Threats, Anxiety and Aspiration as India's financial capital Slum Dwellers Confront Redevelopment

Across several weeks, threatening messages continued. Initially, allegedly from a retired cop and a retired army general, and then from the authorities. In the end, a local artisan claims he was summoned to law enforcement headquarters and instructed bluntly: keep quiet or experience severe repercussions.

This third-generation resident is part of a group opposing a multimillion-dollar project where this historic settlement – a massive informal community with rich history – is scheduled to be demolished and modernized by a corporate giant.

"The unique ecosystem of the slum is like nowhere else in the planet," says Shaikh. "But the plan aims to dismantle our community and prevent our protests."

Opposing Environments

The narrow alleys of this community stand in sharp opposition to the high-rise structures and elite residences that dominate the area. Homes are constructed informally and frequently without proper sanitation, unregulated industries emit toxic smoke and the environment is permeated by the overpowering odor of exposed drainage.

For certain residents, the prospect of a renewed Dharavi into a modern district of high-end towers, well-maintained green spaces, modern retail complexes and homes with multiple bathrooms is a hopeful vision come true.

"We don't have sufficient health services, proper streets or sewage systems and we have no places for kids to enjoy," says a chai seller, in his fifties, who migrated from southern India in that period. "The single option is to clear the area and build us new homes."

Local Protest

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

None deny that this community, historically ignored as unauthorized settlement, is in stark need financial support and improvement. But they fear that this plan – absent of resident participation – is one that will turn a piece of prime Mumbai real estate into a luxury development, forcing out the lower-caste, working-class residents who have lived there since the nineteenth century.

This involved these excluded, displaced people who developed the uninhabited area into an extensively researched phenomenon of local enterprise and commercial output, whose production is valued at between one million dollars and two million dollars annually, making it one of the world's largest unregulated sectors.

Displacement Concerns

Among approximately one million inhabitants living in the crowded 220-hectare zone, a minority will be eligible for new homes in the redevelopment, which is expected to take seven years to finish. Additional residents will be moved to undeveloped zones and coastal regions on the remote edges of the city, threatening to divide a generations-old neighborhood. Some will be denied residences at all.

People eligible to stay in Dharavi will be provided units in high-rise buildings, a major break from the natural, shared lifestyle of living and working that has sustained Dharavi for so long.

Industries from garment work to ceramic crafts and material recovery are expected to shrink in number and be transferred to a designated "industrial sector" separated from homes.

Existential Threat

For residents like the leather artisan, a craftsman and third generation of his family to reside in the slum, the project presents an existential threat. His makeshift, three-storey workshop makes garments – formal jackets, luxury coats, decorated jackets – sold in premium stores in upscale neighborhoods and abroad.

Household members lives in the accommodations underneath and laborers and sewers – workers from north India – live there, allowing him to afford their labour. Away from the slum, Mumbai rents are often significantly costlier for minimal space.

Pressure and Coercion

In the government offices in the vicinity, a visual representation of the transformation initiative illustrates a contrasting vision for the future. Fashionable inhabitants mill about on cycles and e-vehicles, acquiring western-style baked goods and pastries and socializing on a patio adjacent to a restaurant and dessert parlor. It is a world away from the 20-rupee idli sambar breakfast and low-cost tea that sustains the neighborhood.

"This isn't improvement for our community," explains the protester. "This constitutes an enormous real estate deal that will price people out for our community to continue."

There is also concern of the corporate group. Run by an influential industrialist – among the country's wealthiest and a close ally of the national leader – the business group has been subject to claims of preferential treatment and ethical concerns, which it denies.

Even as administrative bodies labels it a partnership, the business group paid nearly a billion dollars for its controlling interest. A lawsuit claiming that the project was questionably assigned to the business group is being considered in India's supreme court.

Ongoing Pressure

From when they initiated to actively protest the development, local opponents state they have been faced ongoing efforts of pressure and threats – including communications, direct threats and implications that speaking against the project was comparable with anti-national sentiment – by figures they assert work for the corporate group.

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