Will India's Biggest Slum Revamp Take Off This Time?

Officials say the Dharavi redevelopment project, which has been two decades in the making, finally seems a step closer to reality

- Clara Lewis

For much of his life Devanna Bhandari lived in a hut in Muslim Nagar that's part of Asia's largest slum, Dharavi. The 63-year-old retired municipal worker, who came to Mumbai as a boy from Raichur, Karnataka, recently moved out of the slum with his family of eight. The walk to the communal toilet had become too much for him, so he now rents rooms in a chawl in Matunga's labour camp nearby. But he hopes to see the day his old home is rebuilt with an attached toilet and bath.

For Bhandari, Dharavi's redevelopment is a mission: "I have brought 22 slums together and I go to people asking them to attend meetings for the redevelopment. They call me 'ch****a' and shoo me away. They don't believe it will happen. Even I have little hope, though I work to mobilise people."

Complex Jigsaw Puzzle

Dharavi has risen on a marshy sliver over 150 years. It snakes its way around a creek in the heart of a bustling metropolis. Home to close to a million people, it is an economic powerhouse that hosts 14,000 small-scale units. So its long-awaited makeover or redevelopment over 500 acres is all about the making of a city within a city - on a daunting scale.

While Asia has witnessed some mega urban-regeneration programmes in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai, they were executed by authoritarian regimes.

Dharavi's redevelopment, however, requires a buy-in from thousands of stakeholders, some with conflicting interests. It's not surprising that every attempt to redevelop it since 2004 has run into resistance.