Pressure, Apprehension and Optimism as India's financial capital Slum Dwellers Face the Bulldozers

Across several weeks, coercive phone calls persisted. Originally, supposedly from a former police officer and an ex-military commander, subsequently from the authorities. Finally, Mohammad Khurshid Shaikh states he was summoned to the police station and instructed bluntly: stop speaking out or experience severe repercussions.

Shaikh is one of many resisting a expensive project where Dharavi – one of India’s largest and most storied slums – faces demolished and modernized by a large business group.

"The culture of Dharavi is like nowhere else in the planet," explains the protester. "However their intention is to eradicate our community and stop us speaking out."

Dual Worlds

The narrow alleys of the slum stand in sharp opposition to the soaring skyscrapers and Bollywood penthouses that dominate the area. Dwellings are assembled randomly and frequently missing basic amenities, small-scale operations produce dangerous fumes and the environment is saturated with the unpleasant stench of exposed drainage.

For certain residents, the vision of a renewed Dharavi into a developed area of high-end towers, organized recreational areas, contemporary malls and apartments with multiple bathrooms is a hopeful vision come true.

"There's no sufficient health services, proper streets or sewage systems and there are no spaces for kids to enjoy," explains A Selvin Nadar, fifty-six, who relocated from southern India in that period. "The single option is to demolish everything and build us new homes."

Resident Opposition

However, some, including Shaikh, are opposing the project.

Everyone acknowledges that Dharavi, long neglected as informal housing, is urgently needing economic input and modernization. But they fear that this initiative – absent of community input – could potentially transform valuable urban land into a luxury development, evicting the marginalized, working-class residents who have been there since the nineteenth century.

These were these shunned, displaced people who built up the vacant wetlands into an extensively researched phenomenon of community resilience and business activity, whose output is valued at between one million dollars and $2m annually, making it a major unofficial markets.

Resettlement Issues

Among approximately one million residents living in the packed 2.2 square kilometer neighborhood, less than 50% will be eligible for replacement housing in the project, which is expected to take seven years to complete. Additional residents will be relocated to undeveloped zones and salt plains on the remote edges of the city, threatening to break up a long-established social network. Certain individuals will receive no homes at all.

Residents permitted to remain in the neighborhood will be given units in high-rise buildings, a significant rupture from the organic, communal way of living and working that has maintained Dharavi for generations.

Industries from garment work to clay work and recycling are projected to decrease in quantity and be transferred to a specific "business area" far from homes.

Survival Challenge

For residents like the leather artisan, a workshop owner and multi-generational resident to live in Dharavi, the redevelopment presents a fundamental risk. His makeshift, three-floor workshop produces leather coats – formal jackets, luxury coats, fashionable garments – distributed in high-end shops in south Mumbai and abroad.

Household members resides in the rooms underneath and laborers and sewers – migrants from different regions – also sleep there, permitting him to sustain operations. Outside this community, accommodation prices are frequently significantly more expensive for basic accommodation.

Pressure and Coercion

Within the official facilities nearby, an illustrated mock-up of the transformation initiative depicts an alternative outlook. Fashionable residents move around on cycles and electric vehicles, acquiring western-style baguettes and pastries and enlisting beverages on an outdoor area outside Dharavi Cafe and Ice-Cream. It is a complete departure from the inexpensive idli sambar first meal and 5-rupee chai that sustains the neighborhood.

"This represents no progress for residents," explains the artisan. "It's an enormous real estate deal that will price people out for our community to continue."

There is also distrust of the business conglomerate. Managed by a prominent businessman – one of India's most powerful and a supporter of the Indian prime minister – the corporation has encountered allegations of preferential treatment and ethical concerns, which it denies.

While the state government calls it a partnership, the developer invested $950m for its majority share. Legal proceedings alleging that the redevelopment was improperly granted to the business group is being considered in India's supreme court.

Continued Intimidation

After they started to vocally oppose the redevelopment, Shaikh and other residents assert they have been subjected to an extended period of harassment and intimidation – involving communications, explicit warnings and suggestions that opposing the project was equivalent to anti-national sentiment – by figures they assert work for the developer.

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