🔗 Share this article

For months, coercive messages persisted. Originally, reportedly from an ex-law enforcement official and a retired army general, later from law enforcement directly. In the end, one resident asserts he was summoned to the local precinct and warned explicitly: stop speaking out or experience severe repercussions.

Shaikh is among those opposing a high-value redevelopment plan where one of India's largest slums – an iconic Mumbai neighborhood – will be bulldozed and modernized by a corporate giant.

"The distinctive community of the slum is exceptional in the planet," states Shaikh. "However the plan aims to destroy our way of life and prevent our protests."

Opposing Environments

The narrow alleys of the slum stand in sharp opposition to the high-rise structures and elite residences that dominate the neighborhood. Dwellings are constructed informally and frequently missing basic amenities, unregulated industries emit toxic smoke and the air is filled with the unpleasant stench of exposed drainage.

Among some individuals, the prospect of the slum's redevelopment into a glistening neighborhood of premium apartments, organized recreational areas, shiny shopping centers and homes with proper sanitation is an aspirational dream achieved.

"We lack sufficient health services, proper streets or sewage systems and we have no places for children to play," states A Selvin Nadar, in his fifties, who relocated from southern India in 1982. "The single option is to tear it all down and provide modern residences."

Local Protest

Yet certain residents, such as this protester, are resisting the project.

None deny that Dharavi, consistently overlooked as informal housing, is in stark need investment and development. However they fear that this initiative – absent of resident participation – is one that will convert valuable urban land into a luxury development, forcing out the lower-caste, migrant communities who have resided there since the nineteenth century.

These were these excluded, migrant workers who built up the uninhabited area into an extensively researched phenomenon of self-reliance and commercial output, whose production is worth between one million dollars and a substantial sum annually, making it one of the world's largest informal economies.

Relocation Worries

Of the roughly 1 million residents living in the crowded sprawling neighborhood, less than 50% will be qualified for replacement housing in the project, which is expected to take seven years to finish. Additional residents will be transferred to barren areas and salt plains on the remote edges of Mumbai, potentially fragment a long-established social network. Some will be denied residences at all.

Those allowed to continue living in the area will be allocated apartments in high-rise buildings, a substantial change from the natural, shared lifestyle of living and working that has sustained this area for so long.

Commercial activities from clothing production to clay work and waste processing are expected to reduce in scale and be transferred to an allocated "commercial zone" separated from people's residences.

Survival Challenge

For residents like the leather artisan, a workshop owner and third generation inhabitant to live in the slum, the plan presents a survival challenge. His makeshift, three-storey workshop produces apparel – tailored coats, premium outerwear, fashionable garments – sold in high-end shops in south Mumbai and abroad.

Household members lives in the rooms underneath and laborers and garment workers – laborers from other states – also sleep on-site, allowing him to manage costs. Beyond Dharavi's enclave, housing costs are typically 10 times more expensive for minimal space.

Threats and Warning

In the government offices close by, an illustrated mock-up of the redevelopment plan shows a contrasting vision for the future. Fashionable residents mill about on bicycles and e-vehicles, purchasing continental bread and pastries and socializing on an outdoor area adjacent to a restaurant and dessert parlor. It is a complete departure from the affordable idli sambar first meal and low-cost tea that supports the neighborhood.

"This isn't development for our community," explains the protester. "This constitutes a massive property transaction that will price people out for us to survive."

There is also concern of the corporate group. Managed by a powerful tycoon – among the country's wealthiest and a close ally of the national leader – the conglomerate has been subject to claims of favoritism and questionable practices, which it disputes.

Even as administrative bodies calls it a joint project, the developer paid a significant amount for its majority share. A lawsuit stating that the redevelopment was unfairly awarded to the corporation is pending in India's supreme court.

Sustained Harassment

After they started to publicly resist the redevelopment, protesters and community members claim they have been faced ongoing efforts of coercion and warning – including messages, direct threats and implications that criticizing the project was comparable with speaking against the country – by figures they claim work for the corporate group.

Included in these alleged to have delivering warnings is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c