Threats, Anxiety and Hope as India's financial capital Slum Dwellers Face the Bulldozers

For months, threatening messages persisted. At first, supposedly from an ex-law enforcement official and a retired army general, later from law enforcement directly. In the end, one resident claims he was summoned to the police station and told clearly: stop speaking out or encounter real trouble.

Shaikh is one of many opposing a high-value redevelopment plan where this historic settlement – an iconic Mumbai neighborhood – faces bulldozed and redeveloped by a large business group.

"The distinctive community of the slum is like nowhere else in the globe," explains the resident. "However they want to destroy our way of life and silence our voices."

Dual Worlds

The dank gullies of this community sit in stark contrast to the soaring skyscrapers and elite residences that loom over the area. Homes are built haphazardly and frequently missing basic amenities, small-scale operations produce dangerous fumes and the air is filled with the suffocating smell of exposed drainage.

For certain residents, the prospect of the slum's redevelopment into a glistening neighborhood of premium apartments, neat parks, shiny shopping centers and homes with two toilets is a hopeful vision achieved.

"There's no adequate medical facilities, paved pathways or drainage and we have no places for children to play," says a tea vendor, fifty-six, who relocated from southern India in the early eighties. "The only way is to tear it all down and build us new homes."

Resident Opposition

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

None deny that this community, historically ignored as informal housing, is urgently needing economic input and modernization. However they are concerned that this project – absent of community input – might transform a piece of prime Mumbai real estate into an elite enclave, evicting the lower-caste, immigrant populations who have lived there since the nineteenth century.

These were these excluded, displaced people who developed the uninhabited area into a widely studied marvel of self-reliance and economic productivity, whose economic value is valued at between $1m and two million dollars annually, making it a major unofficial markets.

Relocation Worries

Of the roughly one million residents living in the dense sprawling area, a minority will be qualified for new homes in the development, which is estimated to take seven years to finish. Additional residents will be relocated to undeveloped zones and salt plains on the far outskirts of the metropolis, threatening to break up a long-established social network. Some will not get residences at all.

Those allowed to remain in Dharavi will be given apartments in high-rise buildings, a significant rupture from the organic, communal way of living and working that has maintained Dharavi for many years.

Businesses from tailoring to ceramic crafts and material recovery are expected to reduce in scale and be moved to a designated "industrial sector" distant from residential areas.

Survival Challenge

For those such as this protester, a workshop owner and multi-generational of his family to reside in this community, the plan presents a fundamental risk. His makeshift, three-storey operation produces leather coats – sharp blazers, premium outerwear, fashionable garments – distributed in luxury boutiques in upscale neighborhoods and abroad.

Relatives resides in the accommodations below and his workers and sewers – workers from different regions – live in the same building, allowing him to afford their labour. Away from this community, housing costs are frequently tenfold costlier for minimal space.

Threats and Warning

At the official facilities close by, a conceptual model of the Dharavi project illustrates a very different outlook. Well-groomed people move around on bicycles and electric vehicles, acquiring international baked goods and breakfast items and enlisting beverages on an outdoor area adjacent to Dharavi Cafe and treat station. This represents a complete departure from the inexpensive idli sambar first meal and 5-rupee chai that supports Dharavi's community.

"This isn't improvement for residents," says Shaikh. "It's a huge land development that will render it impossible for residents to remain."

Furthermore, there's skepticism of the development company. Headed by a powerful tycoon – among the country's wealthiest and a close ally of the Indian prime minister – the business group has been subject to claims of preferential treatment and financial impropriety, which it rejects.

Even as administrative bodies describes it as a partnership, the business group invested a significant amount for its 80% stake. Legal proceedings stating that the initiative was unfairly awarded to the business group is under review in the nation's highest judicial body.

Continued Intimidation

Since they began to publicly resist the development, local opponents state they have been experienced a long-running campaign of pressure and threats – comprising communications, explicit warnings and implications that criticizing the initiative was comparable with opposing national interests – by figures they claim are associated with the developer.

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