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For months, threatening communications recurred. At first, allegedly from a retired cop and a retired army general, and then from the police themselves. Ultimately, Mohammad Khurshid Shaikh asserts he was summoned to the local precinct and told clearly: stop speaking out or experience severe repercussions.

This third-generation resident is among those resisting a high-value project where Dharavi – an iconic Mumbai neighborhood – will be razed and modernized by a large business group.

"The culture of this area is like nowhere else in the planet," says the resident. "But the plan aims to dismantle our social fabric and prevent our protests."

Opposing Environments

The narrow alleys of this community present a dramatic difference to the towering buildings and luxury apartments that dominate the neighborhood. Homes are built haphazardly and frequently missing basic amenities, unregulated industries produce dangerous fumes and the environment is filled with the unpleasant stench of uncovered waste channels.

For certain residents, the promise of Dharavi transformed into a developed area of luxury high-rises, neat parks, shiny shopping centers and residences with two toilets is a hopeful vision realized.

"There's no proper healthcare, paved pathways or water management and there are no spaces for youth to recreate," explains a tea vendor, in his fifties, who moved from his home state in that period. "The sole solution is to tear it all down and build us new homes."

Community Resistance

However, some, including this protester, are opposing the plan.

None deny that the slum, long neglected as informal housing, is desperately requiring financial support and improvement. But they are concerned that this plan – lacking resident participation – could potentially turn valuable urban land into a luxury development, evicting the lower-caste, working-class residents who have lived there since generations ago.

It was these shunned, displaced people who established the uninhabited area into a frequently examined example of community resilience and business activity, whose production is worth between $1m and $2m per year, making it among the globe's biggest informal economies.

Resettlement Issues

Among approximately one million residents living in the crowded 2.2 square kilometer area, fewer than half will be qualified for new homes in the project, which is projected to take seven years to complete. Additional residents will be relocated to barren areas and salt plains on the distant periphery of Mumbai, potentially divide a long-established community. Some will receive no housing at all.

Those allowed to continue living in the neighborhood will be provided apartments in multi-story structures, a significant rupture from the natural, collective approach of residing and operating that has supported the community for many years.

Commercial activities from garment work to ceramic crafts and material recovery are projected to reduce in scale and be transferred to a specific "industrial sector" far from people's residences.

Existential Threat

For those such as Shaikh, a leather artisan and long-time inhabitant to live in Dharavi, the plan presents a fundamental risk. His rickety, multi-level facility produces leather coats – tailored coats, luxury coats, studded bomber jackets – distributed in premium stores in the city's affluent areas and abroad.

Relatives lives in the spaces downstairs and his workers and tailors – laborers from north India – reside in the same building, allowing him to sustain operations. Outside the slum, housing costs are often 10 times more expensive for basic accommodation.

Pressure and Coercion

In the administrative buildings close by, a visual representation of the transformation initiative depicts a contrasting vision for the future. Fashionable inhabitants mill about on cycles and electric vehicles, acquiring international baguettes and breakfast items and having coffee on an outdoor area near a coffee shop and treat station. It is a world away from the 20-rupee idli sambar breakfast and low-cost tea that sustains local residents.

"This is not development for residents," states Shaikh. "It's a massive property transaction that will render it impossible for our community to continue."

There is also distrust of the business conglomerate. Run by a powerful tycoon – among the country's wealthiest and an associate of the government head – the conglomerate has faced accusations of favoritism and questionable practices, which it rejects.

Even as local authorities calls it a collaborative effort, the developer invested nearly a billion dollars for its controlling interest. Legal proceedings claiming that the redevelopment was unfairly awarded to the corporation is under review in India's supreme court.

Ongoing Pressure

After they started to actively protest the redevelopment, local opponents assert they have been faced ongoing efforts of coercion and warning – comprising phone calls, clear intimidation and insinuations that criticizing the development was comparable with speaking against the country – by figures they claim are associated with the corporate group.

Among those alleged to have making intimidations is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c