Scarcity of space has been a top issue in Mumbai, wherein the city intends to grow and expand vertically to compete with other leading cities in the world. Considering that there is no space for expansion horizontally, Mumbai fails to acknowledge that it already has a task at hand already of dealing with implementation of much awaited town planning scheme: the road widening scheme.

  In the heart of Colaba market, many illegal shops continue to exist, narrowing the road space without paying any taxes to the government. Not only does this create many inconveniences for the locals living in the area, but these shop owners are illegally occupying the public road, free of any tax payment. These shop keepers engage in many different works varying from tailoring, to barber shops, to old paper marts. Each one of these shopkeepers charges approximately thirty rupees per work.  Roughly in a day if one hundred people come to the shop, a total of thirty thousand rupees is earned each day. Now, this is money earned of illegal origin on legal land. 

These shops have been created sharing the same wall of building compounds and have invaded public road space, creating narrow roads which make it very difficult for vehicles to traverse across. Not only this, but there is no parking space on the roads, and then to top it off there are vegetable vendors lined up on the very same street.  This makes the roads even narrower than before and extremely cramped up.  “Living in this area has become a complete headache. At the end of a tired day of work returning home is a nightmare to experience through this crowd”, as said by a local resident, Ketan Gupta living in the area. “I have become accustomed to it, as now I get everything right in my vicinity and it is highly convenient,” another local resident- Kainaz Tabeshi points out.   

In fact, The Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation has demarcated the boundaries where the roads need to be widened, and have in fact brought to notice that these shops need to be demolished as it is invasive of public property. Yet, this fact has been ignored by the media and this plan of widening the roads has failed to take effect till date.

Vegetable lenders continue to run their stalls on the narrow roads, already encroached upon by these illegal shops giving cars very little driving space. 

The fact that these shops run illegally even up till date has often been overlooked by people, as in fact in many ways it has provided a source of convenience for them; having a tailor, vegetable lender, newspaper mart close by to attend to the various chores in their life.  In fact, life in this area of Colaba has become dependent on the works done by these various illegal shops, and many people fail to acknowledge or rather tend to ignore the fact that they are illegal simply because of the fast pace of the society one lives in.