After living in Guwahati and Delhi, Dhritee Bordoloi finds Mumbai to be the safest place in India. But the 24-year-old continues to be cautious when looking for accommodation in the city. As a freelance assistant director, Bordoloi’s hours are erratic and she often returns home late at night. Her priority when house-hunting is a place close to a busy road or highway. “If a flat is too deep inside a maze of lanes, autorickshaw drivers often refuse to come and I may need to walk to the apartment at night,” she says. Quick access to the metro or train stations is another must, she adds.
Each time she relocates, Bordoloi has to stretch her budget to find accommodation that checks these boxes. Her male friends renting in the city have no such worries. “In fact, many of them take apartments a bit further away from the main road to save on rent,” she says. Mimi Sarkar, 30, often thinks of giving up on her Mumbai dream and moving back to her hometown in West Bengal. “The rent is eating into half my earnings and I have no savings,” she says. Working women’s hostels could be a cheaper option but Sarkar says the waiting list is long.
Experiences such as Bordoloi’s and Sarkar’s, and of other women in similarly challenging situations, are why a group of working women came together in an almost decade-long effort to include gender in the Mumbai development plan (DP). In 2020, Mumbai became the first Indian city to include gender in its urban plan, the Revised Draft Development Plan (RDDP) 2034, through land reservations in the city’s 24 wards to create physical-social infrastructure for women. On Women’s Day in March this year, the first tangible result of that effort — a multipurpose housing unit (MHU) for working women — was launched in Goregaon, a suburb in the west of Mumbai. Two dozen more MHUs are expected to come up, along with several other facilities such as skill development centres, and childcare and senior-care facilities.
Beyond the male blueprint
This inclusion was the result of efforts by the Women and DP Group — a group of women (from the fields of media, architecture, gender studies, law, to name a few) who worked pro bono and pushed the gender agenda through to the city’s development plan. A few of them are now members of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) six-member Advisory Committee on Gender (ACG) to ensure implementation. “Gender mainstreaming, that is incorporating gender concerns into city planning, is crucial to address issues of access, affordability, and equity,” says senior journalist and urban chronicler Smruti Koppikar. Both Koppikar and Nandita Shah, co-director of Akshara Centre, a not-for-profit working for the empowerment of women and girls in Mumbai, assert that women’s groups across the city had been talking about including gender in city planning for several years.
Senior journalist and urban chronicler Smruti Koppikar
What does including gender in urban planning really mean? It acknowledges that men and women use urban spaces differently and cities can no longer be designed as per the standard male blueprint. Most Indian cities lack equitable infrastructure, making it difficult for women to move around freely. If you’ve ever tried getting into a bus with a toddler and bags in tow, you’ll know it wasn’t designed with women in mind.
Nandita Shah, co-director of Akshara Centre, a not-for-profit that works for the empowerment of women and girls in Mumbai.
“Urban design must cater to specific parameters in gender inclusive planning to make cities accessible to women and inclusive,” says Prachi Merchant, senior urban planner at BMC. These parameters include lighting, openness, visibility, crowds, security, walk path, availability of public transport and gender diversity.
Merchant says even if infrastructure exists, women need to feel safe accessing them. “Even if you have a wide footpath, if there are high walls abutting it, then it becomes dangerous for a woman to walk. Are private vehicles the only solution?” she asks.
Prachi Merchant, senior urban planner, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.
As the Women and DP Group pushed forward, they needed to break down their concerns into tangible elements in city planning. “Our biggest challenge was being heard,” says Shah. It involved campaigning, writing and petitioning by women’s groups across the board. Shah says having bureaucrats and urban planners within BMC aligned to their needs helped. “There was a willingness to find solutions.”
Reservation of 90 land parcels
Women in the workforce was at the heart of the group’s efforts. “The most critical factor we were looking at was how in a financial city like Mumbai, the workforce participation of women was so low. It was around 16% in 2018,” says Shah. “We started looking at how we could change that.”
Care work often hinders women’s participation in the workforce. “How could a working woman with domestic responsibilities go to work when there are very few childcare and senior care facilities,” asks Shah. This led to the idea of reserving space where amenities for working women across both formal and informal sectors could come up — transit housing, emergency shelter during a domestic dispute, reskilling centres, and vending zones for women in the informal sector.
A woman, child in tow, waits her turn at a polling booth in Mumbai. | Photo Credit: AP
Real estate is a prized commodity in Mumbai. So eventually the gender inclusion boiled down to land reservations catering to women’s needs. It helped that the group included retired additional chief secretary Chandra Iyengar, who helped translate the group’s concerns and demands into the language of policy and rules. The result: the reservation of 90 land parcels in all of Mumbai’s 24 wards in the development plan. Each ward has a plot of land exclusively for women’s facilities, as the plan stipulates. “This has not happened in India before and that is the significance of it,” says Koppikar.
Globally, there has been a conversation around feminist urbanism, with a focus on women and sexual minorities who have historically been left out of consideration in city planning and development. One famous example is Spain’s Catalan Neighbourhood Law of 2004, wherein women helped in listing their needs and the gender perspective was included in urban design and aspects of city planning. “If it is safe for women, it is safe for everyone. Because if you’re catering to women, you’re catering to the differently-abled, older people and children. Civic bodies in Indian cities are yet to recognise this from a gender lens,” says Merchant.
But there is hope. Plans are afoot to replicate the Mumbai model in other cities across Maharashtra, and to also build a guide for other Indian cities — to make our urban spaces inclusive and truly welcoming to women.
The writer is a freelance journalist and the co-author of ‘Rethink Ageing’ (2022).
Published - May 31, 2024 10:35 am IST
