Pressure, Fear and Hope as India's financial capital Slum Dwellers Confront Redevelopment

Across several weeks, threatening messages continued. Initially, supposedly from a former police officer and a former defense officer, subsequently from the police themselves. Ultimately, a local artisan claims he was ordered to law enforcement headquarters and told clearly: keep quiet or face serious consequences.

This third-generation resident is one of many fighting a multimillion-dollar initiative where Dharavi – one of India’s largest and most storied slums – faces demolished and modernized by a corporate giant.

"The distinctive community of Dharavi is unparalleled in the world," explains the resident. "But they want to dismantle our community and prevent our protests."

Opposing Environments

The dank gullies of this community sit in stark contrast to the high-rise structures and luxury apartments that dominate the settlement. Homes are constructed informally and often lacking adequate facilities, small-scale operations produce dangerous fumes and the atmosphere is permeated by the unpleasant stench of exposed drainage.

For certain residents, the prospect of Dharavi transformed into a developed area of luxury high-rises, well-maintained green spaces, contemporary malls and apartments with proper sanitation is a hopeful vision achieved.

"There's no sufficient health services, roads or water management and there are no spaces for children to play," explains A Selvin Nadar, in his fifties, who relocated from Tamil Nadu in the early eighties. "The only way is to clear the area and provide modern residences."

Local Protest

Yet certain residents, such as the leather artisan, are opposing the project.

None deny that the slum, historically ignored as informal housing, is desperately requiring investment and development. But they are concerned that this plan – lacking public consultation – could potentially turn a piece of prime Mumbai real estate into a playground for the rich, forcing out the disadvantaged, immigrant populations who have been there since the nineteenth century.

It was these excluded, displaced people who built up the empty marshland into an extensively researched phenomenon of local enterprise and commercial output, whose output is worth between a significant amount and $2m per year, making it one of the world's largest informal economies.

Relocation Worries

Of the roughly a million inhabitants living in the packed 220-hectare area, less than 50% will be eligible for new homes in the redevelopment, which is projected to take a significant period to accomplish. Additional residents will be moved to undeveloped zones and saline fields on the remote edges of Mumbai, threatening to break up a generations-old social network. Some will receive no residences at all.

People eligible to continue living in the area will be allocated units in high-rise buildings, a significant rupture from the evolved, collective approach of living and working that has sustained this area for so long.

Industries from tailoring to pottery and material recovery are likely to reduce in scale and be transferred to a specific "commercial zone" distant from people's residences.

Survival Challenge

For residents like this protester, a craftsman and multi-generational inhabitant to call home the slum, the plan presents a survival challenge. His rickety, three-storey operation creates leather coats – tailored coats, luxury coats, fashionable garments – marketed in luxury boutiques in south Mumbai and abroad.

His family lives in the spaces below and employees and garment workers – laborers from other states – live on-site, allowing him to manage costs. Away from Dharavi's enclave, housing costs are typically 10 times more expensive for minimal space.

Harassment and Intimidation

Within the official facilities close by, an illustrated mock-up of the redevelopment plan illustrates a contrasting vision for the future. Slickly dressed residents mill about on bicycles and eco-friendly transport, purchasing international bread and pastries and socializing on a terrace near a coffee shop and treat station. This depicts a stark contrast from the 20-rupee idli sambar morning meal and low-cost tea that sustains the neighborhood.

"This is not progress for us," states the protester. "It represents a massive real estate deal that will make it unaffordable for us to survive."

Furthermore, there's distrust of the business conglomerate. Headed by an influential industrialist – among the country's wealthiest and a close ally of the Indian prime minister – the corporation has been subject to claims of crony capitalism and financial impropriety, which it disputes.

Although the state government calls it a collaborative effort, the business group invested $950m for its 80% stake. A lawsuit claiming that the initiative was improperly granted to the business group is pending in the nation's highest judicial body.

Sustained Harassment

Since they began to actively protest the project, protesters and community members assert they have been experienced an extended period of harassment and intimidation – comprising communications, explicit warnings and implications that speaking against the initiative was comparable with anti-national sentiment – by individuals they assert are associated with the business conglomerate.

Among those alleged to have making intimidations is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c