🔗 Share this article

Across several weeks, coercive messages recurred. Initially, reportedly from a retired cop and a former defense officer, subsequently from the police themselves. Ultimately, a local artisan states he was ordered to the local precinct and told clearly: stop speaking out or encounter real trouble.

The leather artisan is one of many fighting a high-value initiative where one of India's largest slums – an iconic Mumbai neighborhood – faces bulldozed and modernized by a corporate giant.

"The distinctive community of this area is unparalleled in the planet," explains Shaikh. "But the plan aims to destroy our social fabric and stop us speaking out."

Dual Worlds

The narrow alleys of this community present a dramatic difference to the high-rise structures and elite residences that overshadow the settlement. Homes are assembled randomly and typically missing basic amenities, unregulated industries produce dangerous fumes and the environment is permeated by the overpowering odor of open sewers.

For certain residents, the prospect of the slum's redevelopment into a modern district of luxury high-rises, neat parks, modern retail complexes and apartments with multiple bathrooms is an optimistic future come true.

"We don't have sufficient health services, paved pathways or water management and there are no spaces for youth to recreate," explains a tea vendor, in his fifties, who migrated from southern India in the early eighties. "The only way is to tear it all down and build us new homes."

Community Resistance

However, some, such as Shaikh, are opposing the redevelopment.

Everyone acknowledges that this community, long neglected as informal housing, is in stark need investment and development. However they are concerned that this project – without resident participation – is one that will turn premium city property into a playground for the rich, displacing the marginalized, migrant communities who have been there since generations ago.

It was these marginalized, migrant workers who established the empty marshland into a widely studied marvel of local enterprise and economic productivity, whose production is estimated at between one million dollars and a substantial sum annually, making it one of the world's largest unregulated sectors.

Resettlement Issues

Of the roughly one million people living in the dense 220-hectare zone, less than 50% will be able for new homes in the development, which is expected to take seven years to accomplish. The remainder will be transferred to wastelands and saline fields on the remote edges of the metropolis, threatening to divide a generations-old community. A portion will not get housing at all.

Those allowed to stay in Dharavi will be given units in tower blocks, a substantial change from the organic, communal way of dwelling and laboring that has sustained the community for so long.

Commercial activities from clothing production to clay work and material recovery are likely to shrink in number and be relocated to a specific "industrial sector" far from residential areas.

Survival Challenge

For residents like this protester, a leather artisan and third generation resident to live in this community, the plan presents a fundamental risk. His informal, three-storey workshop produces garments – sharp blazers, premium outerwear, studded bomber jackets – marketed in luxury boutiques in upscale neighborhoods and abroad.

Household members lives in the spaces underneath and his workers and tailors – workers from different regions – live there, permitting him to sustain operations. Outside the slum, accommodation prices are frequently tenfold costlier for a single room.

Threats and Warning

At the administrative buildings in the vicinity, an illustrated mock-up of the redevelopment plan illustrates an alternative vision for the future. Well-groomed inhabitants mill about on bicycles and e-vehicles, purchasing continental bread and breakfast items and socializing on a patio near Dharavi Cafe and dessert parlor. This depicts a world away from the 20-rupee idli sambar first meal and low-cost tea that maintains the neighborhood.

"This represents no progress for us," states Shaikh. "This constitutes an enormous property transaction that will render it impossible for our community to continue."

Additionally, there exists distrust of the business conglomerate. Headed by a powerful tycoon – among the country's wealthiest and an associate of the Indian prime minister – the business group has faced accusations of favoritism and financial impropriety, which it disputes.

Even as local authorities describes it as a joint project, the business group paid nearly a billion dollars for its controlling interest. A lawsuit stating that the redevelopment was questionably assigned to the business group is pending in India's supreme court.

Sustained Harassment

From when they initiated to publicly resist the project, local opponents claim they have been experienced an extended period of coercion and warning – comprising communications, direct threats and insinuations that criticizing the project was comparable with opposing national interests – by individuals they claim are associated with the business conglomerate.

Part of the group alleged to have issuing the threats is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c