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For months, threatening messages recurred. At first, supposedly from a former police officer and an ex-military commander, subsequently from the authorities. Ultimately, a local artisan asserts he was ordered to law enforcement headquarters and told clearly: stop speaking out or experience severe repercussions.

This third-generation resident is one of many opposing a multimillion-dollar project where Dharavi – one of India’s largest and most storied slums – faces bulldozed and redeveloped by a multinational conglomerate.

"The culture of this area is unparalleled in the globe," explains the resident. "Yet the plan aims to eradicate our social fabric and prevent our protests."

Dual Worlds

The dank gullies of this community sit in stark contrast to the towering buildings and Bollywood penthouses that dominate the settlement. Dwellings are built haphazardly and often missing basic amenities, unregulated industries release harmful emissions and the environment is permeated by the suffocating smell of exposed drainage.

For certain residents, the vision of a renewed Dharavi into a glistening neighborhood of luxury high-rises, organized recreational areas, modern retail complexes and homes with two toilets is an aspirational dream come true.

"We lack sufficient health services, roads or drainage and we have no places for children to play," states a chai seller, in his fifties, who relocated from southern India in the early eighties. "The single option is to demolish everything and build us new homes."

Local Protest

However, some, such as the leather artisan, are resisting the redevelopment.

None deny that the slum, historically ignored as informal housing, is desperately requiring investment and development. However they fear that this project – lacking resident participation – might turn a piece of prime Mumbai real estate into a luxury development, displacing the disadvantaged, working-class residents who have been there since the nineteenth century.

It was these marginalized, relocated individuals who established the vacant wetlands into a frequently examined example of self-reliance and commercial output, whose production is valued at between one million dollars and two million dollars a year, making it among the globe's biggest informal economies.

Relocation Worries

Out of about a million residents living in the dense 220-hectare neighborhood, a minority will be qualified for alternative accommodation in the redevelopment, which is projected to take seven years to accomplish. Additional residents will be transferred to barren areas and salt plains on the distant periphery of the city, risking fragment a historic neighborhood. Certain individuals will receive no residences at all.

Residents permitted to stay in Dharavi will be allocated units in tower blocks, a major break from the evolved, shared lifestyle of residing and operating that has maintained this area for generations.

Industries from clothing production to clay work and material recovery are expected to decrease in quantity and be moved to a designated "commercial zone" far from people's residences.

Survival Challenge

For those such as the leather artisan, a workshop owner and long-time inhabitant to call home the slum, the project presents a survival challenge. His makeshift, three-floor workshop makes garments – formal jackets, suede trenches, decorated jackets – marketed in high-end shops in the city's affluent areas and overseas.

Household members lives in the accommodations underneath and his workers and garment workers – workers from different regions – live in the same building, allowing him to manage costs. Away from this community, accommodation prices are often tenfold costlier for basic accommodation.

Pressure and Coercion

Within the administrative buildings nearby, a conceptual model of the transformation initiative illustrates an alternative perspective. Fashionable inhabitants move around on two-wheelers and eco-friendly transport, buying western-style baguettes and croissants and socializing on an outdoor area adjacent to a coffee shop and treat station. This represents a complete departure from the inexpensive idli sambar morning meal and low-cost tea that sustains Dharavi's community.

"This represents no progress for us," says the artisan. "It's an enormous property transaction that will render it impossible for us to survive."

Furthermore, there's concern of the corporate group. Headed by a prominent businessman – among the country's wealthiest and a supporter of the Indian prime minister – the conglomerate has been subject to claims of crony capitalism and questionable practices, which it disputes.

While administrative bodies describes it as a joint project, the business group paid $950m for its 80% stake. A case stating that the project was questionably assigned to the developer is under review in the nation's highest judicial body.

Sustained Harassment

Since they began to publicly resist the development, Shaikh and other residents assert they have been faced ongoing efforts of pressure and threats – comprising messages, clear intimidation and insinuations that speaking against the initiative was comparable with anti-national sentiment – by people they allege are associated with the developer.

Part of the group alleged to have delivering warnings is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c