🔗 Share this article

For months, coercive phone calls continued. Originally, allegedly from a retired cop and a retired army general, and then from law enforcement directly. Finally, Mohammad Khurshid Shaikh asserts he was called to the local precinct and instructed bluntly: remain silent or experience severe repercussions.

This third-generation resident is part of a group fighting a high-value project where this historic settlement – an iconic Mumbai neighborhood – faces razed and modernized by a multinational conglomerate.

"The distinctive community of the slum is like nowhere else in the world," says the resident. "But the plan aims to destroy our community and silence our voices."

Dual Worlds

The narrow alleys of this community sit in stark contrast to the towering buildings and elite residences that dominate the neighborhood. Homes are built haphazardly and frequently lacking adequate facilities, small-scale operations produce dangerous fumes and the environment is permeated by the suffocating smell of uncovered waste channels.

For certain residents, the promise of the slum's redevelopment into a developed area of premium apartments, organized recreational areas, shiny shopping centers and apartments with multiple bathrooms is an aspirational dream achieved.

"There's no proper healthcare, roads or drainage and there's nowhere for kids to enjoy," says a chai seller, 56, who moved from his home state in 1982. "The sole solution is to demolish everything and construct proper housing."

Local Protest

Yet certain residents, including this protester, are opposing the plan.

Everyone acknowledges that this community, historically ignored as an illegal encroachment, is in stark need economic input and modernization. However they worry that this project – absent of public consultation – might turn valuable urban land into a playground for the rich, displacing the lower-caste, immigrant populations who have resided there since the nineteenth century.

It was these excluded, relocated individuals who developed the uninhabited area into an extensively researched phenomenon of local enterprise and economic productivity, whose output is valued at between one million dollars and two million dollars a year, making it among the globe's biggest unofficial markets.

Relocation Worries

Out of about 1 million residents living in the dense 220-hectare neighborhood, less than 50% will be qualified for new homes in the development, which is estimated to take seven years to accomplish. Additional residents will be moved to barren areas and saline fields on the far outskirts of the metropolis, risking fragment a long-established neighborhood. Certain individuals will not get housing at all.

Those allowed to stay in the neighborhood will be allocated apartments in multi-story structures, a significant rupture from the natural, communal way of residing and operating that has sustained the community for many years.

Commercial activities from tailoring to ceramic crafts and waste processing are projected to shrink in number and be moved to a designated "commercial zone" far from homes.

Livelihood Crisis

In the case of this protester, a craftsman and long-time inhabitant to reside in this community, the redevelopment presents a survival challenge. His informal, multi-level facility creates leather coats – formal jackets, luxury coats, fashionable garments – distributed in luxury boutiques in the city's affluent areas and overseas.

Relatives dwells in the accommodations below and employees and garment workers – workers from different regions – also sleep in the same building, allowing him to sustain operations. Away from Dharavi's enclave, accommodation prices are typically significantly costlier for minimal space.

Harassment and Intimidation

Within the administrative buildings close by, a conceptual model of the redevelopment plan illustrates a very different perspective. Slickly dressed inhabitants gather on two-wheelers and e-vehicles, acquiring continental baguettes and pastries and having coffee on a patio adjacent to a restaurant and Ice-Cream. This depicts a world away from the inexpensive idli sambar breakfast and 5-rupee chai that sustains Dharavi's community.

"This isn't improvement for our community," says the artisan. "It's an enormous real estate deal that will make it unaffordable for residents to remain."

Additionally, there exists distrust of the business conglomerate. Run by an influential industrialist – a leading figure and a close ally of the government head – the business group has encountered allegations of favoritism and questionable practices, which it denies.

Although administrative bodies calls it a joint project, the corporation paid $950m for its controlling interest. A case claiming that the initiative was unfairly awarded to the business group is being considered in India's supreme court.

Sustained Harassment

After they started to publicly resist the project, local opponents assert they have been subjected to a long-running campaign of harassment and intimidation – involving phone calls, explicit warnings and implications that speaking against the development was equivalent to opposing national interests – by individuals they assert represent the developer.

Among those accused of issuing the threats is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c