Dharavi slum in Mumbai, India, is home to roughly one million people, crammed into one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with a population density of over 717,780 per square mile.
The roughly 600-acre slum is around the same size as Monaco but is home to over 96,000 more people.
It is considered to be one of the world’s largest slums.
Dharavi has suffered from many epidemics and other disasters, including a widespread plague in 1896, which killed over half of the population of Bombay. Sanitation in the slums remains poor.
However, a new project, estimated to cost $3 billion (£2.3 billion), is set to transform the slum into a modern city hub.
The project aims to create a more liveable environment while preserving Dharavi’s cultural diversity and economic activity. It also seeks to reduce socio-economic differentiation by integrating Dharavi’s residents into the city.
Dharavi has an active informal economy in which numerous household enterprises employ many of the slum residents. Leather, textiles, and pottery products are among the goods made. The total annual turnover has been estimated at over $1 billion (£794 million).
Features will include modern apartments, offices and malls, high-rise residential structures, industrial zones and commercial hubs.
The slum was founded in 1884 during the British colonial era and grew because the colonial government expelled factories and residents from the peninsular city centre and rural Indians migrated into urban Mumbai.
According to the Financial Times, Mohammad Shakib, a 32-year-old fruit merchant, lives in two cramped rooms with his wife, newborn son, parents, and two brothers.
Shakib, however, is displeased by the plans by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani to transform the area into a “world-class” district. The scheme would result in his family’s expulsion and loss of his livelihood; Shakib said: “There’s only one person who will benefit”.
Adani, a powerful tycoon widely thought to have close ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, won a contract in 2022 to remake the slum.
This week, however, Dharavi’s future has become a political flashpoint ahead of state elections. Opposition parties trying to seize back control of Maharashtra from an alliance led by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party have vowed to scrap Adani’s redevelopment contract, which they allege was wrongly awarded.
“This government handed over Dharavi to Adani,” Rahul Gandhi, India’s most prominent opposition leader, told a rally last week. Gandhi has accused Modi of enriching cronies such as Adani, whose business interests have expanded at the same rate as his ambitious nation-building plans.
“They got airports, ports, roads, and now they are getting Dharavi,” Gandhi said.
Adani, who worked as a teenager in Mumbai’s diamond trade in the late 1970s, wrote last year that he “was mesmerised by the industrious chaos that I saw in Dharavi’s alleys” and was inspired by “the community’s struggle for survival”.
“When this opportunity to renew Dharavi came calling, I seized it with both hands,” he wrote, promising to provide “eligible residents” with gas, water, electricity, sanitation, recreational facilities and a “world-class hospital”.
Many in Mumbai are deeply sceptical about Adani’s intentions, including Shaikh Mobinuddin, a businessman who grew up in Dharavi and owned several shops there: “He will make people ineligible, and the land will be resold to the Mumbai free market”.
