On a slippery hill

When Khareghat Colony resident Dr Shanaz Khodaiji was woken up by a series of rumbles at about 5:30 a.m. on September 22, 2020, she found that the eight-foot retaining compound wall near her ground floor flat in Building No. 5 had collapsed. Wet sludge from a portion of the nearby Malabar Hill had broken into one of her rooms, she told Parsiana on September 26. "It is my son’s room but he was in Poona, therefore it was unoccupied.” The consultant hematologist told the Mumbai Mirror (MM) of September 24 that there was muck on the ceiling, wall and floor, "indicative of the force with which it gushed in.”
Committee member of the Khareghat Colony Welfare Association (KCWA) Khorram Siodia told Parsiana on September 25 that "there is no damage to the structure of the 103-year-old building.” The Association "helped the Khodaijis seal off the broken window.” Shanaz stated that for about 24 hours after that, rain and sludge continued to seep into the room through the edges. "This has now stopped.” Temporary barriers using concrete-filled gunny bags have been created in the Colony to possibly prevent further mishaps, Siodia said. Shanaz added that the Association had built "tracks” in their compound to drain off excess rain water.

Damage caused by landslide at Khareghat Colony

The incident has attracted the attention of politicians at the city and state level, Siodia said. Arvind Sawant, Member of Parliament for South Bombay called up the Khodaijis and told them that repairs to fix the cause of the landslide "will take a year.” Malabar Hill houses many ministerial bungalows from the colonial era.
This was the second landslide at Malabar Hill within a span of 50 days. On August 5, the retaining wall near the lower bunglis of the Tower of Silence had collapsed due to a cave-in on Ridge Road. A Doongerwadi pavilion adjoining the wall had to be demolished to prevent further damage, Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP) trustee Kersi Randeria told Parsiana on September 25. The Colony is managed by the BPP. The cave-in disrupted traffic on the arterial Peddar Road too. Ridge Road and one side of Hughes Road have been closed to traffic as on October 1.
Among the first to visit the Khodaijis was former BPP chairman Dinshaw Mehta, Shanaz noted. "(Trustee) Viraf (Mehta) drops in every day... (trustee) Xerxes Dastur has also come by.” Randeria stated, "Our buildings and compound walls for almost all properties are old due to passage of time... a few buildings in Godrej Baug (also on Malabar Hill, on land adjacent to Doongerwadi), the most recent of our colonies, are starting to need structural repairs...We do not have the wherewithal, the ability, or the inclination to do anything about this... We need a multipronged approach to address all our properties... We have to find someone to go around the colonies, identify the broken chhajjias (awnings) and the retaining walls, among other things… The BMC (Bombay Municipal Corporation) alone is not responsible for this mishap... the monsoons have been unusually heavy this year.” The BPP trustees had earlier been told "kai karro, kai karro (do something, do something)” by occupants of a nearby building when they saw the retaining wall showing signs of decay, Randeria recalled.
Assistant municipal commissioner for D ward, Prashant Gaikwad was quoted in MM as stating, "We have to wait till the rains stop to do any repairs.” The monsoon season in Bombay in recent years has extended to October. Additional BMC commissioner P. Velrasu told the newspaper that "work on stabilization of Malabar Hill can only start in November.” The MM stated that an Indian Institute of Technology-led study of all reservoirs in Bombay and the land around them was undertaken after 31 people died in a landslide near a Malad reservoir in July 2019. The Malabar Hill reservoir under the Sir Pherozeshah Mehta Garden has five chambers, each with a capacity to hold 147 million liters of water.
Structural engineer Jamshed Sukhadwala told MM that both landslides are "connected to the Hill... Soil gets saturated and the entrapped water pushes the retaining wall.” Indrani Malkani, chairperson of V Citizens Action Network (VCAN) told the newspaper that "the stability of Malabar Hill is compromised by construction of many high-rises... Parts of the Hill have been cut and dug deep to lay the foundations of these buildings.”
Khareghat Colony houses about 300 families in 34 buildings as well as the F. D. Alpaiwalla Museum, currently under renovation, which is also adjacent to the Hill. Besides Siodia, the other members of the committee are Mehernosh Printer, Bakhtyar Vazifdar, Zubin Billimoria, Cyrus Sarkari, Pervin Avari, Rohena Mehta, Noshad Engineer and Parizad Patel Divwala. Elections were held on September 27 this year. "Designations have not been decided yet... We work through a democratic majority system for all decisions, so designations don’t really matter,” Siodia told us.