Dharavi's human factors

Redevelopment is fraught with problems

After a failed bid in 2019, the Adani group has managed to win the rights to redevelop Dharavi, Asia’s second-largest slum that sits uncomfortably between the city’s commercial hub and the main airport. With a quote of Rs 5,069 crore, the Ahmedabad-based group’s property subsidiary outbid realtor DLF, which bid Rs 2,025 crore. The bid covers a Rs 23,000-crore project in a dense conurbation of 2.8 square km. The project, covering 178 hectares, known as the Dharavi Notified Area, besides another 62 hectares, has two components: Rehabilitation and real estate; the latter is expected to cover the cost of the former. Given the grim aspect of Dharavi, the project appears attractive, offering the residents apartments of roughly 400 square feet in return for vacating space to be developed for high-end commercial and residential real estate. To be sure, this process has taken place in other parts of Mumbai, notably in the Parel area, but those exercises involved transactions between private realtors and local residents. The Dharavi project is, however, a government-sponsored enterprise that has been in the works for 18 years. The fact that tenders were floated and cancelled twice is an indication of the complex nature of the project.

Even with the sweetener of developing and selling thousands of square feet of high-end commercial and residential space, the project appears to be ambitious. The principal problem may be an underestimation of the human factor in the redevelopment project. Slum development has rarely been a success in India, and Mumbai’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority’s record has been less than stellar. With Dharavi, the issues grow exponentially. The place is not just a dense living space offering a useful proximity of labour for upscale neighbourhoods surrounding it — the way most slums in India do. It is also a source of livelihood to hundreds of tiny and small-scale industries that form a vibrant ecosystem of unorganised industry. Many homes here double up as commercial units often involving whole families and with some level of opacity in terms of space-sharing arrangements among inhabitants. These small entrepreneurs are unlikely to unquestioningly accept transfers to limited tenements without some assurance that their livelihoods would also be protected.

Added to this is the vexed question of eligibility. A survey conducted by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation showed that only about a third of the roughly one million residents in Dharavi were eligible for fresh housing in new tenements under the scheme. Other estimates put the number of eligible residents much lower at below 60,000. But as other projects elsewhere in India, notably South Korean steel maker Posco’s failed attempts to develop a manufacturing plant in Odisha have shown, squatters strictly follow the norm that possession is nine-tenths of the law. The requirement of formal “proof” of residence is likely to complicate matters in a conurbation that has existed almost entirely on informal lines, as does the diversity of castes, religions, and ethnicities occupying this space. Under the terms of the agreement, rehabilitation has to be completed in seven years and the project in 17 years. Dharavi’s location will ensure a market for real estate. But for both the Adani group and the Maharashtra government, the real challenge is to ensure that the project does not degenerate into a land grab that tramples over the welfare of Dharavi’s original inhabitants.