Column

The battle for Dharavi is hotting up. Soon, builders and developers will submit their proposals for what they plan to do to the area if they are awarded the tender. It is a lucrative business proposition but is also fraught with legal and human issues.

Dharavi, Often called Asia's largest slum, Dharavi means different things to different people. To the authorities it is an nightmare because they have to find ways to provide services; to the urban planner, it represents a challenge to bring about regeneration that will provide some dignity to its residents; to the citizen, it is a canker, a scary no-mans-land that is full of criminals and unsavoury types; to a builder, the availability of so muchland is enough to make him salivate; to NGOs, it is an example of human resourcefulness, presenting an "alternate view of urban existence"; and for anywhere between 600,000 and 1 million people, it is home.

All of these perceptions have a ring of truth in them. For decades, Dharavi was a blot no one wanted to know about, much less talk about. In the 1970s, it was the home of one of the city's biggest dons, who ran an empire of crime from deep within the bowels of the huge slumtown. The shantytown has never stopped growing, attracting migrants who are self-employed, run small businesses and even work as white collar professionals. Periodically, some noises are made about "rehabilitating" the residents of Dharavi and buildings are constructed by the authorities to house a few slum dwellers.

This however does not even scratch the surface of the problem; Dharavi is just too big and continues to grow. All this changed when a decade or so ago, a Mumbai architect Mukesh Mehta came up with a blueprint to completely overhaul Dharavi. His plan envisaged not only construction of buildings for slum-dwellers — for free — but also boulevards, shops, industrial sheds, schools, hospitals.

And who would bear the cost of this ambitious, Rs 15,000 crore plan? In two words, private builders. The 200-odd hectares of land would be handed over to them and in return they would get a large part (roughly two-thirds) to build smart residential and office tower blocks and whatever else. They would also pay the government one-third of the revenue they make and more importantly, they would undertake to maintain the buildings they had made for the slum-dwellers for 15 years. The state government bought this plan and appointed Mehta as a consultant on it.

Depending on who you talk to, Mehta is either a savvy businessman out to make money from the project or a visionary who has grandiose ideas to finally break through the Gordian knot and change Dharavi forever. There are more who think the former than the latter. A state government-appointed panel whose members include well-known architects, retired bureaucrats and powerful NGO-bosses have written letter upon letter to get him chucked out as a consultant, to no avail. Mehta says they have it in for him and many of them have their own vested interests in keeping Dharavi going the way it is.

The naysayers have raised many objections to the scheme, including specific ones like whether the slum-dwellers should be rehabilitated in four-storied or 12-storied buildings and more fuzzy ones such as whether outsiders should be involved in any plan at all or should any “development” be left to the native genius of the locals. But essentially the clash is between three general ideas: a) this is nothing but a scam to help builders versus it gives locals free residences as well as dignity; b) the flats should be given free versus they be made to pay at least part of it to get a sense of ownership and c) should Dharavi be "developed" at all in the accepted urban way (pucca houses et al) versus it should be left as it is.

Given the past record of redevelopment in Mumbai, where builders have ruthlessly moved in and all planning norms have been thrown out of the window — Lower Parel is a classic example — the first concern is understandable.As far as the second is concerned, getting people to pay, even partly, for something they own is always a better idea; the government could consider giving a subsidy.

The third is a tricky one-it boils down to two different worldviews. Development is a word that scares and irritates many people; the NGO sector is full of them. They find it a “neo-liberal" conspiracy, a way of homogenising urban landscapes which have no spaces for traditional housing. People should be left to their own devices and their cultures, says this view.

But this is an anti-modern, even sentimental approach, which is no less patronising than the top-down approach of the bureaucrat or politician. What is called the "traditional" housing in Dharavi is little more than a rickety structure existing cheek-by-jowl with sewers and there is no denying that the place is full of illegal businesses which pollute the local environment. Keeping Dharavi as a museum piece is as absurd as turning it into a soulless Shanghai-wannabe.

The war is not going to end soon, especially given the relative strengths of both sides. But it will be a pity if, in trying to score a point, the human side is forgotten. Dharavi is, ultimately, about the people who live there; their needs and voices must be considered, not of those who claim to speak for them.