Kudos to Mr. Miloon Kothari for taking a stand on the issue of slum demolitions in Mumbai!
Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh needs to do a reality check if he thinks he can make Mumbai a world class city at the heavy cost displacing an already vulnerable slum population. Blindly demolishing the slums and uprooting thousands of families and children is not a sign of sound city planning. If he wants to wish away poverty from the city of Mumbai, he needs to do more than bulldoze people's homes.
Can the Shanghai-bedazzled Deshmukh please focus on applying some thought, time and resources to some strategic and concrete action plans for housing the poor???
The UN has the audacity to tell the people of bombay how to treat the poor. I fthey feel so badly for them why dont they donate the money to accomodate these people..
Everybody cribs about the poor...what abotu the hard working middle class. why should we tolerate illegally built shanties when we slog our lives to find legal homes.
The UN has gone nuts. First they brand bombay as an uninhabitable place because of the shanties, when we get rid of the slums they say it is against human rights...
Keep it up.. only look at human rights of people in slums and not at citizens paying there taxes for a city that should be clean..also i will ask you to please try and build a single shanty in the US and see what they do to your human rights
Forget slums and homeless in Mumbai and Delhi. Come and have a look at the situation in cities like Washington DC and Philadelphia and then talk about human rights and criminalization of homelessness.
UN and its reporters need to stop carrying double standards. Just because the UN has its largest office in the US and has to obey the US federal law doesn't mean the UN can exempt the US from the human rights violations perpetrated by the US and overlook the grim human rights' situation in the US.
This is not to say that all is well in India; this is just to say that such reports should not be given in isolation and focussing only on India. This is a global situation and the UN needs to stop simply being a hypocritical critique and start playing a role as a solution provider.
