After the textile strike of 1982-83 and two decades of mill closures, some 600 acres in central Mumbai became the largest redevelopment opportunity in any Indian city. Development Control Regulation 58 of 1991 required mill land released for other uses to be shared in roughly equal thirds: open space and amenities for the municipal corporation, public housing for MHADA, and the remainder for the owner. A 2001 amendment recalculated the shares so that the division applied only to open land rather than to the whole plot, sharply cutting the city's and MHADA's take, while adding protections, compensation monitoring and housing quotas for mill workers. The Bombay High Court struck the amendment down in 2005, but the Supreme Court upheld it in Bombay Dyeing v. Bombay Environmental Action Group in March 2006, and Girangaon became malls, offices and luxury towers.
The mill lands are India's canonical post-industrial regeneration episode, and the case in which a planning formula for capturing land value was rewritten in the landowners' favour with judicial sanction. The resulting landscape - Lower Parel's towers rising directly beside surviving chawls - frames the whole Indian argument about who the redeveloping city is for.
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