Mumbai Real Estate & Adiga's Last Man in Tower

From this morning's tragic article in the Guardian, "Death toll rises following collapse of building in Mumbai:"

The death toll from a collapsed building in India's financial centre Mumbai has risen to 72, as an injured woman trapped for 36 hours was freed from the rubble. About 100 rescue workers from the national disaster relief agency continue to search through the wreck of the seven-storey building, using cranes, bulldozers and jackhammers to cut through the twisted metal and concrete. "The building collapsed like a pack of cards within three to four seconds," Ramlal, a resident, told Reuters. "It just tilted a bit and collapsed," he said. Residents said labourers paying rent of around £3.28 ($5) a day lived in the building...  

Unauthorised constructions are a product of unavailability of affordable housing," said Lalit Kumar Jain, president of the Confederation of Real Estate Developers of India. A sharp rise in property prices in densely populated Mumbai over the past five years has put housing out of reach for tens of thousands of lower earners, many of whom moved to the city in search of jobs, and now sleep on the streets or in slums. In 2012, India's urban housing shortage was estimated at nearly 19m homes according to a report by the ministry of housing and urban poverty alleviation.

For a novel about Mumbai's sharp rise in property prices, try Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (author of The White Tiger):

A tale of one man refusing to leave his home in the face of property development. Tower A is a relic from a co-operative housing society established in the 1950s. When a property developer offers to buy out the residents for eye-watering sums, the principled yet arrogant teacher is the only one to refuse the offer, determined not to surrender his sentimental attachment to his home and his right to live in it, in the name of greed. His neighbours gradually relinquish any similar qualms they might have and, in a typically blunt satirical premise take matters into their own hands, determined to seize their slice of the new Mumbai as it transforms from stinky slum to silvery skyscrapers at dizzying, almost gravity-defying speed.

Corruption in India & Adiga's The White Tiger

The following is from this Monday's BBC article "India court charges Suresh Kalmadi with corruption:"

A court in India has charged the chief of Delhi's 2010 Commonwealth Games, Suresh Kalmadi, with corruption. Mr Kalmadi and nine others have been charged with cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy. He denies the charges and has pleaded not guilty. The case will be heard at a fast-track court in Delhi. Estimated to be worth $16.5m (£10m) in funds lost to the exchequer, the case is one of several corruption scandals to have rocked India's government.

A hilarious novel that discusses corruption in India is Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger:

In this darkly comic début novel set in India, Balram, a chauffeur, murders his employer, justifying his crime as the act of a "social entrepreneur." In a series of letters to the Premier of China, in anticipation of the leader’s upcoming visit to Balram’s homeland, the chauffeur recounts his transformation from an honest, hardworking boy growing up in "the Darkness"—those areas of rural India where education and electricity are equally scarce, and where villagers banter about local elections "like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra"—to a determined killer. He places the blame for his rage squarely on the avarice of the Indian élite, among whom bribes are commonplace, and who perpetuate a system in which many are sacrificed to the whims of a few.

(The above book review is from The New Yorker. I can't find the original New Yorker page it comes from, but here is the Amazon page I found it on.)