🔗 Share this article

Over an extended period, intimidating communications continued. Initially, supposedly from a retired cop and a former defense officer, later from the police themselves. Ultimately, Mohammad Khurshid Shaikh claims he was summoned to law enforcement headquarters and warned explicitly: remain silent or encounter real trouble.

This third-generation resident is one of many opposing a high-value initiative where this historic settlement – one of India’s largest and most storied slums – faces razed and redeveloped by a multinational conglomerate.

"The unique ecosystem of Dharavi is like nowhere else in the world," explains the protester. "However they want to dismantle our way of life and prevent our protests."

Opposing Environments

The dank gullies of this community present a dramatic difference to the towering buildings and luxury apartments that overshadow the settlement. Homes are built haphazardly and frequently missing basic amenities, unregulated industries release harmful emissions and the environment is filled with the suffocating smell of uncovered waste channels.

For certain residents, the promise of Dharavi transformed into a glistening neighborhood of high-end towers, organized recreational areas, modern retail complexes and homes with multiple bathrooms is a hopeful vision achieved.

"We lack adequate medical facilities, proper streets or drainage and there's nowhere for children to play," states A Selvin Nadar, fifty-six, who migrated from Tamil Nadu in the early eighties. "The single option is to demolish everything and provide modern residences."

Local Protest

However, some, such as this protester, are fighting against the redevelopment.

Everyone acknowledges that Dharavi, long neglected as informal housing, is urgently needing financial support and improvement. Yet they fear that this project – without resident participation – could potentially transform valuable urban land into an elite enclave, displacing the disadvantaged, immigrant populations who have lived there since the late 1800s.

It was these shunned, displaced people who developed the uninhabited area into a frequently examined example of community resilience and business activity, whose output is estimated at between one million dollars and two million dollars annually, making it one of the world's largest informal economies.

Displacement Concerns

Of the roughly a million residents living in the dense 220-hectare zone, less than 50% will be able for new homes in the project, which is estimated to take an extended timeframe to complete. Additional residents will be moved to wastelands and saline fields on the remote edges of the city, threatening to divide a generations-old social network. A portion will not get homes at all.

Residents permitted to remain in Dharavi will be given units in tower blocks, a major break from the organic, collective approach of dwelling and laboring that has supported this area for generations.

Businesses from tailoring to ceramic crafts and waste processing are likely to decrease in quantity and be moved to an allocated "commercial zone" distant from homes.

Existential Threat

For residents like Shaikh, a leather artisan and long-time inhabitant to reside in this community, the plan presents an existential threat. His informal, three-storey facility produces apparel – tailored coats, luxury coats, fashionable garments – marketed in high-end shops in upscale neighborhoods and overseas.

Relatives resides in the spaces underneath and employees and tailors – laborers from other states – live there, allowing him to manage costs. Outside this community, housing costs are frequently significantly as high for minimal space.

Harassment and Intimidation

In the administrative buildings close by, a visual representation of the redevelopment plan depicts an alternative outlook. Well-groomed residents gather on cycles and e-vehicles, buying western-style bread and croissants and having coffee on a terrace near Dharavi Cafe and dessert parlor. It is a stark contrast from the affordable idli sambar morning meal and budget beverage that maintains local residents.

"This represents no improvement for our community," says Shaikh. "This constitutes a huge land development that will render it impossible for residents to remain."

There is also concern of the development company. Headed by an influential industrialist – among the country's wealthiest and a close ally of the Indian prime minister – the conglomerate has encountered allegations of preferential treatment and questionable practices, which it rejects.

Even as local authorities calls it a joint project, the corporation contributed nearly a billion dollars for its majority share. A lawsuit alleging that the initiative was questionably assigned to the corporation is under review in India's supreme court.

Ongoing Pressure

After they started to vocally oppose the project, Shaikh and other residents claim they have been subjected to an extended period of coercion and warning – comprising communications, clear intimidation and implications that speaking against the initiative was comparable with anti-national sentiment – by figures they allege work for the developer.

Among those accused of delivering warnings is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c