Dharavi

BMC has proposed land allocation for Dharavi Redevelopment Project, reveals RTI https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/bmc-has-proposed-land-allocation-for-dharavi-redevelopment-project-reveals-rti/article68367468.ece July 05, 2024 BMC has submitted the proposal to the Urban Development Department, Maharashtra State Government for the allocation of five acres of land in Mulund out of the 18 acres for the Dharavi Redevelopment Project on an immediate basis as it’s readily available, and the remaining 10 acres will be handed over after the completion of the ongoing project work.
It is alleged that 41.6 acres of land is now given for dumping ground reclamation and will be given over for Dharavi Rehabilitation Project after June 2025

“Earlier, it was claimed that no land had been allocated for the Dharavi Rehabilitation Project in Mulund. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders Kirit Somaiya and Mihir Kotecha had spread misinformation during the election campaign. It is important to note that the master plan for the Dharavi Redevelopment Project is still pending, which will determine the number of eligible citizens, the amount of land required, and the location of the rehabilitation,” Mr. Devre said.

Dharavi residents to get 350 sq ft flats with kitchen and toilet after redevelopment: Adani Group https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/dharavi-residents-to-get-350-sq-ft-flats-after-redevelopment-adani-group/article67743065.ece January 15, 2024
The new flats will be dream homes for all Dharavikars and will upgrade their living conditions.

Protesters stage massive march against redevelopment project   https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/remove-adani-save-dharavi-protesters-stage-massive-march-against-redevelopment-project/article67645451.ece  December 16, 2023 Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Uddhav Thackeray says his party is not against development but not pro-builders while BJP holds that the tender was set up during the MVA regime

ackaeray

Large Protest in Mumbai Against Dharavi Redevelopment Project Given to Adani Group https://thewire.in/rights/large-protest-in-mumbai-against-dharavi-redevelopment-project-given-to-adani-group   Udhav Thackeray "this is the biggest TDR [Transfer of Development Rights] scam of the world. Adani is getting TDR of Rs 1 crore, which means his next generations can also live peacefully without working. So much is the TDR that the government is gifting them."

Both the BJP and the Adani Group have claimed that it was the MVA government that had signed an agreement with the Adani Group. “The Dharavi project was awarded to the Adani Group through a fair, open, internationally competitive bidding process,” the group said in a statement.

“The tender conditions were finalised during the MVA government’s tenure and have remained unchanged post-awarding. Hence, it is inaccurate to claim any special privileges granted to the awardee,” it continued.

In the late nineteenth century, colonial authorities erected a blockade on the Sion Causeway, a major road linking Bombay and the suburb of Salsette. Police patrolled the entrance, controlling the flows of migrants who sought refuge from the ever-present threat of famine in the city’s hinterlands. On a single day in 1877, 546 men, women, and children, many emaciated, arrived at the blockade; only twelve were deemed healthy enough to work and allowed into Bombay. - “Were We Not Promised To Be Free?”  https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/were-we-not-promised-to-be-free/  Divya Subramanian ▪ Spring 2021
The pandemic has revealed how the rapid urbanization fueling India’s economic ascent is rooted in migrant labor. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/were-we-not-promised-to-be-free/ 

Images of migrant workers trekking home defined India’s coronavirus response. The government instated the lockdown order on March 24 with only four hours’ notice. To avoid starvation in the cities, hundreds of thousands of migrants packed up and left. Railways were closed, so their only option was to walk in the punishing heat, carrying children and their possessions, their blue surgical masks often the only new item of clothing they wore. While repatriation flights were chartered for migrants abroad, including some of the 8.5 million Indian workers in the Persian Gulf, it took more than a month to set up special rail services for domestic migrant workers, and many were charged full-price fares—a cruel joke to those who had already exhausted their savings to survive. When the villagers reached home, they faced harassment as potential carriers of disease as well as a stagnant rural economy, with the promise of relief work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act curtailed by the lockdown.

In Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay, Sheetal Chhabria argues that urbanization in late colonial India relied on a series of exclusions that elided the role of migrant labor in the production of the colonial city. Radhika Singha’s The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914–1921 looks back to the early twentieth century to show how vulnerable wartime workers mobilized to demand their share of benefits.

Migrants who did find a place in the city were pushed to its fringes, where they packed into one-room shanties and crowded tenements. In Making the Modern Slum, Chhabria shows how from the 1860s onward, colonial authorities brought about the conceptual transformation of shelter into housing—an administrative shift that allowed them to distinguish between desirable and undesirable populations by consigning non-economic forms of shelter, which didn’t produce tax or rent income, to the category of the slum. This transformation coincided with the need to extract greater revenues from housing; the “house tax” represented a significant source of municipal income.