October 4, 2024

17 min read

Dharavi revamp: A way of life and work to change in Mumbai’s migrant hub

In the streets and warehouses of Asia’s largest slum, migrant workers who make up for a large part of the slum’s population, reflect on the ambitious rehabilitation plan and what it means to them even as officials say they want to “accommodate everybody”

Aarefa Johari

MUMBAI, Maharashtra: When Raeesa Shaikh first moved to Dharavi with her husband and three children, she thought she had landed in a kind of hell. The only world she had known before that was the village of Kodangal in Telangana’s Vikarabad district. It had fresh air, open fields and a leisurely pace to life, but no land to her family’s name and no employment for her husband.

In 2013, the family packed their scant belongings and boarded a train to Mumbai, where Shaikh’s sister had already settled. Right in the middle of the swarming metropolis, they began to rent a tiny room in Dharavi – Asia’s largest slum, and hub of small businesses and industries that have flourished against all odds.

Shaikh was barely 21 at the time, with children aged six, two and one, and she was not prepared for the culture shock.

“I hated Dharavi back then. The lanes were so crowded and narrow, and our room was barely big enough for three adults to sleep,” said Shaikh, a lean woman with a piercing gaze. She blamed the slum for the separation she suffered from her son when he was just a toddler. “He got lost in the streets one day, and we could not find him for hours. After that, my mother took him back to the village to make it easier for us, and I did not get to raise him. I used to cry every day, wondering where I had ended up.”

Eleven years later, Shaikh’s feelings towards Dharavi have completely transformed. Despite all its chaos, the slum gave her family the one thing they, like thousands of migrants who move to Mumbai, needed the most: the opportunity to earn a decent living and move up in life.

While her husband found work as a mason, Shaikh became a daily wage labourer in one of Dharavi’s key industries – scrap recycling. When The Migration Story met her, she was sitting at the base of a mountain of plastic trash, all pouring out of large gunny sacks piled high in a small, dimly-lit warehouse in the depths of the slum. Her fingers black with grime, she deftly sorted through broken toys, old bottles and boxes of every shape and size, tossing each piece into different crates based on their colour. In another corner of the warehouse, workers were feeding segregated plastic into a machine to be broken down for recycling.

“Ten years ago, I used to earn Rs 120 per day for this work. Now I make Rs 320 a day,” said Shaikh, beaming with pride. “Look at the tarakki [progress] I have made!”

Shaikh’s progress includes moving to a bigger rental room, having her younger son back with her and being able to send all her children to school. Most important to her is her tremendous inner progress. “I used to be so timid and scared when I first came, but now I have got himmat (courage),” Shaikh said. “All this is because of Dharavi. I cannot imagine living anywhere else.”

Imagining a life somewhere else, however, is exactly what Shaikh has been forced to do for the past two years, thanks to an ambitious slum rehabilitation plan that is likely to push her out of her beloved home.

THE GREAT DHARAVI REVAMP

In November 2022, Adani Properties Private Limited was awarded a Maharashtra government tender to redevelop Dharavi in partnership with the state, with a bid of Rs 5,069 crore. It is slated to be the biggest slum rehabilitation project in the country, because of its sheer scale: Dharavi is sprawled across 641 acres in central Mumbai, with a population of nearly a million people.

The project area under the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP) is 429 acres, and the plan proposes to replace the informal tenements of the slum with formal housing in multi-storey apartment blocks. In addition to rehousing Dharavi’s inhabitants in new buildings, the DRP also promises to transform Dharavi into a “state-of-the-art world-class city”, with revamped commercial spaces, a school, hospital, open spaces and proper sanitation.

According to SVR Srinivas, the chief executive officer of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project Private Limited (DRPPL – the official name of the joint venture between the Adani Group and the state), a blueprint or “masterplan” of the project is likely to be ready in “a couple of months”.

As an incentive to carry out such redevelopment work, Mumbai’s slum rehabilitation scheme offers private builders the right to construct a portion of structures for sale at commercial market rates. In Dharavi, this could mean a revenue potential of Rs 20,000 crore for Adani Properties.

But Dharavi’s redevelopment is mired in a number of controversies.

For one, there are allegations from a rival bidder that the state government’s tender process unfairly favoured Adani Group. And then, Maharashtra’s opposition parties have accused the state government of allowing the conglomerate to grab land across Mumbai in the name of Dharavi’s redevelopment. This is because the DRP is the first slum rehabilitation project in the city to promise housing for both “eligible” and “ineligible” residents. Those who can prove they have been living in the slum before the year 2000 are to get free housing within Dharavi; the rest are to be provided with subsidised rental housing on land being acquired in other parts of Mumbai.

Already, the Indian Railways has sold 27.6 acres of railway land adjacent to Dharavi to the DRP for Rs 1,000 crore. The central government has also approved the transfer of 256 acres of eastern Mumbai’s salt pan land, for a lease of 99 years, to the project. This has triggered opposition from environmentalists, who warn that construction of housing on low-lying salt pans is likely to aggravate monsoon flooding in the city.

While these controversies simmer, the DRPPL has been busy conducting an eligibility survey in the slum, painting red stamps – red stencilled numbers – outside the tenements and shops that have been counted.

In early September, DRP authorities claimed that they had the full cooperation of Dharavi’s local residents, who are in support of the survey and the redevelopment plan. All opposition, they claim, has come from people living outside the slum.

Could such a claim be true for all the lakhs of people living and working in Dharavi? In a slum populated by waves of migrants, many surviving on livelihoods endemic to this unique settlement, what does the Adani vision of redevelopment really mean?

In the streets, shops and warehouses of Dharavi, The Migration Story found that the answers to this question were as diverse as they were nuanced. Any mention of the redevelopment project was met with scepticism and worry, even though a few hoped Dharavi’s redevelopment would bring with it new opportunities.

TWO SIDES OF SCRAP

Sagar Gupta believes he is among the most vulnerable of the slum’s residents, because the industry he works in “will definitely not get a place” in a new, redeveloped Dharavi.

Gupta is a plastic scrap dealer, and runs a small, solo business from a decrepit 200-sq-ft warehouse. He buys scrap from rag-pickers across the city and segregates it before it can be sold to recyclers. Dust, grime and filth are an inescapable part of his job, but he sees no shame in it.

“I was 16 or 17 when I left Gorakhpur and came here to Dharavi, and I was very poor,” said Gupta, now aged 49. He first found work as a labourer for another scrap dealer in the slum, but established his own business in a few years. “My aim was to make money, and I learnt how to do it in this industry.”

With Gautam Adani’s reputation as one of India’s most elite businessmen – the founder and chairman of the Adani Group is counted amongst the world’s richest people – Gupta fears that any Adani-led redevelopment will necessarily involve the gentrification of Dharavi. “They will build nice, big buildings and pay watchmen and sweepers to keep everything clean,” said Gupta. “Do you really think they will allow a kacharpatti ka dhandha (garbage business) like mine in such a fancy place? People like me will be forced to leave.”

To make matters worse, Gupta is also a floating migrant within Dharavi – he has no tenement to his name, and his family has to move from one rented room to another every few years. He may have been living in the slum for 33 years, but under the DRP, only residents who have their own ground floor tenements since before the year 2000 are eligible for free, 350-sq-ft apartments within Dharavi. As an “ineligible” resident, the DRP would likely offer Gupta’s family a subsidised rental flat elsewhere, possibly in the redeveloped salt pan land in the more distant suburbs of Bhandup and Kanjurmarg.

“Dharavi is good for the scrap business because it is very central. If I have to set up my shop all over again so far away from the main city, I don’t know if I will be able to do it,” Gupta said.

In a phone conversation with The Migration Story, DRPPL chief SVR Srinivas said that business owners from the scrap industry or any other sector have no reason to fear. “No industry is going to get pushed out. Why would we do that?” said Srinivas. “We want to accommodate everybody.”

However, since no such assurance has been officially conveyed to the people of Dharavi so far, many residents and business owners have been fearing the worst for nearly two years. Some, like 53-year-old Mehboob Qureshi, already have a backup plan.

Like Gupta, Qureshi also believes that redevelopment will drive the scrap industry out of Dharavi. But Qureshi’s plastic scrap business is much bigger, and he is more confident about being able to re-establish his enterprise in a different suburb.

Qureshi moved to Mumbai in 1989, leaving his tailoring job in a Delhi slum to learn the more lucrative trade of scrap recycling from his uncle. By the time he moved from south Mumbai to Dharavi in 2008, he had earned enough to rent a one-bedroom flat in a building within the slum.

“Dharavi has given me my rozi-roti [livelihood], but its commercial rents have been increasing every year,” said Qureshi, who did not want to reveal what he pays to rent his 900-sq-ft warehouse full of his daily-wage employees. “So in my industry, a lot of people are now moving their business to suburbs like Nallasopara, where rents are cheaper.”

Located in the satellite city of Vasai-Virar, Nallasopara is 57 km north of Dharavi. Hesitant to move that far, Qureshi began renting a small scrap warehouse in the suburb of Sakinaka, just 10 km away, five years ago. “I don’t know if this redevelopment will actually happen anytime soon, but if it does, I have a backup business,” said Qureshi. “I will have to spend more on the transport of my goods, but I am not too worried.”

THE FATE OF BUSINESSES

Apart from scrap recycling, Dharavi is known for a myriad other small-scale industries, including garment factories scattered throughout the slum, the kumbharwada enclave for pottery makers and the famous leather goods industry that draws tourists and shoppers from across the city.

“In Dharavi, half the residential spaces are also commercial,” said Imran Khan, whose family has been manufacturing leather goods in the heart of the slum for nearly 50 years. “In some places, almost every room owner has built one or two floors on top of their ground floor homes, which they use for setting up a small business or for renting to others.”

Babu Khan, the president of the Dharavi Garment Association, says his organisation has been lobbying the DRP authorities to ensure that the slum’s existing industries remain within Dharavi even after redevelopment. “We have submitted a proposal to them suggesting multi-storey commercial buildings, with manufacturing on the upper floors and sales on the lower ones,” he said.

Babu Khan believes a revamped, good-looking Dharavi would attract bigger businesses from across the city, but admitted he “could not say” what would then happen to smaller businesses that currently operate in Dharavi.

According to DRP chief Srinivas, Dharavi has over 15,000 commercial industrial estates, and the intricate ways in which business and residential spaces are intertwined does make redevelopment more challenging. As per the state government’s slum rehabilitation rules, Srinivas said that all eligible business owners will receive around 300 to 350 sq ft free business premises under the DRP, either in separate commercial blocks or mixed-use buildings.

In this context, “eligible” refers to those who have owned ground floor level commercial spaces since before the year 2000. “Typically, under slum rehabilitation schemes, businesses on higher floors are not given anything. They are just thrown on the streets,” said Srinivas. “But this leads to tremendous dislocation of a large number of people.”

To avoid this, Srinivas said that an exception has been made for Dharavi: “ineligible” businesses – those located on higher floors and those established after the year 2000 – will have the option of being accommodated within redeveloped residential buildings.

“In every residential building, 10% of the built-up area will be reserved as commercial spaces for the housing society to rent out to businesses,” said Srinivas. These rents, he added, would help housing societies pay for building maintenance, in addition to the Rs 40,000 corpus fund that the DRP intends to provide each building’s housing society for maintenance expenses.

Srinivas believes that most of these commercial spaces will be rented out to local, existing businesses within Dharavi that are ineligible for free commercial space. “The government cannot mandate this, because sometimes you have to let the local community decide,” he said. “But it will happen, because housing societies will have locals in it, and they will choose to support their own local businesses. And no outsiders will want to set up their business in Dharavi.”

When asked how the DRP would ensure that rents in the commercial spaces in residential buildings remain affordable for local businesses, Srinivas admitted that for now, there is no plan to cap the rent that housing societies can charge. “There is always an element of demand and supply, but 95% (of the commercial premises) will go to local businesses only,” said Srinivas.

On the ground in Dharavi, business owners are unaware of any of these proposals, with many convinced they will not be able to afford commercial rents after redevelopment. The resultant uncertainty about their future has left them feeling anxious.

Sayed Gufran, for instance, is steadfast about never wanting to work outside Dharavi. A wholesale jeans manufacturer, Gufran’s business took a major beating since the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. He had to shut down three of his six factories and fire dozens of tailors, and still struggles to draw profits from his sales. He now plans to shut down two more factories in order to stay afloat.

“We don’t know what kind of commercial spaces have been planned in the redevelopment project, but the rents will definitely become unaffordable,” said 36-year-old Gufran, who has been living in Dharavi since he was 11. “I would rather go back to my village in UP than set up a new business in a different part of Mumbai.”

Running a business, Gufran explained, is about building a network of contacts, which takes years to establish. “And there is also the problem of bhaigiri,” he added, referring to the informal – and illegal – culture of “local goons” extracting haftas or bribes from new business owners. “Here in Dharavi, I have built a name after all these years. The local police and the people who do bhaigiri know me, and they don’t bother me. But in a new area, I will have to face it.”

ANCHORLESS LABOURERS

While manufacturers in Dharavi have their own preoccupations, many daily-wage workers in their factories are aware that they fall under a very different demographic category.

One such worker is 52-year-old Mohammed Rais, who spends nine hours a day in a leather factory sorting leather skins based on their quality. Rais spent his youth doing the same work at a leather company in Agra, and moved to Dharavi 25 years ago when the company shut down. He now makes Rs 20,000 a month, most of which he sends to his wife and children back in Agra.

“I don’t earn enough to rent a room anywhere. I just sleep in the factory with other workers,” said Rais. Dharavi has thousands of labourers like him – migrants living in the corners of garment, leather or scrap factories, dependent entirely on public toilets and local restaurants for their basic needs.

“If the factory moves out of Dharavi because of redevelopment, I will move with it. And if it shuts down, I will just have to find work in a new place,” Rais said dismissively. “For people like us, what else is there to do? This is life.”

Babu Khan, however, is clear that daily-wage workers must be retained in Dharavi and provided with better facilities under the DRP. “In our proposal, we have asked for proper rental housing to be provided to them,” he said. “A servants’ colony is very important.”

While businesses, workers and residents of Dharavi wait anxiously for more details about the redevelopment plan, the slum’s floating migrants, who know they will be ineligible for housing within Dharavi, are coming to terms with the possibility of leaving.

In her plastic recycling warehouse, Raeesa Shaikh and her colleagues often discuss what their future would be if the slum was “broken down”.

“I will be very sad to leave Dharavi, but if I am forced to, I have decided I will set up a clothes stall somewhere in the city,” said Shaikh, flashing a determined smile. “Dharavi has made me a confident person, so now I know I can actually do something like that.”

A few others, like Alkama Ansari, have already moved out of Dharavi as a pre-emptive measure.

The son of a migrant tailor from Bihar, 21-year-old Ansari was born and raised in Dharavi’s rental rooms. All through his childhood, he had heard of different Dharavi redevelopment plans, none of which ever materialised. “But when Adani was brought on board two years ago, we felt that this project would definitely happen,” said Ansari. “We decided it was time to move out.”

His family now lives in a rented flat in the suburb of Chembur, a move made possible by Ansari’s own income as a part-time Dharavi tourist guide. At least twice a week, he takes groups of foreign and Indian tourists for a guided walk around the slum, showing them the “real lives of people” and taking them to local leather stores for shopping.

“Outsiders have an image of Dharavi being dangerous and full of crime, but it is important for me that they should see our reality,” said Ansari, who speaks confidently in English. “I have moved out now, but for me, Dharavi will always be home.”

Aarefa Johari is an award-winning independent journalist writing on gender, labour, human rights, culture and more.