Today, the area where Mumbai's hospitals, educational centers, museums, sports and arts centers etc. stand was provided by the people of these Gaothans. There are some open spaces like Shivaji Park where ancient old coconut trees still stand in the corners, touching the skies. If we ask those century-old silent sentinels about who planted them a hundred years ago, they will definitely point at the farmers and field owners living in the Gaothans.

Today, the railways and all the road networks in Mumbai have passed through the farms, fields, gardens and houses of these farmers. Most of their lands have been bought by people from outside the village, leaving only the ancestral homes. These Gaothans were under the Thane Local Board before the formation of the Mumbai Region. They were allotted house numbers by the Thane Local Board. The said house numbers were changed after the formation of the Mumbai area and after the city survey was done. Soon after the Mumbai Municipal Corporation was formed; the situation changed further and the straightforward life in the villages took on a kind of dispassionate monotony. People who had come from outside were more educated, while in the Gaothans the people were poor and uneducated. The people of the village spoke their dialect of Marathi. Outsiders spoke English, and had well-paying jobs in government offices by which they could buy the lands of the native residents of the Gaothans. Soon the lands were sold and they declared themselves the de-facto owners. Despising the natives, they started saying: Sure Mumbai is yours; but it’s our dirty dishes you wash.

We had a lesson in school as children. As it was getting cold, the camel asked the Bedouin owner of the desert tent permission to stick his head inside. Then he put his feet inside the tent on the pretext that his feet were getting cold. Then the camel put its entire body into the tent. The poor Bedouin man in Arabia was pulled out of his tent by a mere camel. It would not be wrong to say that the natives of Mumbai have been subjected to a similar situation by the outsiders. The outsiders who were taken in as guests, as tenants, by the people of the Gaothans, those same tenants have become the owners of many houses today. The uneducated native is stuck fighting court cases, and wearing his soles out going up and down staircases of government offices.

Today, the wealthy who want to own Mumbai have forgotten who the original owners of the land are. To forget that the barrister Joseph ‘Kaka’ Baptista, who provided legal counsel to Bal Gangadhar Tilak (father of the Home Rule League) hailed from Matharpacady in Mazagaon, is to forget history itself.

Today, the builder lobby, with the help of some officials in the corporation and the Maharashtra government, is trying to usurp Worli Gaothan first and thus trying to penetrate other Gaothans in Mumbai, and trying to wipe out the cadastral survey numbers that have belonged to their houses for generations. The SRA scheme is expected to spread across all Gaothans.

What is strange and noteworthy is that a few Toms Dicks and Harrys who have no idea of Mumbai's past are today daring to declare this original ‘Gaothan’ as a 'slum'. Isn't there a difference between slum dwellers and Gaothan-dwellers? There is a huge difference between the two. The community living in Gaothans belongs to one caste, one tribe, one language, one religion, one custom and celebrates one type of festival.

The fragrance that wafts into the air from their cookfires is one of a kind. Their forms of prayer and worship and their places of worship have a history. Their burial grounds, their graveyards and their cemeteries are in the same places for generations. For that, they never felt the need to reach out to the Mumbai Corporation, be it churches, temples or mosques. Today, some of the churches in Mumbai Gaothans and their records date back to more than four and a half hundred years. Their business has been going on for generations. These people have a cultural history. On the other hand, the people in slums speak different languages. They belong to different religions, different sects and different sub-sects. Their festivals, their ways of celebrating them, are varied. Their customs are different. Their eating habits are different. The temples owned by them are relatively new. They do not have their own ancestral lands for burial grounds, graveyards and crematoriums. To get these facilities, the slum dwellers have to reach out to the Mumbai Corporation for land. It is not like that for the natives of the Gaothans. They are moulded from the same land, cut from the same cloth, one caste, one surname, one language and natives of Maharashtra. They are not outsiders like the slum dwellers. How can these homogenous natives be connected to those who came from different regions?

Under the pretext of making Mumbai a smart city, the municipal officials joining hands with builders is a fraud done to the Gaothans. Axing the Gaothans is an act of ingratitude, and a great fraud. Backstabbing the Gaothan dwellers is dishonest and unfair. The imposition of SRA on village slums is impractical and unthinkable. In short:

If the Gaothans survive, who will drown?

If the Gaothans drown, who will survive?

If the Gaothans live, who will die?

If the Gaothans die, who will live?