For long we have been fed lies. Mumbai has no scarcity of houses and the key to the truth lies in using digital technology to unlock the city's housing potential.

The politics of inclusion in the Sabarmati Riverfront Development project, an urban mega-project in Ahmedabad, has been predicated on a “flexible governing” of the residents of the riverfront informal settlements. Such flexible governing has allowed state authorities to negotiate grass-roots opposition and mobilisation, modify the project to gentrify the riverfront further, and even officially represent the project as inclusive although questions of social justice have been profoundly disregarded over the past decade and continue to be insufficiently addressed.

The resettlement packages offered to slum dwellers in Mumbai not only violate their right to shelter but also lead to deterioration in their quality of life. There is an urgent need to calculate the cost of repeated demolitions that push slum dwellers to the city’s outer limits against that of acknowledging their right to housing.

The right to the city, an idea mooted by French radical philosophers in 1968, has become a popular slogan among right to housing activists and inclusive growth policymakers. In Indian cities unprecedented and unregulated growth, incremental land use change, privatisation and chaotic civic infrastructure provisioning are fracturing resources created over centuries and reducing the right to the city to mere right to housing and property, thus short-changing the concept’s transformative potential.

Gifting of land, or bhoodan in Hindi, is the current obsession of the government. It is on a spree of acquiring land. This is often termed as bhoodan to corporate houses. There is another kind of bhoodan that is being talked about. For a country that is demographically young, this bhoodan took place as a movement when India was just four years old.