🔗 Share this article

Across several weeks, threatening phone calls continued. Initially, allegedly from an ex-law enforcement official and a retired army general, and then from the police themselves. In the end, Mohammad Khurshid Shaikh asserts he was called to law enforcement headquarters and warned explicitly: keep quiet or experience severe repercussions.

This third-generation resident is one of many resisting a multimillion-dollar initiative where one of India's largest slums – an iconic Mumbai neighborhood – faces demolished and redeveloped by a large business group.

"The unique ecosystem of Dharavi is unparalleled in the globe," says the protester. "However their intention is to dismantle our community and silence our voices."

Dual Worlds

The dank gullies of this community present a dramatic difference to the soaring skyscrapers and elite residences that loom over the area. Residences are assembled randomly and typically without proper sanitation, small-scale operations produce dangerous fumes and the environment is filled with the suffocating smell of uncovered waste channels.

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

"We lack adequate medical facilities, proper streets or sewage systems and there are no spaces for kids to enjoy," says a chai seller, in his fifties, who relocated from southern India in that period. "The sole solution is to demolish everything and build us new homes."

Local Protest

Yet certain residents, like this protester, are opposing the project.

None deny that Dharavi, long neglected as unauthorized settlement, is urgently needing economic input and modernization. Yet they fear that this plan – absent of community input – is one that will transform valuable urban land into a luxury development, displacing the lower-caste, immigrant populations who have been there since the nineteenth century.

This involved these shunned, relocated individuals who built up the empty marshland into an extensively researched phenomenon of community resilience and business activity, whose output is estimated at between one million dollars and a substantial sum a year, making it among the globe's biggest unofficial markets.

Displacement Concerns

Among approximately a million people living in the dense 220-hectare neighborhood, fewer than half will be eligible for alternative accommodation in the development, which is projected to take an extended timeframe to complete. Others will be relocated to barren areas and coastal regions on the far outskirts of the city, potentially fragment a generations-old community. Some will not get homes at all.

Those allowed to remain in the area will be provided apartments in high-rise buildings, a major break from the natural, communal way of dwelling and laboring that has sustained Dharavi for many years.

Industries from tailoring to pottery and waste processing are likely to reduce in scale and be transferred to a designated "commercial zone" distant from people's residences.

Livelihood Crisis

In the case of Shaikh, a craftsman and third generation of his family to call home Dharavi, the project presents an existential threat. His informal, three-storey workshop creates apparel – sharp blazers, luxury coats, fashionable garments – sold in luxury boutiques in the city's affluent areas and overseas.

Relatives dwells in the rooms below and laborers and tailors – migrants from other states – also sleep on-site, enabling him to afford their labour. Beyond this community, accommodation prices are often 10 times as high for a single room.

Harassment and Intimidation

In the administrative buildings nearby, a conceptual model of the Dharavi project shows a very different vision for the future. Well-groomed residents gather on two-wheelers and e-vehicles, purchasing western-style bread and breakfast items and enlisting beverages on a patio near a coffee shop and dessert parlor. It is a world away from the 20-rupee idli sambar breakfast and budget beverage that supports local residents.

"This represents no development for us," explains Shaikh. "It's a huge real estate deal that will render it impossible for residents to remain."

Furthermore, there's distrust of the business conglomerate. Run by a prominent businessman – one of India's most powerful and an associate of the national leader – the business group has faced accusations of preferential treatment and financial impropriety, which it rejects.

Even as administrative bodies calls it a collaborative effort, the corporation invested nearly a billion dollars for its 80% stake. A case claiming that the redevelopment was unfairly awarded to the developer is being considered in India's supreme court.

Sustained Harassment

Since they began to actively protest the redevelopment, local opponents assert they have been faced an extended period of harassment and intimidation – involving communications, explicit warnings and suggestions that criticizing the project was equivalent to anti-national sentiment – by individuals they assert represent the corporate group.

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