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As Mumbai, India's financial capital, witnessed vertical growth over the years with highrises dotting its skyline, some 'gaothans' (villages) have held onto their heritage and legacy. Ranwar, in the heart of Bandra, is one such village that has resisted the urge to make way for towering structures. Dwarfed by highrises, the East Indian-majority village has narrow streets lined with old quaint bungalows and crosses outside homes. With jazz music streaming in the air, walking around the area can transport you to a simpler time. While Bandra developed rapidly and became home to Bollywood's elite and a burgeoning street shopping hub, residents of Ranwar maintained their old bungalows. The coexistence, however, has come at a price, causing traffic issues and crowding. And now, plans are afoot to give the 300-year-old village a facelift while preserving the past. Talking to PTI, <keyword id="23283968" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Johan-Dharmai" source="Orion">Johan Dharmai</keyword>, BJP secretary and a member of the East Indian community, said, "Locals want to preserve the heritage. One of the steps in the facelift plan is to close vehicle movement and build a walkway so that tourists can take a stroll and enjoy the architecture." Though many houses in Ranwar are now being redeveloped, Veronica Street has maintained its old-world charm. It has a square erected in 1866. However, honking rents the air on this street, as motorists see it as a shortcut to Bandra Reclamation and other areas. Mehboob Studio is just a stone's throw away, and senior citizens living on Veronica Street recall seeing actors Helen and Zeenat Aman around Ranwar. A beautification, restoration and conservation project is being initiated to improve safety, regulate traffic and create awareness about the centuries-old village. Mumbai BJP president and <keyword id="20238930" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Bandra-West" source="keywords">Bandra West</keyword> MLA Ashish Shelar recently met locals to discuss ways to move the project forward. "The beauty of Bandra West is its 'gaothans'. The heritage needs to be protected and showcased. I have asked the government to allocate funds from the District Planning Development Committee (DPDC). <keyword id="23283965" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Ranwar-Village" source="keywords">Ranwar village</keyword> will get a facelift. The work has begun on roads, CCTV cameras, street light illumination, parking and traffic plan will be in place with the help of locals and architects," Shelar told PTI. <keyword id="23283967" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Architect-Samir-DMonte" source="keywords">Architect Samir D'Monte</keyword> has been working with the Ranwar Veronica Street Residents' Association since 2009, and they identified a range of problems that the area faced. D'Monte said improvements were made to open spaces and common areas, roads, sewage and drainage systems, street signage, street lighting and traffic and parking management. Apart from this, individual houses were restored, and an innovative fire system was also introduced. Locals say most residents are senior citizens and want to live peacefully without disturbances by motorists. Kaevan Umrigar of Khaki Tours, who works to create awareness about Mumbai's heritage, said Bandra comprised 23 gaothans that housed fisher folk, Kunbis (a farming community) and the agris community who had salt pans. "Ranwar was a farming village, and the area had paddy fields. Later, these paddy fields made way for urban settlements. These little villages are now trapped in the city. Now, only 10 to 15 gaothans in Bandra have survived," he said. But preserving heritage comes at a cost, and if a 'gaothan' comes under heritage guidelines, it becomes difficult to upgrade a home in the area or live a modern life, Umigar said, adding that heritage should be made attractive by tapping the tourism potential of these areas. 'Gaothans' in Mumbai and the larger Mumbai metropolitan region (MMR) are urban villages that house the city's original inhabitants. The Mumbai suburban district collector and Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) have been roped in for Ranwar's facelift plan. Umigar calls land scarcity a threat to 'gaothans', with only 100 left in the city. "When someone wants to develop gaothans, they want to do it vertically. There is a constant battle between heritage and development. They (villages) survive because the houses are tightly packed and on narrow lanes. So individual houses are not attractive for redevelopment, and parking becomes an issue," he said.

300-year-old Bandra village to get facelift to conserve its glorious past

Spotify to Swiggy: Do you know the people behind your favourite apps?

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Many NATO armies may not be prepared for large-scale urban warfare.</li><li>Israel's operation in Gaza is a test-case for what they may need.</li></ul>Urban warfare in Gaza has revealed a painful truth for NATO: Many of its armies are ill-prepared for fighting in crowded cities.The Israel Defense Forces has achieved some success in adapting new weapons and tactics, such as arming tactical units with missiles and drones rather than relying support from aircraft and artillery, according to a new British study. The problem is that the British Army lacks the equipment to replicate Israeli tactics."While British troops may be trained to fight like the IDF, they find themselves equipped to die like Hamas," warned the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/occasional-papers/tactical-lessons-israel-defense-forces-operations-gaza-2023">report</a> by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.The <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/british-army-size-smallest-since-napoleonic-wars-2024-7">British Army</a> is understrength, underequipped and underfunded. But so are many European armies that dwindled after the end of the Cold War. Even some American experts worry about the city-fighting capabilities of the <a target="_blank" href="https://warontherocks.com/2023/12/learning-from-real-wars-gaza-and-ukraine/">US Army</a>, which is far more lavishly equipped and supplied than its NATO counterparts. There is good reason for concern: urban warfare has become a fixture of warfare on a rapidly urbanizing planet, from <a target="_blank" href="https://mwi.westpoint.edu/urban-warfare-case-study-6-first-battle-of-fallujah/">Fallujah</a> in 2003 to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/bakhmut-how-ukraine-lost-city-russia-won-hollow-victory-2023-12">Bakhmut</a> in 2023.So it's natural for NATO armies to study how the IDF — a NATO-style mechanized force with a reputation for innovative tactics and high-tech equipment — is battling Hamas among the labyrinthine streets and high-rises of Gaza. Like Western militaries, the last place the IDF wants to fight is in a city, where buildings and rubble shelter the defender, impede armored vehicles and hamper airpower and artillery. Gaza poses an added challenge: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-invasion-gaza-hamas-hardest-fighting-underground-tunnels-warfare-2023-10">a vast tunnel network</a> that Hamas uses for storing weapons and springing hit-and-run attacks.Indeed, Israel even coined a term for this form of combat: "<a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/israeli-troops-struggled-to-fight-through-gaza-sections-reduced-rubble-2024-7">Devastated terrain warfare</a>." Israel's aerial barrage reduced many neighborhoods to rubble before ground forces moved in and is the leading cause of the 39,000 reported Palestinian fatalities. It is a challenging environment for Israel in particular, a small nation of 10 million people that is sensitive to casualties among its soldiers, the majority of whom are reservists.<div type="image" title="Israeli troops and their vehicles have faced challenges operating in sections of Gaza that the Israeli Air Force shattered." height="1342" width="2000" msid="112424687" hostid="261" sizebytes="269204"></div>One tactic that proved effective was to give the lower echelon units — such as platoons — small attack <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/armies-need-their-own-drone-air-force-flown-by-specialists-study-says-2024-5">drones</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/anti-tank-missiles-armor-ukraine-tank-still-has-battlefield-role-2023-10">anti-tank missiles</a>. "It was discovered that units that had these systems as well as ATGMs [anti-tank guided missiles] could monitor more urban terrain and conduct precision strikes at tempo in support of tactical actions," RUSI said. "The small size of the munitions used meant that they could be used with an expectation of precision."With Hamas hiding in and raiding from an estimated 450 miles of concrete tunnels, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-uses-yahalom-unit-when-it-needs-to-fight-underground-2023-11">the IDF</a> also found that it couldn't clear buildings first and then destroy the tunnels underneath. "As the operation developed, it became evident that this allowed Hamas to persist in conducting ambushes for a protracted period and to then transition to a layered defense of underground facilities," noted RUSI analysts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, who co-authored the report. "Nor could underground infrastructure be safely bypassed." This meant that Israeli troops had to clear the surface and tunnels simultaneously.Surprisingly, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-pounding-gaza-massive-spice-kit-bombs-2023-12">the high-rise buildings</a> of Gaza proved less beneficial to Hamas than anticipated. Fighters stationed in the upper stories had limited visibility and fields of fire, so the tendency was to stick to the first few levels. But tall buildings did help the defender in another way: destroying them with air strikes led to extensive rubble that hampered the attacker's tanks and infantry.The biggest lesson of Gaza is the importance of firepower in urban warfare, according to RUSI. This makes arming tactical units, such as infantry platoons, with as much firepower as possible. Unlike mechanized operations, where low-level infantry and armored units might get air and artillery support from higher headquarters, city fighting tends to be waged by small units.Firepower played a decisive role "in determining initiative during the fighting in Gaza," RUSI said. "Ultimately, the superiority in responsiveness and organic lethality of IDF units made it costly for Hamas to mount attacks, and the larger the force it endeavored to bring to bear, the higher the cost of any given action. Furthermore, while indirect fire prevented Hamas from concentrating its forces, the limited organic lethality of its teams meant that once they engaged IDF troops, they were quickly suppressed and thereafter destroyed."Another lesson is the importance of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/see-israel-defense-systems-weapons-in-action-2024-4">air defense</a>. "Buildings do not offer significant protection against air-delivered munitions because of the weight of ordnance that can be dropped with precision," the report pointed out.Airpower also hampers maneuver, a major handicap for armies that usually lack the strength to occupy an entire city, and thus have to redeploy troops to key sectors. "Hamas's lack of ability to threaten Israeli aircraft and ISR [aerial reconnaissance] meant that it was unable to concentrate and lacked freedom of maneuver," said RUSI. "Once its defensive strong points were identified, they could be reduced. The weight of munitions deliverable from the air outweighs anything deliverable from artillery systems, such that many of the defensive advantages of urban terrain can be bypassed if it is possible to conduct precision bombing from medium altitude."In other words, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-israel-trying-to-achieve-in-gaza-bombing-2023-12">aerial bombing</a> from this altitude is accurate and high volume enough to destroy most urban strongholds or render them useless.This phenomenon has been seen in Ukraine, said Watling and Reynolds, who have extensively studied that conflict. "Whenever the Russian air force has established access at medium altitude near an urban settlement, it has rapidly destroyed it, enabling subsequent capture."However, the lessons of Israeli operations are not always applicable to other conflicts. For example, unlike Russia, Hamas has no artillery, nor electronic warfare to jam Israeli drones and communications, RUSI said. Hamas also only had 40,000 fighters at the war's start, many of whom are now casualties.Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.twitter.com/@mipeck1">Twitter</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mipeck/">LinkedIn</a>.

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The creepiest urban legend from every state

Gabbi Shaw

300-year-old Bandra village to get facelift to conserve its glorious past

PTI

Spotify to Swiggy: Do you know the people behind your favourite apps?

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Israel's urban warfare tactics in Gaza offer lessons for NATO armies

Michael Peck

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