Maharashtra: Dharavi Redevelopment Becomes Key Poll Issue as Opp Questions Adani ‘Land Grab’

Mumbai: Last week, a team of five men visited Sundar’s three-generation-old business unit on the 90-feet road in Dharavi. The men, identifying themselves as ‘executives’ from Adani Realty, were there to measure Sundar’s 340-square-foot garment shop. Equipped with cameras, measuring tapes and small diaries, the men went around the shop and recorded every corner. On camera, Sundar was asked to confirm the exact measurements of the space.

Stricken with anxiety, Sundar kept repeating that he had additional space just above the ground-floor structure and requested the men to take a look at that too. They plainly refused. “We have no instructions to measure extended and elevated spaces,” they told Sundar. These ‘extensions,’ as old as the shops and houses in the region, are an integral part of Dharavi and the lives here.

As the migration to Mumbai’s South-Central region continued in the 1940s, shanties were built dangerously close to each other, leaving no room to manoeuver. With a paucity of space, people expanded their houses vertically, giving way to multi-storey shanties. The multi-storey structures are today a contentious part of the new redevelopment project underway in Dharavi, where most are living under the constant threat of losing a significant portion of their house space. Under the new plan, those considered eligible for redevelopment are entitled to a 350-square-foot space. The locals feel they stand to lose more than half of their existing structures.

The plan, they claim, has not been communicated to them, and this lack of transparency has made way for rumours and exploitation at the hands of both the ruling and opposition political parties.

In 2022, Gautam Adani-led Adani Realty won the tender for the 259-hectare Dharavi cluster redevelopment project worth Rs 20,000 crore. The new plan claims to transform Asia’s largest slum into a “modern urban enclave”. The region is centrally located and connects both the up-market central and western suburbs of the city.

In the same year, in September, Adani Realty established a special purpose vehicle (SPV), called the Dharavi Redevelopment Project Pvt Ltd (DRPPL), in agreement with the state government’s Dharavi Redevelopment Project Authority – a unit that had existed for over two decades under the state’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) specifically for the Dharavi project. Of the total DRPPL, Adani Realty owns 80% , making it almost a sole entity to carry out the redevelopment of the area with very little interference from the state.

With this decision, the two-decade-old plan to redevelop the largest slum in Asia, which had failed on several occasions, was revived once again. Adani’s entry into the fray soon assumed larger political significance and has now become one of the primary election issues in the upcoming assembly elections, not just in Dharavi but across the state. The opposition leaders have been invoking Dharavi and Adani in their election campaigns across Maharashtra.

Sundar’s grandfather, like thousands of others from Tirunelveli district in South Tamil Nadu, moved to Dharavi in the late 60s. “This place was still a marsh swamp. My grandparents and my father would carry bags of mud and level this space. What you see today is the decades of work that has gone into making this unlivable place our home,” says Sundar. But today, Sundar says, the people who built a community in Dharavi are divided into “legal or illegal” and “eligible or ineligible”.

Under the new plan, structures that existed before the year 2000 are eligible for redevelopment, and the rest are declared ineligible. According to the 2011 census, over 6.5 lakh people reside in the complex neighbourhood of Dharavi. Officials and local residents say this number has at least doubled, if not more, in the past decade and a half, making the redevelopment work that much more challenging. For those who moved here after the cut-off period, DRPPL has rental plans. 

Dharavi largely houses inter- and intra-state migrants, mostly belonging to Dalit and OBC communities from across different states. The region also has a sizeable Muslim population. While the professions here are still loosely divided along caste lines, the communities have largely lived amicably in the region. Leather tanneries, potters, catering businesses, embroidery units and recycling businesses are spread across different lanes of Dharavi, and people run their businesses from tiny under-200-sq-ft rooms that often double up as their places of residence too.

Not all businesses here fall under the legal ambit, like Sundaran’s lottery business and the gambling slot machines hidden in one of the alleys on the 90-feet road. The vibrant business, run from a dingy, nondescript room, has secured livelihood for several families in the locality. The redevelopment plan will not only shut down Sundaran’s business but also render several dependents jobless.

Not everyone is against the takeover by Adani; their concerns, however, are largely the same. The case in point is the residents of Kumbharwada, or the potter’s colony, on the 90-feet road that mainly houses the traditional potter community from the Kathiawar peninsula in Gujarat. The Kumbharwada houses stand out for the way they are built: a long matchbox-like structure, with the pottery shop facing the road and their place of residence at the tail end. In the backyard of each house are makeshift brick kilns used to fire their ceramic pieces.

The residents in this pocket of Dharavi, mostly belonging to Dalit or OBC castes, although traditional voters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), express palpable fear of getting displaced and losing their livelihood. 

Janu Bai Parmar, a 90-year-old woman, migrated from Una in Gujarat when she was still a toddler. “I was married here, had four sons, and each of those sons has grandchildren today,” she shares. Parmar’s is one among the many joint families in the area. “The sons and their families live on the first floor. My husband and I live on the ground floor, with the shop attached,” she explains. But with the new redevelopment plan, most family members will be forced to look for alternative accommodation outside Dharavi.

Parmar’s family are unsure if they will be able to avail themselves of the new rental option worked out under the redevelopment plan. In addition to the large land parcel in Dharavi, a few days before the announcement of the polls, the state government allotted an additional 1,080 acres of land across Mumbai in adjoining areas of Mulund, Kurla Dairy, the salt pan lands, the Deonar dumping ground and Madh Island. This space, according to the government, will be utilised to create housing for those deemed ineligible under the Dharavi redevelopment project.

The state government’s decision to indiscriminately pass over land to Adani is dubbed as a land grab by the opposition. Jyoti Gaikwad, a Congress candidate from the region, has been doing a door-to-door campaign speaking about the issue with the locals. In an interview with The Wire last week, Gaikwad said that while her party and the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), an alliance of Congress, NCP (Sharad Pawar), and Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray), are not against developing the region, what they oppose is the state’s decision to let Adani take over almost every patch of available land in the city. “And there is absolutely no transparency. How the residents here will be rehabilitated, where they will be relocated, and whether their houses and workshops will be located together or in different areas — nothing is known,” she says.

Congress has been dissuading the locals from allowing surveys of their houses and commercial establishments. Many locals who have been desperately awaiting better living conditions disagree with Congress’s stand. “If Congress has an alternative and better plan, they should first make that public,” says Suraj, a resident of Dharavi.

Dharavi has traditionally been a Congress seat, with veteran Congress leader Eknath Gaikwad, and his father before him, winning from the constituency on multiple terms. Later, when Eknath went on to become a Member of Parliament from the region, his elder daughter Varsha Gaikwad won the MLA seat for four consecutive terms. Now she is the president of the Mumbai Regional Congress Committee and an elected MP from the neighbouring Mumbai North Central constituency.

Contesting against Gaikwad is Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde faction) candidate Rajesh Khandare. To ensure that Khandare, a local realtor and ardent supporter of the Adani-led redevelopment plan, has an edge in the election, Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena decided not to field a candidate here.

Redevelopment of the region is not a new political issue. Residents here say that since the early 90s, these conversations take place every few years, only to fizzle out eventually. But in the process, the everyday struggle of the communities gets overlooked, shares Satish, a Buddhist Ambedkarite. 

Satish, originally from Tamil Nadu, belongs to the Parayar community, categorised as Scheduled Caste. But most migrant Dalits here don’t possess a caste certificate. “And to think of it, this is a reserved constituency and all our elected members are Dalits. But they have never worked on something so crucial to the existence of the Dalits here,” Satish adds.