🔗 Share this article

Across several weeks, coercive phone calls recurred. Initially, reportedly from an ex-law enforcement official and a retired army general, and then from the police themselves. Ultimately, Mohammad Khurshid Shaikh claims he was summoned to law enforcement headquarters and instructed bluntly: keep quiet or encounter real trouble.

Shaikh is among those fighting a high-value redevelopment plan where this historic settlement – one of India’s largest and most storied slums – faces razed and redeveloped by a multinational conglomerate.

"The distinctive community of Dharavi is unparalleled in the planet," states Shaikh. "Yet the plan aims to eradicate our community and prevent our protests."

Opposing Environments

The narrow alleys of the slum present a dramatic difference to the towering buildings and Bollywood penthouses that loom over the neighborhood. Dwellings are assembled randomly and typically without proper sanitation, small-scale operations release harmful emissions and the environment is permeated by the overpowering odor of uncovered waste channels.

For certain residents, the prospect of a renewed Dharavi into a developed area of high-end towers, well-maintained green spaces, shiny shopping centers and residences with proper sanitation is an optimistic future come true.

"We lack proper healthcare, roads or water management and there's nowhere for youth to recreate," states a chai seller, 56, who moved from southern India in 1982. "The sole solution is to demolish everything and construct proper housing."

Community Resistance

But others, such as Shaikh, are opposing the redevelopment.

Everyone acknowledges that this community, long neglected as an illegal encroachment, is desperately requiring financial support and improvement. But they fear that this plan – without resident participation – might convert premium city property into a playground for the rich, forcing out the disadvantaged, immigrant populations who have lived there since generations ago.

These were these excluded, relocated individuals who established the empty marshland into a widely studied marvel of self-reliance and business activity, whose economic value is estimated at between $1m and two million dollars annually, making it among the globe's biggest unregulated sectors.

Relocation Worries

Of the roughly a million people living in the packed sprawling neighborhood, less than 50% will be able for alternative accommodation in the project, which is projected to take seven years to complete. Additional residents will be transferred to barren areas and salt plains on the remote edges of the metropolis, potentially divide a long-established community. Some will not get homes at all.

People eligible to continue living in the neighborhood will be allocated apartments in tower blocks, a substantial change from the organic, communal way of living and working that has sustained this area for so long.

Businesses from clothing production to clay work and recycling are likely to shrink in number and be transferred to a specific "industrial sector" distant from people's residences.

Survival Challenge

For residents like the leather artisan, a craftsman and multi-generational of his family to call home this community, the plan presents a fundamental risk. His informal, three-floor workshop produces garments – tailored coats, luxury coats, studded bomber jackets – distributed in premium stores in south Mumbai and abroad.

His family resides in the rooms downstairs and his workers and sewers – workers from north India – also sleep there, permitting him to sustain operations. Beyond the slum, housing costs are often tenfold as high for minimal space.

Pressure and Coercion

Within the official facilities nearby, an illustrated mock-up of the redevelopment plan shows an alternative outlook. Fashionable people mill about on bicycles and electric vehicles, acquiring international baked goods and breakfast items and socializing on an outdoor area outside a coffee shop and dessert parlor. It is a world away from the 20-rupee idli sambar first meal and 5-rupee chai that sustains Dharavi's community.

"This represents no progress for residents," states the protester. "It's an enormous property transaction that will render it impossible for our community to continue."

Furthermore, there's skepticism of the corporate group. Managed by a prominent businessman – among the country's wealthiest and a close ally of the Indian prime minister – the business group has encountered allegations of favoritism and questionable practices, which it rejects.

While local authorities describes it as a partnership, the developer contributed nearly a billion dollars for its majority share. Legal proceedings claiming that the redevelopment was improperly granted to the corporation is pending in the top court.

Sustained Harassment

After they started to actively protest the development, local opponents claim they have been experienced ongoing efforts of coercion and warning – comprising phone calls, explicit warnings and implications that speaking against the project was tantamount to anti-national sentiment – by figures they assert are associated with the business conglomerate.

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