Across several weeks, intimidating messages continued. Initially, allegedly from a retired cop and a former defense officer, and then from law enforcement directly. Finally, a local artisan states he was ordered to law enforcement headquarters and instructed bluntly: stop speaking out or face serious consequences.
The leather artisan is one of many fighting a multimillion-dollar redevelopment plan where one of India's largest slums – a massive informal community with rich history – will be razed and transformed by a multinational conglomerate.
"The culture of the slum is like nowhere else in the world," explains the resident. "Yet the plan aims to dismantle our community and stop us speaking out."
Dual Worlds
The dank gullies of this community present a dramatic difference to the high-rise structures and luxury apartments that overshadow the area. Homes are built haphazardly and often missing basic amenities, small-scale operations release harmful emissions and the environment is saturated with the suffocating smell of open sewers.
To some, the prospect of the slum's redevelopment into a glistening neighborhood of premium apartments, neat parks, contemporary malls and residences with multiple bathrooms is an optimistic future come true.
"There's no adequate medical facilities, paved pathways or drainage and we have no places for youth to recreate," states a tea vendor, 56, who relocated from his home state in that period. "The only way is to clear the area and provide modern residences."
Local Protest
But others, including the leather artisan, are fighting against the project.
All recognize that Dharavi, long neglected as unauthorized settlement, is in stark need investment and development. But they worry that this initiative – lacking community input – might transform a piece of prime Mumbai real estate into a playground for the rich, displacing the disadvantaged, migrant communities who have lived there since the nineteenth century.
This involved these excluded, migrant workers who developed the empty marshland into an extensively researched phenomenon of community resilience and business activity, whose production is valued at between a significant amount and $2m a year, making it one of the world's largest informal economies.
Relocation Worries
Among approximately a million people living in the crowded 220-hectare neighborhood, a minority will be able for alternative accommodation in the redevelopment, which is estimated to take seven years to finish. Others will be relocated to undeveloped zones and coastal regions on the far outskirts of the metropolis, threatening to fragment a generations-old social network. Some will receive no residences at all.
Those allowed to remain in the neighborhood will be allocated apartments in high-rise buildings, a major break from the natural, shared lifestyle of living and working that has maintained the community for so long.
Commercial activities from tailoring to pottery and recycling are expected to reduce in scale and be transferred to a designated "industrial sector" separated from homes.
Survival Challenge
In the case of Shaikh, a leather artisan and third generation resident to reside in this community, the redevelopment presents a fundamental risk. His rickety, three-floor facility produces apparel – tailored coats, luxury coats, studded bomber jackets – marketed in high-end shops in the city's affluent areas and abroad.
Household members dwells in the spaces underneath and his workers and sewers – migrants from north India – live there, enabling him to sustain operations. Away from this community, accommodation prices are often tenfold more expensive for basic accommodation.
Harassment and Intimidation
At the government offices nearby, a conceptual model of the transformation initiative illustrates a very different outlook. Slickly dressed people move around on two-wheelers and electric vehicles, buying international baked goods and breakfast items and having coffee on a terrace adjacent to a coffee shop and dessert parlor. It is a world away from the inexpensive idli sambar breakfast and low-cost tea that sustains the neighborhood.
"This is not improvement for our community," says the artisan. "This constitutes a huge real estate deal that will make it unaffordable for residents to remain."
There is also skepticism of the development company. Headed by a powerful tycoon – one of India's most powerful and a supporter of the Indian prime minister – the business group has been subject to claims of crony capitalism and financial impropriety, which it disputes.
Even as administrative bodies describes it as a joint project, the developer contributed nearly a billion dollars for its majority share. Legal proceedings claiming that the project was improperly granted to the business group is being considered in the top court.
Sustained Harassment
After they started to publicly resist the development, local opponents state they have been experienced ongoing efforts of pressure and threats – including communications, clear intimidation and insinuations that speaking against the project was tantamount to opposing national interests – by figures they claim work for the developer.
Included in these alleged to have making intimidations is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c
