Intimidation, Anxiety and Hope as India's financial capital Inhabitants Confront the Bulldozers

Over an extended period, threatening communications persisted. Initially, reportedly from an ex-law enforcement official and a retired army general, later from the police themselves. Finally, one resident states he was ordered to law enforcement headquarters and instructed bluntly: keep quiet or face serious consequences.

Shaikh is one of many opposing a multimillion-dollar redevelopment plan where Dharavi – a massive informal community with rich history – faces razed and transformed by a large business group.

"The culture of the slum is like nowhere else in the planet," says the protester. "But the plan aims to dismantle our community and stop us speaking out."

Dual Worlds

The cramped lanes of Dharavi stand in sharp opposition to the soaring skyscrapers and luxury apartments that dominate the neighborhood. Residences are assembled randomly and frequently missing basic amenities, unregulated industries produce dangerous fumes and the air is saturated with the unpleasant stench of exposed drainage.

To some, the promise of a renewed Dharavi into a modern district of premium apartments, organized recreational areas, modern retail complexes and apartments with proper sanitation is an optimistic future come true.

"We lack sufficient health services, roads or water management and there's nowhere for children to play," says A Selvin Nadar, fifty-six, who migrated from southern India in 1982. "The only way is to tear it all down and build us new homes."

Community Resistance

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

Everyone acknowledges that this community, consistently overlooked as informal housing, is urgently needing investment and development. Yet they worry that this project – absent of resident participation – might transform a piece of prime Mumbai real estate into a luxury development, evicting the disadvantaged, immigrant populations who have been there since generations ago.

It was these marginalized, displaced people who established the vacant wetlands into an extensively researched phenomenon of local enterprise and commercial output, whose output is valued at between a significant amount and a substantial sum per year, making it a major unofficial markets.

Relocation Worries

Among approximately a million inhabitants living in the crowded 2.2 square kilometer area, fewer than half will be qualified for new homes in the project, which is projected to take seven years to accomplish. Others will be transferred to barren areas and saline fields on the distant periphery of the city, risking break up a long-established social network. Certain individuals will not get homes at all.

Those allowed to stay in Dharavi will be provided apartments in high-rise buildings, a substantial change from the evolved, shared lifestyle of living and working that has sustained the community for many years.

Commercial activities from garment work to clay work and recycling are expected to shrink in number and be relocated to a specific "business area" far from people's residences.

Survival Challenge

For those such as Shaikh, a leather artisan and multi-generational inhabitant to reside in Dharavi, the project presents a fundamental risk. His makeshift, three-storey workshop produces leather coats – formal jackets, luxury coats, studded bomber jackets – sold in high-end shops in the city's affluent areas and overseas.

Relatives lives in the accommodations underneath and employees and sewers – migrants from north India – also sleep on-site, permitting him to manage costs. Away from this community, accommodation prices are typically 10 times costlier for basic accommodation.

Harassment and Intimidation

In the official facilities in the vicinity, a conceptual model of the Dharavi project illustrates a very different outlook. Well-groomed residents mill about on cycles and electric vehicles, acquiring continental bread and croissants and enlisting beverages on a patio outside a coffee shop and Ice-Cream. It is a complete departure from the inexpensive idli sambar breakfast and low-cost tea that supports local residents.

"This is not development for our community," says Shaikh. "It's a huge land development that will make it unaffordable for residents to remain."

Additionally, there exists distrust of the business conglomerate. Run by a powerful tycoon – among the country's wealthiest and a supporter of the Indian prime minister – the conglomerate has been subject to claims of favoritism and financial impropriety, which it denies.

Even as the state government describes it as a joint project, the business group invested nearly a billion dollars for its controlling interest. Legal proceedings claiming that the initiative was improperly granted to the developer is pending in the top court.

Continued Intimidation

From when they initiated to actively protest the redevelopment, Shaikh and other residents assert they have been subjected to an extended period of harassment and intimidation – involving messages, direct threats and suggestions that opposing the project was equivalent to speaking against the country – by figures they claim represent the business conglomerate.

Included in these accused of making intimidations is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c