Mumbai: Till the Elphinstone Road railway station stampede snuffed out her life, 24-year-old Hiloni Dedhia embodied the soaring aspirations of a millennial working in a setting with imposing glass facade towers that spawn a thousand dreams.
The steel-and-glass buildings that dot central Mumbai’s skyline, drawing in lakhs of people every day, also explain the tragedy that struck on Friday, killing 23 on a narrow foot overbridge (FOB) linking Parel and Elphinstone Road stations.
Far from the massive rush of people, the cotton mills in this pocket gave Mumbai its identity — Manchester of the East — where people worked at their own pace in textile mills, with chimneys billowing smoke and sirens blaring, indicating change of shifts. After the 1980s, the mills began giving way to skyscrapers as the restless Maximum City’s dreams grew bigger in the quest of affluence.
Ms. Dedhia worked in the corporate relations department of Axis Bank, and was headed to work from her home in Ghatkopar when she was caught in the stampede, her uncle said outside KEM Hospital’s morgue. Axis Bank’s corporate headquarters is housed in the Bombay Dyeing Compound, walking distance from Elphinstone Road station, where the offices of airline GoAir, media firm Republic TV and the country’s first Hard Rock Cafe are also located. The Century Mills Compound nearby houses Idea Cellular and the Playboy Cafe. There are many such ‘mill compounds’ here.
Mills exit stage
The textile strike a decade before Ms. Dedhia’s birth broke the back of the mills, leading to their demise. But the land turned into a goldmine, located as it were in the heart of the city. The landscape began to change rapidly in 2005 when the first mill land was cleared for commercial development.
Mill owners switched to sectors like pharma, aviation and realty, while a few sold out to real estate companies. The developers bought transfer of development rights by buying FSI from the open market, and erected skyscrapers. According to property consultant JLL, the tiny locality has a ‘Grade A’ built-up office space of 13.5 million sq.ft. today, up from 2.96 million in 2005.
If one goes by the thumb rule of 100 sq.ft. per person, the area could be home to 1.35 lakh working people, JLL research head Ashutosh Limaye said. Many more glass-and-steel towers are coming up, making it one of the most busy construction sites in Mumbai. The upcoming towers in the vicinity include the country’s first Trump Tower, and the 101-storey World Tower, the country’s tallest.
But infrastructure remains caught up in a time warp. “The mills were never so high and had a lot of open space. The number of people employed also was much lower than today. There were also duty shifts, which ensured less crowding at any time of the day,” a septuagenarian local says. “There is a war-like situation every day here on the FOB during rush hour. People have to fight a war to take the stairs to leave or enter the station,” said Arun Tiwari, regional head of a marketing company. Another passenger, Satish Paul, said, “People have increased but not the infrastructure.”
After her dream died young, Ms. Dedhia’s aunt and uncle waited patiently at the KEM Hospital, clutching her grey handbag, for the statutory post-mortem to get over and receive her body. Less than two kilometres away, surging crowds at the two railway stations continued to muscle their way to platforms and into crammed trains, the trauma of the tragedy probably a mere flicker of uncomfortable memory.
