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For months, coercive communications continued. Originally, reportedly from an ex-law enforcement official and a former defense officer, and then from law enforcement directly. Ultimately, a local artisan asserts he was summoned to the police station and instructed bluntly: keep quiet or experience severe repercussions.

The leather artisan is part of a group fighting a expensive redevelopment plan where Dharavi – an iconic Mumbai neighborhood – faces razed and transformed by a corporate giant.

"The unique ecosystem of the slum is like nowhere else in the globe," states the protester. "But they want to destroy our social fabric and prevent our protests."

Opposing Environments

The dank gullies of the slum present a dramatic difference to the towering buildings and Bollywood penthouses that overshadow the settlement. Residences are built haphazardly and often missing basic amenities, unregulated industries emit toxic smoke and the environment is filled with the suffocating smell of open sewers.

To some, the vision of the slum's redevelopment into a developed area of premium apartments, organized recreational areas, contemporary malls and residences with multiple bathrooms is an aspirational dream achieved.

"We lack proper healthcare, roads or sewage systems and there are no spaces for youth to recreate," says a tea vendor, in his fifties, who relocated from Tamil Nadu in 1982. "The single option is to clear the area and provide modern residences."

Resident Opposition

But others, like Shaikh, are resisting the project.

All recognize that the slum, historically ignored as informal housing, is urgently needing investment and development. But they fear that this initiative – without public consultation – is one that will convert a piece of prime Mumbai real estate into a playground for the rich, evicting the disadvantaged, working-class residents who have lived there since the late 1800s.

It was these marginalized, relocated individuals who developed the uninhabited area into an extensively researched phenomenon of local enterprise and economic productivity, whose economic value is estimated at between $1m and a substantial sum a year, making it among the globe's biggest informal economies.

Resettlement Issues

Among approximately 1 million inhabitants living in the packed 2.2 square kilometer neighborhood, fewer than half will be qualified for replacement housing in the redevelopment, which is expected to take an extended timeframe to complete. Additional residents will be transferred to wastelands and salt plains on the remote edges of the city, threatening to divide a long-established social network. Certain individuals will not get homes at all.

Those allowed to continue living in the area will be given flats in multi-story structures, a substantial change from the organic, communal way of dwelling and laboring that has sustained Dharavi for so long.

Businesses from tailoring to clay work and waste processing are likely to decrease in quantity and be moved to a designated "industrial sector" distant from residential areas.

Survival Challenge

For those such as this protester, a workshop owner and multi-generational inhabitant to reside in this community, the project presents a fundamental risk. His rickety, three-floor workshop makes apparel – sharp blazers, premium outerwear, fashionable garments – distributed in premium stores in upscale neighborhoods and overseas.

His family lives in the spaces below and employees and sewers – laborers from other states – live on-site, permitting him to sustain operations. Away from the slum, housing costs are frequently 10 times costlier for minimal space.

Threats and Warning

Within the official facilities close by, a conceptual model of the Dharavi project illustrates an alternative perspective. Fashionable people mill about on bicycles and electric vehicles, acquiring western-style baguettes and pastries and socializing on a terrace adjacent to a restaurant and treat station. This represents a world away from the affordable idli sambar morning meal and 5-rupee chai that sustains the neighborhood.

"This represents no development for our community," explains Shaikh. "It's a huge land development that will render it impossible for us to survive."

There is also skepticism of the development company. Headed by a powerful tycoon – among the country's wealthiest and an associate of the national leader – the corporation has encountered allegations of preferential treatment and financial impropriety, which it disputes.

Even as local authorities calls it a partnership, the developer contributed a significant amount for its majority share. Legal proceedings stating that the initiative was improperly granted to the corporation is under review in the top court.

Sustained Harassment

Since they began to actively protest the development, local opponents state they have been subjected to ongoing efforts of pressure and threats – comprising messages, explicit warnings and implications that criticizing the development was comparable with anti-national sentiment – by people they claim represent the corporate group.

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