How Governments and Corporates Silenced Workers and Sold Their City for a Premium
By Pius Varghese Pullikottil
Following my earlier piece, “Who Owns Mumbai’s Mills and Factories?”, this article traces how the story deepened — how policies, politics, and profiteering dismantled the working class in Mumbai who built Mumbai.
The City That Built India — and Was Then Sold
In my previous article, I reflected on ownership — on how the mills that built Mumbai’s strength slowly changed hands.
This chapter looks at what followed: how that change of ownership became a change of purpose, and how land once meant for labour became the currency of corruption.
Mumbai’s rise as India’s financial capital began not with stock markets or skyscrapers, but with mills, factories, and workers.
From Parel to Kurla, Ghatkopar to Thane, the city once pulsed with the hum of production.
The workers who spun cotton, forged steel, and assembled machines built the Mumbai we know.
But over four decades, those factories were systematically erased — not by decline, but by design.
Under the pretext of “revival” and “development,” Mumbai’s industrial lands were repurposed, rezoned, and sold — turning public-purpose land into private wealth.
Dr. Datta Samant: The Voice They Tried to Silence
In the 1970s, Dr. Datta Samant, a medical practitioner turned trade-union leader, emerged as the most fearless voice of Mumbai’s industrial workforce.
He founded multiple independent unions — including the Maharashtra Girni Kamgar Union, the Association of Engineering Workers, the Maharashtra General Workers’ Union, and the BEST Kamgar Union — representing thousands across mills, factories, and engineering sectors.
When 2.5 lakh workers from 65 mills approached him in 1982, disillusioned by corrupt and politically controlled unions, Dr. Samant initially refused — warning them of the hardships ahead.
But when the workers persisted, he accepted their call and led the Great Bombay Textile Strike, a movement rooted in justice, fair wages, and dignity.
Dr. Datta Samant’s historic strike in 1982 was a legitimate and principled struggle for the rights of workers — a movement born of fairness, courage, and conviction, whose demands were supported even by several mill owners.
The tragedy was not in the strike itself, but in how political powers and vested interests conspired to use that moment to weaken independent unionism, nationalise mills, and later exploit those very lands for private gain.
His struggle was not a failure — it was a turning point that exposed the nexus between power and capital.
Even years after his death, the private mills and companies where his unions remained continued to prosper, a testament to his disciplined, constructive trade unionism.
The DC Rules That Changed Everything
The real transformation began in 1991, when the Maharashtra government amended the Development Control (DC) Rules through its Urban Development Department.
The key clause — DCR 58 — allowed mill and factory land leaseholders to sell, redevelop, or commercially utilise their leased industrial plots, provided they surrendered portions to BMC and MHADA for open spaces and worker housing.
In theory, it was a balance. In practice, it became the legalisation of converting leased industrial land into private real estate.
BMC approved plans, MHADA got scattered and less valuable plots, and the leaseholders — originally bound to industrial use — partnered with private developers under new permissions.
Thus began the conversion of Mumbai’s working-class land into a real-estate goldmine.
How Institutions Enabled the Takeover
The shift from production to speculation was not accidental — it was administered.
While the Urban Development Department framed and amended the rules, agencies like BMC, MHADA, SRA, CIDCO, MIDC, and the Revenue Department executed them.
- BMC implemented DC Rules, collecting premiums and approving land-use changes.
- MHADA, meant to provide housing for workers, received minimal or unsuitable land.
- SRA (Slum Rehabilitation Authority) extended “redevelopment” to worker chawls and industrial quarters, displacing genuine residents under the guise of rehabilitation.
- CIDCO, created to balance industry and housing, began auctioning plots for high-end residential and IT projects.
- MIDC, once Maharashtra’s industrial backbone, permitted conversions of industrial plots to commercial use.
- The Revenue Department approved lease modifications and title changes, giving legal cover to it all.
Together, these institutions formed the machinery of transformation — a network that turned Mumbai’s working-class geography into a speculator’s paradise.
The Industrial Corridors That Died
This transformation was city-wide:
- Central Mill Lands – from Parel and Byculla to Worli, where mills once stood shoulder to shoulder, now host luxury towers.
- Eastern Industrial Belt (LBS Marg, Sion–Thane) – once filled with Premier Automobiles, Godrej, Mukand, Richardson & Cruddas; over 95% have shut down or shifted.
- Western Corridor (SV Road, Western Express Highway) – from Bandra to Dahisar, small and medium industries gave way to malls, studios, and showrooms.
- Eastern Express Highway – from Kurla to Mulund, factories and warehouses disappeared under commercial complexes.
- Thane–Belapur Road (CIDCO–MIDC Belt) – built for manufacturing, now dominated by IT parks and logistics hubs.
From Colaba to Dahisar, Sion to Belapur, the pattern is identical:
Factories declared “sick,” lands undervalued, leases relaxed, and plots sold under the banner of “development.”
What was once industrial Mumbai has become a corridor of consumption.
Profit Over Production: The Private Exodus
It wasn’t only government leaseholders who surrendered to greed.
Even many private freehold industrial owners, who once prided themselves on entrepreneurship and employment, began shutting down operations in the late 1980s, 1990s, and thereafter — not because their factories were unviable, but because real estate promised faster and easier profits.
Under pretexts like “environmental restrictions,” “labour unrest,” or “obsolete technology,” several private owners quietly wound up production, sold machinery, and redeveloped their plots for commercial gain — because the amended Development Control (DC) Rules enabled it.
By allowing large-scale land-use conversion and redevelopment incentives, the new regulations ensured that private freehold owners and government leaseholders alike benefited from the same real-estate windfall.
In effect, policy itself became the vehicle of profit — rewarding those who abandoned production and punishing those who worked to sustain it.
This convergence of state policy and private greed led to mass unemployment, community collapse, and urban poverty across industrial belts.
Factories once known for skill and production became towers of glass — monuments not to progress, but to the abdication of responsibility.
Who Really Paid the Price
In the end, it wasn’t the land developers, or the dirty politicians, or the dirty bureaucrats who paid the price.
They thrived — multiplying wealth through the very policies that dismantled Mumbai’s industrial base.
The real victims were the workers and their families — the people who powered the city’s rise, only to be discarded when their land became valuable.
For every factory that shut, a thousand dreams collapsed.
Entire generations who had known steady jobs, secure homes, and community life were left stranded.
As glass towers replaced chimneys, the city’s heart stopped beating for those who built it.
The tragedy is not that Mumbai changed — cities evolve.
The tragedy is who was made to bear the cost of that change.
Not the speculators. Not the ones in power.
It was Mumbai’s working class, forced out of the city they built, condemned to live on its fringes — often working as guards, hawkers, or daily-wage labourers near the same towers that rose on their former workplaces.
The City’s Unpaid Debt
Much of Mumbai’s industrial and mill land was never truly private — it was leased or allotted by the government, the Revenue Department, and civic or semi-government bodies such as BMC, MHADA, MIDC, and CIDCO.
These leases were granted on the clear condition that the land be used for industrial activity, employment generation, and public purpose — not for speculative sale.
Over time, successive governments diluted those restrictions.
Through policy amendments, lease renewals, and official permissions, mill and factory lease-holders were allowed to redevelop or sell land originally held in public trust.
That process — justified in the name of revival — became the single greatest transfer of public-purpose land into private hands in Mumbai’s history.
The real betrayal lay not only in factory closures but in how dirty politicians, greedy bureaucrats, and complicit land developers converted public and leased land into private real estate — often under the cover of reform and redevelopment.
The city grew richer in glass, poorer in soul.
If Mumbai is to call itself fair, it must first acknowledge this truth — that its prosperity stands on land once leased for labour, not luxury.
Justice must begin with recognition and restitution — housing rights, fair compensation, and legal protection for the descendants of those who built the city’s economy.
Conclusion: A City Redeveloped, A Conscience Unbuilt
Dr. Datta Samant’s historic strike in 1982 was a legitimate and principled struggle for the rights of workers — a movement born of fairness, courage, and conviction, whose demands were supported even by several mill owners.
The tragedy was not in the strike itself, but in how political powers and vested interests conspired to weaken independent unionism, nationalise mills, and later exploit those very lands for private gain.
From that betrayal onward — through the late 1980s, 1990s, and beyond — governments changed, parties changed, but the policy of profit over people stayed constant.
Factories became towers. Workers became watchmen.
The city expanded, but its heart contracted.
Mumbai’s transformation is not just an urban story — it is a moral reckoning.
Because a city that forgets its workers, forgets itself.
It is time to correct that injustice.
The descendants of mill and factory workers — the very people who built Mumbai — must be granted their rightful share in the land that was taken from them in the name of “development.”
Every policy that enabled this betrayal must be reviewed, audited, and reversed where possible.
The State must restore housing, livelihood, and dignity to those displaced — not as charity, but as a debt of honour owed to labour.
This is not just about land — it is about justice, memory, and moral accountability.
If the governments that ruled over this destruction could rewrite laws to benefit developers,
then today’s generation has the duty to rewrite them once again — for the workers.
By Pius Varghese Pullikottil
Co-Founder and National General Secretary, Sanay Chatrapati Shasan Party.
Former associate of Dr. Datta Samant; writes on labour rights, urban policy, and the moral dimensions of development.