Anuradha Baraskale stands at the threshold of her house in Mumbai’s Dharavi, unsure of whether to retreat inside or step out and talk to this reporter. The redevelopment of the sprawling and famed slum, where she was born and spent her life in, will transform it like the gleaming city that has grown around her. It will be great she says shyly.
But she is nervous and has some doubts. She is a tenant not an owner. “Have you heard if there is any plan for tenants?” she asks. One of the customers at her diya stall had told her, as a tenant, she might be one of those sent to live atop Mumbai’s towering old garbage mountains at Deonar. But she doesn’t’t know officially. She hasn’t slept since then, she says softly, revealing the uncertainty about the future that consumes her.
Anuradha Baraskale. Photo: Saumya Roy
The development process of the sprawling 600 acre slum is set to begin. After several failed attempts, the Maharashtra government awarded the contract in November 2022, to the Adani group to ‘redevelop’ Dharavi. Redevelopment in the Mumbai context most implies a glittering multi-use complex, offices, malls and luxury homes. Dharavi is in a prime location, close to the Bandra Kurla Complex area where top corporates have their headquarters. The potential for profits is huge.
While those residents who have lived here since before 2000 are to be resettled in the area itself, there are tens of thousands of tenants such as Anuradha who may be sent to the Deonar dumping ground, which receives much of Mumbai’s waste since 1899.
In October 2024, the government allocated 124 acres of Mumbai’s sprawling, vertiginous garbage mountains at Deonar to resettle some of Dharavi’s residents. Some more land has been given in salt pans, where salt has been made for generations.
S.V.R. Srinivas, chief executive of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), the government body set up for the project, says that usually in such projects, “those who are ineligible just have to go to another slum, another slumlord. Here we are saying, housing for all.” Even residents such as Anuradha will get homes, except not in situ, where she was born and her family have always lived. The difference is that post her marriage, she took another residence and that makes her ineligible.
She most likely be shifted to Deonar which, the government announces regularly, will be fully shut but remains partly in use. Over the decades, food, clothes, shoes, glass, plastic and everything else Mumbai shed has become tightly layered with mud to form ‘fetid garbage mountains’ that now rise as high as 20 storey buildings at Deonar. Additionally, the city’s fitfully working medical waste incinerator later came at the edge of the dumping grounds, making the area even more toxic to live in.
There are people who live in and around the garbage mountain and many of them suffer from a range of respiratory diseases, including some of the world’s highest rates of multiple drug resistant tuberculosis, leading to a life expectancy of 39 years according to the state’s human development index in 2009.
Deonar dump. Photo: Saumya Roy.
In nearly a decade of working as a writer and social entrepreneur in the lanes around the garbage mountains, I had seen the spectre of the mountains haunt those who lived around it. I had seen grown men and glowing teenagers shrivel with tuberculosis, cling to the empty comfort of alcohol, drugs, ink whitener, or unending bottles of cough syrup they picked up from the waste.
What the Adani group has been handed by the state government are the garbage mountains to resettle Dharavi residents. Waste has not completely stopped coming to Deonar and waste pickers continue to work here. Srinivas, in an interview to The Wire at his office, said flattening these mountains and making them liveable “will cost more and take longer.”
Dharavi’s residents, who are likely to be moved, such as Anuradha, do not know that decomposing waste in Deonar lets off methane and hydrogen sulphide among other toxic gases, but fear, confusion and uncertainty hang heavily in Dharavi’s tightly packed lanes.
Maybe with this in mind, Srinivas says only about 23,000 households had been surveyed in the pre-election period. After the election results and the Mahayuti’s return, the pace for the survey and project has picked up, including by drone.
Anuradha’s fear is that she could be living in a new house either on some of the country’s most expensive real estate or atop a garbage dump. It is this uncertainty that keeps her up at night.
Her parents lived in Dharavi since before she was born, in 1992, she says. It would make her mother eligible for getting a home in the new Dharavi. Anuradha’s mother still lives in their childhood home but she has five sisters, muddying the prospects of her getting the house. Soon after the election, surveyors visited her mother’s house. Since then she has been hearing of surveys being done in other places.
Raju Korde, a lawyer and member of the Shetkari Kamgar Party, says there are about 100,000 structures in Dharavi, most of which are houses; others are businesses that make leather goods, clothes and recycle plastic among other things. “Adani group has been given 1,500 acres in different parts of the city for resettlement,” Korde says. “Why? What kind of land grab is this?” On his part, DRP’s Srinivas says that land will not be given to the Adani group but be held by the government.
The Dharavi project is to be implemented by a specially formed entity with government’s DRP and the Adani group, called Navbharat Mega Developers Private Limited (NMDPL). NMDPL was renamed from Dharavi Redevelopment Project Limited (DRPPL) late last month. While the Adani group owned 80% of DRPPL, the government’s Dharavi Redevelopment Project Slum Rehabilitation Authority (DRP/SRA) bought 20% stake in DRPPL in June 2024, according to company records reviewed by The Wire. The DRP/SRA invested Rs 100crore for this stake. The corporate documents of the new domain are not yet in public domain.
In the old DRPPL, The Adani group and DRP could nominate directors on the board in proportion to their stake holding and board resolutions could be passed through a simple majority, DRPPL documents said. This could leave the government with its 20% stake, potentially with little say in the running of the company that will redevelop Dharavi and be responsible for rehabilitation of residents.
“If I was a private equity minority shareholder or another joint venture partner, I would ask for some rights, such as having veto rights on certain issues before they are placed in board meetings,” says a former banker and founder of an institutional advisory service who did not want to be named. Such minority rights are written in for government entities in other public private infrastructure projects such as the Delhi and Bangalore airports.
However, Srinivas justifies giving the Adani group functional independence – he says it was the only way to ensure the long held up project would take off. “They require some freedom,” he says. “You spend money and I will be the boss, how can that be,” he says, referring to about the Adani investment into the project.
Also read: Maharashtra: Dharavi Redevelopment Becomes Key Poll Issue as Opp Questions Adani ‘Land Grab’
Besides, DRPPL (now NMDPL) will only be allowed to develop commercial property after it resettles Dharavi residents, which is a challenge given the lack of space in Mumbai. This is how the government came up with the Deonar land after much scouring around the city.
But garbage mountains emit harmful gases that take years to subside, I had found while studying similar landfills around the world. In 2017, I visited the closed Fresh Kills garbage landfill that had received most of New York City’s garbage. It had closed after the debris of the World Trade Center towers had been buried here after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The more than 2,000 acres garbage township on Staten Island had been out of bounds since then. The garbage mountains had been covered, then topped with mud. Grass and trees grew on it. Vents through the mountains let out gases spewing from the garbage. It took more than two decades for these harmful gases to subside and the landfill to reopen as one of New York City’s largest parks.
Dr A.D. Sawant, director of the Waste to Energy Research and Technology Council set up by Columbia University, in a phone interview to The Wire, said that the garbage mountains will have to be cut down and all the waste removed through bio-mining. After that methane emissions will have to subside before people can be sent to live there. “It will take several years even with the latest technology,” he says. The state government has asked the Adani group to complete the project, including rehabilitation in seven years, a seemingly insurmountable task if Dharavi residents are to be resettled on the Deonar’s garbage mountains. Srinivas says the project may not end up using Deonar given the cost and time involved.
Adani group officials did not respond to queries but a source closely involved in the project said in a written statement to The Wire that all residents “will enjoy modern amenities and infrastructure for an enhanced lifestyle. The vision is inclusive.” Whether settled in Dharavi, Deonar or elsewhere, residents “will be rehabilitated in modern townships featuring green and open spaces, wide roads, schools. healthcare facilities, community centres, public transport access and other social infrastructure.” He claimed that this project is “unique and unlike any tender conceived to redevelop Dharavi.”
Amina Khan and Shaikh Nanhi. Photo: Saumya Roy.
The uncertain future is bringing back memories of the hard scrabble life residents eked out hoping they would hand over better lives and houses to their children.
Amina Khan, 65, was born in Dharavi. She had grown up protesting for water, power and cooking oil. Later, the distant, open air theatre, where they watched movies with no sound from their rooftops, and the marshy expanse around it, became the Bandra Kurla Complex. Dharavi residents saw Mumbai’s shiny new financial and entertainment district, adjoining Dharavi. She had hoped then that her life and children’s’ lives would improve when Dharavi too would inevitably gentrify.
Aware that she will have to prove her credentials of having lived in Dharavi for a long time, Amina pulls out a range of various government IDs. She has heard of the tangle of rules she could get caught in and is unsure her cards and house survey papers would be enough. She has heard project staff are surveying the area to count homes, residents, those who are to stay here and those who are to move. She has heard that she could be moved to Deonar. “Isme Dharavi ki safai nahi, ham saaf ho jayenge.” (We will get cleaned out, not Dharavi), is her response.
‘It would be cruel to send people to live in Deonar’
Many who live in Deonar, came on their own, while some had been brought by the municipal authorities since the garbage first began being sent from the city by a special train line after a plague epidemic had wracked Mumbai in 1896. Colonial officials believed the rapidly growing city’s mounting trash and ensuing rats had caused the plague. They acquired a sprawling marsh at the edge of the city and decided to send Mumbai’s garbage there, according to the municipal commissioner’s report for 1897. Waste began coming to Deonar in June 1899 and waste pickers emptied trains to fill the watery marsh. Even then, carrying broken glass and old iron had given these workers cuts and bruises, the commissioners’ report said.
While there is no report of when people had first begun to live around the dump, tightly knit communities had come up at the filled up edges of the dumping grounds over the next few decades. Distanced from the city and its’ jobs, many came to pick and sell trash. Hera Shaikh, a 28-year-old who lives near the garbage mountains, says her father and brother had hoped to have jobs, clean houses and eventually to be given housing elsewhere.
While a waste-to-energy plant is being constructed in the area, Shaikh has stayed here and suffered from a range of illnesses including tuberculosis. Her 21-year-old younger brother Samir, who picked waste, died last November after an infection in his brain that led to pus pouring out of his ears. Hera believes waste picking led to his infection and death.
Her dream of moving out through government resettlement, finding work or marrying out of here have long been dashed, but the thought of people being moved here has angered Shaikh. “How will anyone live there, snakes and scorpions come out of those mountains,” she said. “It is already so hard for us to live on this side of the boundary.”
She talks of the desperation that still leads people to get through the boundary wall at night and pick the little waste that still comes. “It would be cruel to send people to live there.”
Much like Deonar, in Dharavi too, the land had been made liveable by its residents, said Aaysha Aslam Khan a local activist and Congress politician. Now that their land is worth a lot, they are being pushed out, she says.
When initial surveys had begun in the lanes behind Anuradha’s house in the pre-election period, she had heard that residents had pelted stones to push back surveyors near her house. But blocking surveyors would only ensure the residents would get nothing she had heard. Rumours swirl around among the residents.
Her five year-old-daughter, Rudrani, was recently admitted to a municipal school. Anuradha hopes her daughter can complete her education in the school but that looks like a dim prospect. To her, a shift to a location near the garbage mountain is closer than ever.
Saumya Roy is the author of Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings, a book about the Deonar dumping grounds and the waste pickers who live and work there.
