JANATA COLONY Resettling a Squatter Resettlement S G Deshpande THE Trombay hill lies like a beached whale on the eastern shore of the Bombay peninsula, facing north, with a red light at its highest point marking the whale's spout and warning off aircraft which fly in to land past its nose. West of the hill are a number of major industries, mainly fertilisers and chemicals and the oil refineries. On the east, in the narrow strip of land between the hill and the sea, the prominent white dome one sees is Apsara, the Canada-India research reactor, flanked by the other buildings of the ha Atomic Research Centre. This high-security area accessible by road only from the north and south. To the north the Department of Atomic Energy land continues beyond the security gate into the DAE residential complex, a group of long low three and four storeyed buildings with 16 and 20 storeyed point blocks between, extending around the hill. At the foot of the hill on the north, touching the spout of the whale, dwarfed by the scale and ample layout of the DAE residential buildings now all around its remaining open sides, is the 54-acre Janata Colony, a squatter resettlement dating from the early 1950s.
