Bombay’s underworld gangs have put up £300m of illegal buildings

Bombay’s underworld gangs have put up £300m of illegal buildings. During the city’s 1993 Hindu- Muslim riots, his Shiv Sena thugs led mob raids on many Muslim neighbourhoods.Mr Thackeray’s no-nonsense militarism appeals to many native Bombay citizens who think that Shiv Sena may clean out the city’s corrupt bureaucracy. Shiv Sena’s chief, Bal Thackeray, a former cartoonist who says he admires Hitler, has gained a strong following among locals by promising to drive out immigrants from Bombay, especially the millions of Bangladeshi Muslims who are pouring in. An extreme right-wing organisation called Shiv Sena this week begins its rule of Bombay, with support from the Bharatiya Janata Party. It is a dream that gathers colour and dimension every time an Indian goes to the local cinema; Bombay is more than garish backdrop for most Indian films, it is the leading character.Bombay’s port, which handles half of India’s foreign trade, and its factories – generating more than 30 per cent of Gross Domestic Product – exert a strong pull on Indians in the countryside, desperate for work.As in any lifeboat, though, those in Bombay are desperate to stop more outsiders crawling aboard.

The smell of a frying steak wafting across from a neighbour’s kitchen fills many Indians with revulsion Some Muslim tenant groups will not allow television. In a city as crowded as Bombay, people either become militant in retaining caste and cultural identity or drown in the multitude.Despite communal riots in January 1993 that left 500 dead, Bombay is still the place Indians dream of going to. “You get so litle for the money you pay,” complained one banker. “The lifts don’t work, and the bathrooms are green with mould, even in the best places.” Anyone choosing one of the upper-storey flats in a Malabar Hills skyscraper (price more than £1.5m) may also have to put up with vultures dropping a human nose or ear on the balcony – from the nearby Parsee Towers of Silence, where corpses are left to be picked apart in a “sky burial” by birds.Even if you have the cash, you are not necessarily assured a flat Some housing colonies will not tolerate meat-eaters. In the same area today, a three-bedroom flat with temperamental plumbing and power shortages, in a new 22-storey skyscraper, sells for more than £2.24m.Discouraged after months of house-hunting, many foreign bankers and executives of multinational companies are trying to persuade their head offices that it is cheaper, and less hassle, to stay in five-star hotels. These new estates can be nightmares: sloppily built concrete blocks rising out of malarial swamps.When the East India Company leased grazing land back in 1750 on Colaba Point, now Bombay’s most sought-after downtown area, it paid only £20. Many are forced to move out to satellite suburbs a two-hour train ride away.

More than 13 million Indians have piled on to these islands looking for jobs, and every year another 100,000 climb aboard.Bombay probably has more millionaires than London, but many middle-class Indians – a teacher, say, earning £150 a month – cannot begin to afford these rents. Others believe India’s opening to investment after 40 years of economic isolation has set off a property spree among foreign companies and overseas Indians wanting to invest in Bombay – built on islands surrounded by swamp and the Arabian Sea, with no easy way to expand. Estate agents say property values last year tripled.Some attribute this dizzying increase to Bombay’s gangsters, who have moved into the profitable business of land-grabbing. A shopfront property which sold six months ago for £800,000 was bought this month by Standard Chartered, for £1.1m: 15 days later it sold it for £1.7m.

Indeed office rents are the most expensive, surpassing Hong Kong and Tokyo, and at an average £93.10 about £50 more per square foot than prime space in the West End of London.
In Nariman Point, where many corporations have headquarters, office space sells for £450 a square foot. Price: £11,000, with a few old tyres heaved on to the roof for ballast, to keep the hut from flying away in the monsoon squalls. Whether you are searching for a hovel or for a high-rise in the exclusive Malabar Hills colony, Bombay has become the third most expensive city in the world. No electricity, no running water, no view, except of children splashing in an open sewer. FOR SALE: a one-room shanty in Bombay’s Mahim Creek slum. But with the UN warning already that 70 per cent of world fish stocks are “depleted” or “almost depleted”, there remains the risk that even that would be too little too late.Rear Window, page 24. “But unfortunately the British government continues to support Spain and Portugal, as European Union members.”Less attention is being paid to Canada’s own history of over-fishing, encouraged for years, not least in this province, by generous government subsidies.But with that in the past, Ottawa believes it now has the high ground and intends to press for change, first at a meeting scheduled for this week at the headquarters of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organisation (NAFO) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and also at the ongoing conference on so-called “straddling stocks” – those fish that migrate between national and international waters – at the United Nations that resumes on 27 March.Canada’s goal is fairly simple: to establish clear controls on trawlers working areas with threatened stocks which lie beyond the current 200- mile boundaries of national jurisdictions – as on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks – coupled with strong and consistently enforced penalties for those who flout them.The Estai confrontation may propel all sides towards achieving that.

Letters of support, faxes and telexes have been coming in to Mr Tobin and Mr Wells from Britain, Ireland and Germany.”I think that many British people are mightily offended by Spain’s behaviour,” Mr Wells concludes. All has been eclipsed by the joy of seeing the country stand up to Europe, however.That the main target happens to be Spain appears to have helped. In that, there may be a racist tinge to the affair.On Wednesday, the tabloid Toronto Sun printed a comment article which was in the tradition of the British Sun’s “Up the Argies” during the Falklands War.Canadians have not missed the fact, meanwhile, that while all EU governments are showing unity behind Spain, popular sentiment in many states, especially in Britain, is with them. The nasty sore of Quebec separatism will not go away and only three weeks ago, Mr Chretien was forced to impose a harsh austerity budget on the country to avert financial disaster because of rampant federal debt. Most astonishing of all, even the leaders of the Quebec separatist movement have spoken out in the government’s support.The liberal government, led by Jean Chretien, can hardly believe its luck These should be tricky times.