24
them. The area receiving attention has hitherto been too extended a ono.
Town-planning has too often consisted in going after people who have built
vilJas in unsuitable areas, and treating these as if they were the nuclei of
future townships. The discouragement of building in unsuitable places is a «
necessary corollary to the encouragement of it in healthy ones.
Coining to parts of the island in detail, one may say without hesitation
that Trombay may be put aside as distinctly unsuitable for development ; there
is not room for a healthy area between the hill and the mud-flats. Chembur
might be considered a possible place, but the area round it is not sufficiently
large to make it alone worth special means of communication.
The part of the island between the hills and the Thána Creek, through
which the G. I. P. Railway runs northwards from Ghatkopar Station, is one
which also is wholly unsuitable for development. The abundant grass lands
and the plentiful space around Vikhroli Station led to the selection of Vikhroli
by a committee which sat in 1969 as the best site on which to locate the
Bombay Municipal Slaughter-house, when that is removed from Bándra, with
its allied trades. But the Spleen Rate shows that the scheme would be quite
impracticable ; there would be such incessant invaliding among the employees,
and such a high death-rate among their children. The area is as unsuitable
for institutions as it w r ould be for villa residences.
No part of the island—north of Thána—would bo suitable for develop-
ment either, even were it provided with means of access,
Both New and Old Kurla are non-malarious, though there is no room
near the Railway Station for building, unless reclamation of flats were under-
taken. Ghatkopar is so much on the border-line and so near the danger zone
that it is more difficult to give an opinion about it. The part south of the
railway is safe enough, and there appear to be some healthy bungalows north
of it, but one would certainly deprecate any encouragement of building on the
Agra Road.
On the west side of the island the large area round Bháyndar Station in
the extreme North, consisting of salt-lands,, is unobjectionable from the present
standpoints as it is so free from Malaria. Some Indian commercial men do
not find Bháyndar too far from Bombay to live in, but the want of a water-
supply is the great hindrance to its development, and there is, unfortunately,
no other area suitable for development with which it could combine in
managing to afford one.
The nest area to be considered is that to the south of this, from Dahisar,
between Bháyndar and Borivli Stations, along the B. B. and C. I. Railway to
Andheri, which may be considered its southern limit. The Ghodbandar Road
runs through it close to the railway, and it is along this road that there has been
so much building of bungalows mostly used only in the hot weather, the only
reason for building them in this malarious part of the island having been the
presence of the railway, on whichstation after station has been opened for suburban
trafile as the bungalows grew in number. Not all parts of this area aro equally
malarious ; that round Goregaon Station is the most so. But the railway runs
much too near the central hills of Salsette to allow the neighbourhood of its
stations within this area, which is bounded on the East by a line of villages
deserted years ago on account of the increasing malariousness of the climate,
to be fit fcr anything that could seriously be called town-planning. It does not
do anybody any particular harm that well-to-do people, who can bring their
servants and their supplies from Bombay, should elect to live here in the hot
weather if it suits them. Their doing so does not involve the planting down
of any all-tbe-year-round population of poorer-class people ; that is why it is
unobjectionable. But to provide them with roads, water-supply, markets and
schools would not only use up part of funds that should be concentrated on
the development of more hopeful parts of the island and attract future settlers
to the less desirable places ; it would also mean that bazaars would form, in
which middle-class and poor people would be living all the year round, in a
climate which would involve a sick-rate among them and their children higher
than there is any need for in the case of people who are to live in Salsette,