Dharavi dreams: The new redevelopment plan ignores the rights of the people who built it https://scroll.in/article/1039858/dharavi-dreams-the-new-redevelopment-plan-ignores-the-rights-of-the-people-who-built-it Hussain Indorewala
The area’s staggering land value has been collectively produced over the decades, much of it by the labour of residents themselves...In 2009, a committee of experts wrote to Ashok Chavan, who was chief minister at the time, that the Dharavi Redevelopment Project is a “sophisticated land grab...being driven by personal greed rather than the welfare of the residents of Dharavi”. This time round, it is a brazen handout of prime urban land – one that forebodes unimaginable hardship for millions of Dharavi’s residents.
Dharavi could develop more fruitfully through a self-organising process, provided it is allowed a lot of time, and a good deal of material support and planning aid. A rapid transformation of this spread of settlements is impossible without extreme coercion and violence. Is this what the new overlords of Dharavi have in mind?