Mumbai Airport Slum Removal Sought by India Over Terror

12 Sep 2014 00:58:25

bloomberg.com

India's federal government has asked officials in Mumbai for a plan to evict 90,000 slum dwellers living around the airport after terrorist attacks on airfields in Pakistan, a person familiar with the proposal said.

The civil aviation minister has written to the Maharashtra state government asking it to relocate and rehouse those living by the airport, according to an aviation ministry official, who asked not to be identified as the information isn't public. The security threat to the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport from the slum is grave, the official said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government is looking at terror threats to aviation more closely after the Taliban attacked Karachi's airport in early June killing 36 people and later that month gunmen fired on a plane coming to land in Peshawar, killing one passenger. Evicting slum-dwellers in India's financial capital has always been contentious, however, and past efforts at the airport have had little success.

"œThere will always be resistance, and relocation, if it happens, won't be quick either," Uday Athavankar, a professor at the Industrial Design Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, said yesterday in a phone interview. "œTo move people is never easy when they have built their community in that area."

The slums occupy about 309 acres (125 hectares) of land around the airport and have restricted the expansion of the facility.

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