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For months, coercive messages continued. At first, allegedly from a former police officer and an ex-military commander, and then from law enforcement directly. Finally, one resident claims he was ordered to law enforcement headquarters and warned explicitly: stop speaking out or face serious consequences.

Shaikh is one of many fighting a high-value redevelopment plan where Dharavi – a massive informal community with rich history – faces razed and transformed by a large business group.

"The culture of Dharavi is unparalleled in the planet," states Shaikh. "However their intention is to destroy our community and stop us speaking out."

Contrasting Realities

The dank gullies of this community stand in sharp opposition to the towering buildings and luxury apartments that loom over the neighborhood. Homes are built haphazardly and frequently lacking adequate facilities, small-scale operations produce dangerous fumes and the air is permeated by the overpowering odor of uncovered waste channels.

To some, the prospect of a renewed Dharavi into a modern district of premium apartments, neat parks, shiny shopping centers and residences with multiple bathrooms is an optimistic future achieved.

"There's no adequate medical facilities, paved pathways or water management and there's nowhere for youth to recreate," says a tea vendor, in his fifties, who relocated from southern India in that period. "The only way is to clear the area and provide modern residences."

Community Resistance

However, some, like Shaikh, are resisting the plan.

None deny that this community, consistently overlooked as informal housing, is desperately requiring investment and development. But they worry that this plan – lacking community input – is one that will turn valuable urban land into a luxury development, evicting the marginalized, migrant communities who have resided there since the late 1800s.

This involved these marginalized, migrant workers who established the empty marshland into an extensively researched phenomenon of community resilience and economic productivity, whose economic value is valued at between $1m and $2m annually, making it among the globe's biggest unregulated sectors.

Displacement Concerns

Among approximately one million residents living in the crowded 2.2 square kilometer area, less than 50% will be qualified for new homes in the redevelopment, which is expected to take an extended timeframe to finish. Additional residents will be transferred to wastelands and coastal regions on the remote edges of Mumbai, risking break up a generations-old social network. Some will not get residences at all.

Residents permitted to continue living in the neighborhood will be given flats in tower blocks, a major break from the evolved, shared lifestyle of living and working that has supported the community for generations.

Industries from tailoring to clay work and recycling are expected to decrease in quantity and be moved to an allocated "business area" distant from homes.

Survival Challenge

For residents like this protester, a workshop owner and multi-generational resident to live in the slum, the plan presents an existential threat. His informal, multi-level operation produces leather coats – formal jackets, premium outerwear, studded bomber jackets – sold in premium stores in the city's affluent areas and internationally.

Relatives resides in the accommodations underneath and laborers and garment workers – laborers from north India – also sleep in the same building, allowing him to sustain operations. Beyond Dharavi's enclave, housing costs are frequently 10 times more expensive for a single room.

Threats and Warning

At the government offices in the vicinity, a visual representation of the Dharavi project depicts an alternative vision for the future. Fashionable people move around on bicycles and eco-friendly transport, acquiring continental bread and pastries and having coffee on a terrace adjacent to a coffee shop and dessert parlor. This represents a complete departure from the 20-rupee idli sambar first meal and low-cost tea that maintains local residents.

"This is not improvement for residents," states the protester. "It represents a massive property transaction that will price people out for us to survive."

Additionally, there exists distrust of the corporate group. Run by an influential industrialist – among the country's wealthiest and a close ally of the Indian prime minister – the corporation has encountered allegations of favoritism and financial impropriety, which it denies.

Even as administrative bodies labels it a partnership, the business group contributed $950m for its 80% stake. A lawsuit stating that the project was improperly granted to the developer is under review in the top court.

Continued Intimidation

From when they initiated to publicly resist the project, local opponents state they have been experienced a long-running campaign of pressure and threats – involving communications, direct threats and insinuations that criticizing the development was equivalent to opposing national interests – by individuals they assert represent the business conglomerate.

Included in these accused of making intimidations is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c