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Over an extended period, intimidating phone calls persisted. At first, supposedly from a retired cop and a former defense officer, later from the authorities. In the end, one resident states he was ordered to the police station and told clearly: stop speaking out or experience severe repercussions.

This third-generation resident is one of many fighting a high-value redevelopment plan where one of India's largest slums – an iconic Mumbai neighborhood – faces bulldozed and redeveloped by a corporate giant.

"The distinctive community of the slum is unparalleled in the planet," says the resident. "However they want to dismantle our community and stop us speaking out."

Dual Worlds

The cramped lanes of Dharavi stand in sharp opposition to the soaring skyscrapers and luxury apartments that loom over the area. Residences are constructed informally and frequently missing basic amenities, informal businesses produce dangerous fumes and the atmosphere is saturated with the overpowering odor of exposed drainage.

For certain residents, the prospect of a renewed Dharavi into a glistening neighborhood of luxury high-rises, neat parks, contemporary malls and apartments with multiple bathrooms is a hopeful vision come true.

"We lack proper healthcare, paved pathways or water management and we have no places for youth to recreate," explains a chai seller, in his fifties, who moved from southern India in 1982. "The sole solution is to tear it all down and provide modern residences."

Resident Opposition

Yet certain residents, like Shaikh, are fighting against the plan.

None deny that the slum, consistently overlooked as an illegal encroachment, is urgently needing financial support and improvement. But they worry that this plan – lacking community input – could potentially convert a piece of prime Mumbai real estate into a playground for the rich, displacing the disadvantaged, immigrant populations who have resided there since the nineteenth century.

This involved these excluded, displaced people who developed the empty marshland into a frequently examined example of community resilience and commercial output, whose output is valued at between $1m and a substantial sum a year, making it a major informal economies.

Resettlement Issues

Among approximately one million inhabitants living in the crowded sprawling area, less than 50% will be able for new homes in the project, which is estimated to take an extended timeframe to finish. Additional residents will be transferred to undeveloped zones and saline fields on the distant periphery of Mumbai, threatening to break up a long-established community. Certain individuals will be denied housing at all.

Those allowed to stay in the area will be allocated flats in multi-story structures, a major break from the organic, communal way of living and working that has supported Dharavi for generations.

Businesses from tailoring to clay work and material recovery are expected to decrease in quantity and be transferred to a specific "commercial zone" distant from residential areas.

Existential Threat

For residents like Shaikh, a workshop owner and long-time resident to reside in this community, the redevelopment presents a fundamental risk. His rickety, three-floor operation creates apparel – sharp blazers, suede trenches, fashionable garments – sold in high-end shops in upscale neighborhoods and internationally.

Household members lives in the accommodations below and employees and tailors – laborers from north India – live on-site, enabling him to sustain operations. Away from this community, housing costs are often tenfold costlier for a single room.

Pressure and Coercion

Within the official facilities nearby, a conceptual model of the Dharavi project illustrates an alternative perspective. Slickly dressed inhabitants gather on two-wheelers and electric vehicles, acquiring international bread and breakfast items and having coffee on an outdoor area outside Dharavi Cafe and Ice-Cream. It is a world away from the 20-rupee idli sambar breakfast and 5-rupee chai that maintains the neighborhood.

"This is not development for our community," states Shaikh. "It represents a massive real estate deal that will render it impossible for our community to continue."

Furthermore, there's distrust of the business conglomerate. Headed by a powerful tycoon – among the country's wealthiest and a close ally of the government head – the business group has encountered allegations of crony capitalism and financial impropriety, which it disputes.

Although local authorities calls it a joint project, the developer invested $950m for its controlling interest. Legal proceedings claiming that the redevelopment was improperly granted to the developer is under review in India's supreme court.

Ongoing Pressure

After they started to publicly resist the development, protesters and community members assert they have been subjected to an extended period of harassment and intimidation – comprising messages, explicit warnings and suggestions that speaking against the initiative was tantamount to anti-national sentiment – by individuals they claim represent the developer.

Included in these suspected of issuing the threats is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c