BENGALURU – Dharavi is known as Asia’s biggest slum, its swathe of tightly packed hutments with blue tarpaulin roofs unmissable to anyone who flies over Mumbai. But to residents like Mrs Anita Subhash, a domestic worker, Dharavi is the core – “the beating heart” – of India’s financial capital.
The 50-year-old mother of five adults, three of whom live with her and work as teacher, salesman and computer coder in Dharavi, has been looking forward to a long-pending redevelopment project of the government-owned land that promises to decongest the slum of one million residents.
But of late, she is anxious about “being a pawn in a larger business plan”.
“Will the redevelopment be a bypass surgery or will they rip the heart out?” Mrs Subhash asked.
Around 240ha of Dharavi is set to be redeveloped into a modern township and rehabilitation project helmed by the Maharashtra state government and the Adani Group, a conglomerate owned by one of India’s richest men, Mr Gautam Adani.
The redevelopment project is Adani’s opportunity to expand its control of Mumbai, the country’s most expensive region, and catapult the group to becoming the biggest player in India’s booming real estate market.
But the project’s dual goal – to provide housing for existing poor residents and parcel out the land on which Dharavi now sits for the construction of malls and luxury housing – has raised strong objections from Dharavi residents and their advocates.
In the past year, the government has been unveiling resettlement sites for a majority of Dharavi residents at landfills and salt pans in Mumbai’s outskirts, shocking many and triggering concern that some of the city’s most vulnerable people will be relocated to unliveable sites to accommodate the rich in a prime, central location.
With the masterplan not yet in the public domain, and field surveys ongoing to determine which residents are eligible for rehousing, anxiety is growing.
The Dharavi redevelopment project gives Adani seven years to rehouse slum residents in high-rise flats spread across 120ha on the current site with running water, electricity connections and broader streets. Following this, it can build luxury housing and commercial buildings in the rest of Dharavi and sell them at the lucrative market rates of this prime location.
According to the project tender, some 60,000 families who moved to the area before the year 2000 and have residency documents will remain in Dharavi, with each entitled to a new 350 sq ft flat. The rest – more than 100,000 families – will be relocated elsewhere in Adani-built flats of 300 sq ft each that they will have to rent or buy in instalments spread over 12 years.
Critics say this differentiation is arbitrary and discriminatory.
Toxic relocation
Dharavi residents were further enraged in mid-April, when local media reported official pollution data pointing to alarming levels of toxic gases, including methane, at the Deonar landfill, a site the government approved in September 2024 to rehouse 50,000 to 100,000 people from Dharavi.
“Are the authorities sending Dharavi people to die in Deonar? The average life expectancy of people who live near Deonar is 39 years, while in the rest of urban Maharashtra it is 73 years,” said Mr Raju Korde, a social worker who is the president of Dharavi Bachao Andolan, representing slum residents.
He said Indian environmental laws don’t allow the construction of buildings in landfills for human habitation until 15 years after they have been closed and cleaned.
Mumbai housing rights group Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan says such resettlement disproportionately affects economically vulnerable families who have lived for decades in Dharavi.
Urban experts and housing activists are preparing legal petitions alleging that allotting these sites for resettlement without coordinating land clean-up, assessing risk and obtaining clearances amounts to gross negligence.
In Dharavi, which is Asia’s second-biggest slum, more than a million people are packed into around 240ha.PHOTO: ST FILE
Project chairman S.V.R. Srinivas said these sites were picked for resettlement because “land is hardly available in Mumbai”.
“I assure that no one will be sent to a garbage dump till it is cleaned fully and environmental clearances are in place,” he told The Straits Times.
“People will be rehabilitated first to the railway ministry-owned land abutting Dharavi, then other developed lands. By which time the dump sites will be closed and ready,” he added.
The “hazardous resettlement sites” – in Mr Korde’s words – have reinforced the Dharavi Bachao Andolan’s demand that all residents be accommodated in Dharavi and not moved anywhere else.
Bulldozing the poor
Slum residents have also turned their attention to Adani’s potential gains – possibly at their expense.
Redevelopment would unlock Dharavi’s value as prime real estate. Located beside the upscale Bandra Kurla Complex, seen as the central business district of India’s financial capital, Dharavi is near Mumbai’s main airport and sits between two key train lines.
If successfully executed, the Dharavi project will give Adani Realty, the group’s real estate wing established in 2013, access to prime land in the heart of Mumbai.
“If Adani is allotted a little less land to sell for profit, every single existing resident can be accommodated in Dharavi. No one will have to move out,” said Mr Korde, whose organisation has prepared an alternative rehabilitation plan they hope the government will consider.
Street art in in Dharavi in the city of Mumbai in India.PHOTO: ST FILE
But others worry that the site’s tremendous potential for profit will marginalise the working class that is Mumbai’s backbone.
“Many of the existing residents will be moved out of the prime location of Dharavi to subprime areas – or areas with low property values. It will threaten their livelihood and businesses that are rooted in the central location and networks,” said urban researcher Hussain Indorewala.
Mrs Subhash’s husband, who sells lemons on the street, for example, would have to travel twice or trice the distance to buy them wholesale if they are moved to the outskirts. Her sons will have to look for new jobs closer to home.
A melting pot of around one million working-class people from diverse communities who live cheek-by-jowl in one-room tenements amid open drains and criss-crossing electric wires, Dharavi epitomises both poverty and innovation. The Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire immortalised the reality of living in a slum where 150 people share a public toilet.
Its relatively low rents and host of informal jobs attract both penniless migrants and young people with big city dreams from across the country. Thriving micro and small garment, leather, pottery, recycling and food industries that employ tens of thousands of residents in Dharavi clock an annual turnover of around US$1 billion (S$1.32 billion).
With 40 per cent of India’s population – around 600 million – expected to live in cities by the year 2036, Dharavi could set a precedent for greater private developer involvement that could make urban housing “unaffordable and out of reach for the majority”, said Mr Indorewala.
Adani’s Mumbai
This was probably unimaginable in 2004, when the Maharashtra government approved the redevelopment of the Dharavi slum. It remained in limbo, plagued by a lack of interest, shady developers and protesting residents.
By 2022 though, the Adani Group had won the tender with a proposal to transform Dharavi into a modern, upscale neighbourhood with an initial investment of over 50.69 billion rupees (S$780 million) that will eventually hit 230 billion rupees. The state government has a minority 20 per cent share in the project.
By the end of 2024, the Dharavi Redevelopment Project was renamed Navbharat Mega Developers — meaning ‘New India’ – reflecting the project’s vision of exploiting the prime land’s commercial potential with malls, offices and residences for the affluent.
In a company statement, Mr Adani, who is known to be close to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, called it the first step towards making “Mumbai slum-free.”
“There are not too many developers like Adani who have the risk-taking appetite and ability to raise capital and offer higher bids for a complex, costly project like Dharavi,” said Mr Pankaj Kapoor, managing director of property consultant Laises Foras.
He added that it took a willing government working in sync with a risk-taking developer to take the project forward. “Each one alone couldn’t have done this,” Mr Kapoor said.
To make the Dharavi project viable as a profitable prospect for developers, though, the state government made never-before tweaks to regulations over slum rehabilitation, urban housing and development control.
For instance, it has mandated that going forward, all Mumbai builders constructing anywhere in the city must buy 40 per cent of transferable development rights (TDR) that Adani will acquire through the Dharavi project.
TDR (measured in sq ft) is offered as compensation to developers in exchange for a public purpose. This can in turn be redeployed in other projects or sold to other developers.
For Adani’s case, with an estimated 160,000 families in Dharavi, the project could generate around 23.9 million sq ft of free sale area within Dharavi and 39.9 million sq ft of TDR through construction of resettlement housing outside Dharavi.
Mr Srinivas said that the Dharavi redevelopment has to be “financially structured to ensure the developer’s interest in this risky and time-consuming project.”
But critics and supporters of the move told ST that this gives Adani a near-monopoly on Mumbai’s real estate market.
Adani already operates the Mumbai airport and the second Navi Mumbai international airport, which will open soon, apart from six others across India. It is also planning its biggest township project on 405ha in Navi Mumbai – almost twice as big as the Dharavi project.
It has other slum redevelopment projects in Mumbai too, including Bharat Nagar in the upmarket Bandra area. It will also redevelop a sea-facing plot in the real estate hot spot of Bandra Reclamation for a value of 300 billion rupees.
“With these projects in the pipeline, Adani can probably become India’s largest developer in three to five years. Dharavi, its most complicated project, will likely take more than seven years – 15 years, I would say,” said Mr Kapoor.
Meanwhile, Mrs Subhash waits patiently for the Dharavi rehabilitation masterplan.
“I don’t want my children to struggle the same way I did. This is why I want Dharavi to be redeveloped. But in the right way, to help us, not to chase us out,” she said.
- Rohini Mohan is The Straits Times’ India correspondent based in Bengaluru.
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