Mumbai’s chawl residents negotiate with ‘light mafias’ for power supply

“We pay Rs 600 every month whether we get electricity or not. We used to pay more but there are now two electricity mafias competing in this area,” says Ajuma Sheikh, a 63-year-old social worker who stays in Patra chawl in Mumbai’s Mankhurd suburb.

For the past 25 years, she has been caught between the powerful stakeholders of Mumbai’s electricity sector: the government, Adani Electricity and local unauthorised operators.

In and around the Mumbai Port Trust, reserve forest areas and on land owned by the Railways and Defence departments, thousands of people live like the residents of Patra chawl – in densely-packed, make-shift homes made of tin sheets and plastic tarp with poor ventilation and no reliable electricity.

“We sit outside all day because it’s too hot to go in,” Sheikh says, pointing to clusters of plastic chairs, cardboard sheets, cement bags, wooden planks, and ripped mattresses arranged haphazardly along the Mankhurd railway track. “We go indoors at 2 am but get bit by mosquitoes all night. We can’t put up a net or light a coil because there’s no ventilation. We’ll suffocate.”

A survey from several South Asian cities including Yavatmal and Jalna in Maharashtra found that temperatures inside tin-roofed homes often exceeded those inside concrete-roofed homes and even...

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