Mumbai's Historic Colaba Besieged by Shadows, Sold to the Highest Bidder
By Gajanan Khergamker
In the fading twilight of Apollo Bunder, where the Arabian Sea once whispered promises of colonial grandeur and maritime dreams, Colaba now stands as a battered sentinel - its pavements choked, its monuments defiled, its heritage crumbling under the weight of deliberate neglect. This is no mere urban decay, no accidental erosion of a neighborhood's soul; it is a meticulously orchestrated siege, a symphony of corruption conducted by the very custodians sworn to protect it.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (MCGM aka BMC), that lumbering behemoth of civic authority, has not just surrendered the streets of A-Ward to the encroaching hordes of hawkers, touts, and land barons - it has auctioned them off, parcel by filthy parcel, in exchange for the greasy coins of political patronage and electoral arithmetic.
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| A Pasta Lane pavement being repaired .. again! (File Pic: The Draft) |
As the Model Code of Conduct blankets the city in a shroud of enforced paralysis ahead of the BMC polls on December 2, 2025, Colaba's public spaces gasp their last, evicted not by decree but by the silent complicity of those who feast on the carcass.
Walk the Causeway today, that once-vibrant artery pulsing with the eclectic rhythm of Mumbai's cosmopolitan heart, and you confront not a promenade but a battlefield. Illegal stalls, estimated at a brazen beyond 50 percent of the total, sprawl like metastatic tumors across the sidewalks, peddling everything from knockoff trinkets to lukewarm snacks wrapped in newsprint stained with yesterday's monsoon grime.
These are no desperate vendors scraping by on the margins of survival; they are foot soldiers in a shadow economy, a cartel as organised as any corporate syndicate, its revenue streams funneled not into community welfare but into the coffers of municipal inspectors and the war chests of local politicians.
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| Hawkers along the Colaba Causeway are a persistent scourge despite the law (File Pic: The Draft) |
The BMC's raids, those theatrical flourishes of enforcement, are nothing more than a ritualistic shakedown: hawkers cough up predictable "fines" that deter no one, prevent nothing, and ensure the cycle spins eternally. "This is a routine exercise by the BMC - an eyewash to fool the citizens," seethes a veteran from a Colaba Residents' Association, his voice laced with the weariness of a thousand fruitless complaints.
"Every few days, they evict the hawkers, and within no time, they are back with their confiscated goods. This is not possible without the connivance of the hawker mafia and politicians. The BMC has not solved the problem; it has simply fulfilled a political quota for a few hours."
This toxic equilibrium, this "perfect alignment of administrative apathy and political venality," as one observer aptly dubs it, extends its tentacles far beyond the Causeway's hawker bazaars. It coils nearly around the Gateway of India itself, that arching emblem of imperial ambition now reduced to a vortex of exploitation and shame.
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| The iconic Gateway of India has been losing its sheen in the wake of controversies (File Pic: The Draft) |
Tourists, drawn by postcards of majestic domes and sun-dappled waves, arrive expecting a portal to history's embrace. Instead, they are ambushed in a theatre of chaos: swarms of self-anointed guides barking inflated rates for "authentic" snapshots, photographers with lenses more predatory than panoramic, and vendors thrusting greasy baubles under noses with the persistence of debt collectors.
The air, once perfumed by sea salt, hangs heavy with the stench of open urination and rotting food waste, a public health cataclysm brewing in the shadows of unchecked vending. By dusk, as the arch's silhouette melts into the indigo haze, the racket morphs - daytime peddlers moonlighting as fixers for seedier trades, their operations unfolding mere meters from the ornamental police post that stands sentinel like a forgotten prop in a farce.
Here, the degradation is not haphazard; it is calibrated, symbiotic, a localised economy where intimidation begets complicity. The Mumbai Police, stationed ostensibly for safety, function as gatekeepers of the status quo, their inaction a tacit endorsement of the touts' reign. Adjacent to the Taj Mahal Palace, scarred still by the ghosts of 26/11's terror, this unchecked melee is no mere eyesore; it is a security hemorrhage, a criminal negligence that mocks the ghosts of vigilance.
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| Heritage structures in Colaba face issues with maintenance and upkeep (File Pic: The Draft) |
"The Gateway of India is supposed to be our city’s physical calling card," laments a heritage advocate and seasoned traveler, her words dripping with the acid of betrayal, "and it is run like a filthy, high-pressure confidence game. Tourists arrive expecting majesty and leave with a sense of being harassed, fleeced, and utterly disappointed. The government has prioritised the immediate, petty revenue generated by a handful of thugs and their police patrons over the entire global image of Mumbai. This is not tourism management; it is state-sanctioned vandalism of a national monument. The Gateway’s shame is the BMC’s ultimate failure."
Yet, this assault on the senses is but the visible bruise of a deeper wound: the wholesale colonisation of Colaba's public realm, a slow-motion eviction of the citizen from the very spaces that define urban dignity. The pavements, those sacred ribbons of concrete meant to cradle the pedestrian's stride, have been repurposed as private fiefdoms - lucrative estates policed not by bylaws but by the iron fist of encroachment mafias.
Vagrant encampments huddle like defiant squats amid the debris of illegal merchandise, while powerful landlords, those de facto sovereigns of the street, parcel out kerbsides as cash registers, their influence seeping into every layer of municipal inertia. Traffic islands, once verdant pauses in the urban frenzy, now host makeshift shrines to commerce; narrow service roads, engineered for flow, choke under the sprawl of unregulated parking rackets that thrive on engineered pandemonium.
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| Apart from the terror attacks, there has a been a rise in petty crimes in Colaba (File Pic: The Draft) |
Consider the sordid saga of Kailash Parbat, that unassuming eatery off the Causeway, in First Pasta Lane, whose kitchen was sealed not for culinary sins but for a more profound transgression: squatting on land zoned eternally as a recreation ground. What began as a BMC-sanctioned tenancy in the 1970s - a temporary lease on public soil - ballooned into a permanent usurpation, sidestepping fire clearances, pollution nods, and zoning edicts with the ease of a well-oiled bribe. In a city gasping for breathable open spaces, this "private" takeover robbed generations of Colaba's children of their rightful greensward, converting collective respite into a profit engine.
"Private entities often appropriate public land or spaces for their own commercial benefit, undermining the very purpose for which that land was reserved," articulates a Pasta Lane resident with the precision of a prosecutor's brief. "In a city already starved for open space, allowing a commercial entity to usurp land meant for recreation is fundamentally unfair."
This is no isolated felony; it is the blueprint of betrayal, where the BMC's inertia morphs into active facilitation, trading the citizen's fundamental Right to Walk for the shadow revenues that grease the wheels of electoral machinery. The pedestrian, exiled to the roadway's perilous embrace, dodges vehicles amid the detritus of a broken covenant - paying taxes for pavements they can no longer tread.
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| Shrinking public spaces have jeopardised the rights of Colaba-Cuffe Parade residents (File Pic: The Draft) |
And, looming over this carnival of collapse is the gravest indictment: the methodical evisceration of Colaba's heritage, a cultural genocide masked as bureaucratic oversight. Century-old facades, those lacework testaments to Mumbai's Parsi, British and Portuguese patrimony, plead for repairs that vanish into the BMC's procedural black hole - applications languishing for years, clearances deferred like sentences on death row, material approvals twisted into weapons of coercion.
The municipal inspectorate, in unholy alliance with the land lobby and political puppeteers, engineers this attrition with surgical malice: neglect begets erosion, monsoons carve their cruel runes into weakened mortar, until the inevitable verdict - "C1: dangerous and irreparable" - issues forth like a death warrant. Demolition follows, heritage laws circumvented in a puff of pretextual dust, unleashing the plot for high-rise avarice, its value ballooning from crores to a developer's fever dream.
This is no passive rot; it is institutional sabotage, a land grab cloaked in the velvet glove of delay. The jetty project thrusting its pilings into the earth near the Gateway exemplifies the peril: unchecked vibrations rattle the foundations of Grade I marvels, water seepage gnaws at arches that have weathered empires, all sans environmental reckoning or structural autopsy. Conservationists, those beleaguered guardians of stone and story, had stormed the Bombay High Court and Supreme Court in vain salvos, decrying the BMC's haste in greenlighting what petitioners brand "unchecked construction... pursued without adequate environmental or structural impact assessments."
Yet, the courts, in their deliberative torpor, halted nothing, fueling a public distrust that festers like an open wound. "The Heritage Committee is not a committee of conservationists; it is a committee of stalling agents," laments an eminent conservation architect, his voice a clarion amid the rubble. "They do not want these buildings saved. They want them to fail. Every delay, every lost file, and every absurd request for unnecessary documentation is a conscious step toward the demolition notice. The system has calculated that the land is worth more than the history. The BMC is selling the city’s soul, piece by historical piece, to the builder-corporator nexus, and the result is the systematic, slow-motion destruction of Mumbai’s architectural identity."
In this requiem for Colaba, the threads of hawker hegemony, tout tyranny, spatial seizure, and heritage holocaust intertwine into a noose of civic despair. The sidewalks' funeral procession winds past filth-choked monuments and scaffold-shrouded relics, a procession led by a BMC that has bartered its mandate for the mirage of progress.
The citizen - law-abiding, tax-weary, voice-strangled - pays doubly: first in rupees for the infrastructure's hollow shell, then in dignity for its denial. This is the literal manifestation of a social contract shredded, a public realm privatised not by vote but by venality, where the vote bank of the 'marginalised' becomes the cudgel against the marginalised middle.
As the MCC's iron curtain descends, freezing raids and repairs in electoral piety, the shadow economy swells unchecked, consolidating its territorial claims until the polls' afterglow permits the next charade. But herein lies the spark amid the ashes: the BMC elections of December 2, 2025, beckon not as ritual but as reckoning. Colaba and Cuffe Parade, rise from this eviction's rubble.
Your streets are not syndicates' spoils; they are your birthright. Demand demarcation of vending zones that honors the law, not the lobby. Insist on heritage committees staffed by saviors, not saboteurs. Rally for a Gateway reborn as gateway, not gauntlet. Let your ballots be the bulldozers that reclaim the pavement. In the ballot box lies not just a vote, but vengeance—a chance to bury the shadows and resurrect the city that Mumbai deserves.
The requiem need not be final; let it be the prelude to resurrection.
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