In city’s many gaothans, sons of the soil vote for progress, protection

Quiet anger and apprehension are growing in Mumbai’s gaothans ahead of civic elections, with residents demanding Bhumiputra Policy

MUMBAI: Walk through Mumbai’s gaothans and there’s a palpable sense of community, tightly knit, lived-in and deeply rooted. There’s also a quiet anger born of decades of neglect. These are ancestral village settlements where families have lived long before the city swallowed them whole.

In the Kurla gaothan, one of Mumbai’s largest gaothans, the demand for allowing ground-plus-two structures dominates every conversation. (Satish Bate/Hindustan Times)

Today, across the 189 gaothans in Mumbai and an additional number in the wider Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), residents say the civic elections are less about party politics and more about survival. The overriding fear is being labelled as slums and forcibly pushed into redevelopment frameworks that do not reflect how gaothans function.

Encroachments around gaothans, often by slum settlements or commercial projects, have made it easier for state authorities to club these villages into ‘problematic’ zones. Once that label sticks, boundaries blur and basic services dry up. Worse, land is taken away.

What is a gaothan?

Gaothans are the residential cores of old villages, with surrounding lands used for farming, fishing or grazing. Most gaothans look strikingly similar – tiled-roof homes, narrow internal lanes, a village square, community well, Holy Cross and often a Gaavdevi temple. They are mixed settlements, populated mainly by Catholics and Hindus.

Of the 189 gaothans in Mumbai, only 52 are officially demarcated in the BMC’s Development Plan (DP) maps. “Without demarcation, gaothans are defenceless. Anyone can walk in, take land, and later claim it was never ours,” said Alphi D’Souza, chief of the Mobai Gaothan Panchayat.

There is no special regulatory framework governing these settlements. Instead, the BMC applies outdated building rules, often treating gaothans as slums, when convenient. The most visible fallout of this is the restriction on the height of construction, a flashpoint across all gaothans. In the Kurla gaothan, one of Mumbai’s largest gaothans, the demand for allowing ground-plus-two structures dominates every conversation.

“We are allowed only the construction of ground plus one, up to 14 feet. We are not asking for towers. Ground plus two is our biggest demand,” said Bonni Gomes, 76, the first sarpanch of the Kurla gaothan. “They look at villages as slums. That is the biggest injustice.”

As a result, civic amenities are very poor. Drinking water is not clean, roads and drainage are poor and street lighting is negligible,” said Uretta Tolstoy Gomes, 43, gaothan sarpanch of Old Kurla.

Royston Jacinto, deputy sarpanch of the Vakola gaothan, said, “Former corporators and MLAs rarely visit our gaothans during their terms. For five years, they don’t show their faces. Then, a month before elections, they suddenly remember us.”

When HT visited Kolovery gaothan earlier this week, former corporator and independent candidate George Abraham was canvassing in the area. “There is a need to completely redo the water network and road infrastructure. These areas have been de-reserved, and planning has failed,” he said, promising to push for solutions if elected. Residents say they have heard similar assurances before, but no action has followed.

Voting in gaothans, residents stress, has been candidate-based rather than party-driven. “We vote for people who understand our villages, our issues and our way of life,” said Tolstoy Gomes. “But there are barely half a dozen indigenous corporators or MLAs who have gaothan backgrounds. We are reaching out to them. Or else, we’ll have to choose the least-worst option.”

Bhumiputra Policy

It is in this context that the Mobai Gaothan Panchayat has put forward the Mumbai Bhumiputra Policy, and is seeking written assurances from candidates, said Alphi D’Souza.

The manifesto demands housing benefits through MHADA quotas, a gaothan expansion policy, ground-plus-two development, compensation for community lands taken for infrastructure projects, tax exemptions for pre-1960 gaothan homes, improved civic amenities, job reservations, representation in civic bodies and simplified permissions for repairs.

Heritage activists say that without such protection, gaothans will vanish. “Once upon a time, vast tracts of land in Mumbai belonged to us, including where the airport stands,” said Godfrey Pimenta of the Watchdog Foundation. He pointed out that while builders benefit from generous FSI and TDR incentives, similar consideration has not been extended to gaothans, koliwadas and adivasi padas.

Navi Mumbai

For residents across Navi Mumbai’s original villages, the January 15 civic election is largely about decades of unresolved governance failures. The city’s 45 ancestral villages, in Airoli, Ghansoli, Vashi, Belapur, Turbhe and the newly inducted villages along the Thane-Kalyan border, together account for 2 lakh voters across 18 of the 28 wards, enough to influence outcomes in a majority of the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation’s 111 seats.

In Navi Mumbai too, gaothan voters back candidates from their own villages, cutting across party lines but prioritising accountability. That logic, however, is being disrupted by the panel system, which groups four wards, often mixing gaothan-dominated villages with high-rise nodal areas. “Earlier, one village could decide its corporator. Now our votes are mixed with areas where issues are completely different,” said Dinanath Mhatre of Gothivali village.

Pointing to houses marked “illegal” on civic maps, Mhatre said the problem is structural. “This illegality was manufactured. Villagers didn’t break the law, the system stopped working.”

He traced this to the Gaothan Expansion Scheme (GES), last surveyed in 1968, under which villages were meant to expand periodically to accommodate family growth. “In 60 years, there should have been planned expansion. If that had happened, these illegalities would not exist,” he said.

Gaothans here are home to Agri and Koli fishing communities, Kunbi and Maratha farmers, and project-affected families whose land was acquired by CIDCO in 1972. Despite being taxed, settlements remain unregulated. Promises such as the 12.5% land allotment, villagers say, remain unresolved even after four generations.

As campaigning intensifies ahead of the civic elections, residents across gaothans say poll promises are no longer enough. They want recognition under the law, space to grow with dignity, and protection from development models that erase village life in the name of progress.

“We are called sons of the soil only in speeches. This time, we will support only those who actually resolve our problems,” said Baban Bhoir, 74, a resident of Kasarvadavali gaothan in Thane.