Santosh Kadam with his wife and child in the playground of the New Hind Mill complex in Cotton Green. Pictures by Gajanan Dudhalkar

Mumbai, March 25: Vilasini Phodkar’s face lights up as she enters her 17th-floor apartment in New Hind Mill, Cotton Green.

Her fingers linger on the newly polished black granite on the kitchen platform while her eyes take in the living room.

No, Phodkar is not among those moving into luxury apartments in skyscrapers mushrooming in central Mumbai’s textile mill district. She is the wife of Vishwas Phodkar, a mill worker who lost his livelihood in the aftermath of the massive 1982 textile strike that left thousands jobless.

Her new home, in a 24-storey tower, is a tiny 225sqft carpet-area flat. The tower is one of the 14 highrises built by a state-run agency to provide permanent houses to mill workers, the forgotten force that once wielded immense power on the streets of Mumbai as the backbone of the trade union movement.

Vishwas was one of the 23 mill workers who were recently handed apartment keys and allotment letters by Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan.

Chavan had speeded up the process that was moving at a snail’s pace since 2001 when the Vilasrao Deshmukh government amended the Development Control Rules to create a policy for sale of mill land and housing for mill workers.

Nearly 12 years later, the first of the 1.4 lakh mill workers who applied for houses would be rehabilitated. “This is a dream come true for us. We couldn’t believe it when the CM handed the allotment letters,” said Vishwas’s son Viraj.

Vishwas used to work at Kohinoor Mill No. 3 located opposite Shiv Sena Bhavan at Dadar. It shut down during the Datta Samant-led strike in 1982. Some 2.5 lakh workers from 58 mills joined the strike.

Like Vishwas, the lives of thousands of workers plunged into darkness for nearly 16 months. Eventually, in 1987, foreseeing the mill’s closure, Vishwas resigned. He hardly received any compensation.

The mill lay defunct till the National Textile Corporation conducted eye-popping auctions of mill lands in 2005. A firm run by Raj Thackeray and Manohar Joshi’s son Unmesh bought the 4.8-acre mill land for a staggering Rs 421 crore — at a rate of Rs 15,000 a sqft.

The eldest son of a mill worker, Vishwas was his family’s only breadwinner. “We had two small children and a large family back in the village (in Konkan) to support. So we opened a small grocery store in our hutment selling various kinds of dough, pickles and whatever else we could. Eventually, the store sustained us during those dark days,” recalled Vilasini, seated in a large rectangular garden at the centre of the housing complex of 14 towers, all 24-storey high.

If the Phodkars had a grocery to sustain them, Santosh Kadam’s father couldn’t take up any work when he lost his job after 36 years of service with Elphinstone Mill.

Struggling through school and college in a joint family, the young photographer is now looking ahead to better times. “My son is so excited and wants to play in this garden all the time,” said the 32-year-old.

The flats have been allotted at a price of Rs 7.5 lakh, far cheaper than the prevailing rate of around Rs 40 lakh.

But as there are nearly 1.4 lakh applications from mill workers, Chavan has decided to allot a part of the 100,000 houses being built by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority on rent and also provide housing to workers in their native districts.

The New Hind Mill complex

While the mill crisis scorched the childhood of many like Viraj and Santosh, it also hastened the demise of a thriving working-class culture and the communist trade union movement in the post-liberalisation era. Once led by firebrand labour leaders like S.A. Dange and George Fernandes, the trade union movement was already on the decline after the birth of the Sena in 1966 and the violent killing of CPI MLA Krishna Desai.

The trade union movement weakened further after the 1982 strike that was crushed by mill owners, forcing thousands of workers to either return to their native villages or take up jobs as watchmen and vada-pav vendors.

“During 1987-1989, 10 mills, including Modern Mill where I worked, shut down. The 1982 strike had left workers disillusioned, trade unions had weakened, and no political party was supporting our cause. So, along with others in different mills, we formed the Bandh Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti,” said Datta Iswalkar, 63.

In the post-1991 liberalisation era, the Samiti fought a long battle for freeing up 400 acres out of 600 acres of total mill land for public welfare based on a formula devised by architect Charles Correa. The formula envisaged dividing the 600 acres in three portions and allowing mill owners to utilise 200 acres — or one-third of the 600 acres — for commercial exploitation while reserving the remaining area for public utilities.

The formula proposed the BMC could be given one-third of the 400 acres for nurturing the open spaces while Mhada could be asked to create low-cost housing for mill workers, thus enabling central Mumbai’s integrated development.

This formula was adopted by the Deshmukh government in 2001 to sell mill land, but tweaked in such a way that it eventually shrank the area meant for open spaces to 32 acres and the area meant for housing to just 25 acres.

The workers, supported by the Bombay Environmental Action Group, moved Bombay High Court, which stayed the sale of mill land and struck down the controversial 2001 amendment.

The battle soon moved to the Supreme Court which, in 2006, set aside the high court order, permitting sale of the mill land.