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For months, intimidating communications recurred. Initially, reportedly from a former police officer and an ex-military commander, later from law enforcement directly. Finally, a local artisan claims he was ordered to the local precinct and warned explicitly: keep quiet or experience severe repercussions.

The leather artisan is among those fighting a high-value project where one of India's largest slums – one of India’s largest and most storied slums – is scheduled to be razed and transformed by a large business group.

"The distinctive community of Dharavi is like nowhere else in the globe," explains the resident. "But their intention is to destroy our community and stop us speaking out."

Opposing Environments

The cramped lanes of this community present a dramatic difference to the soaring skyscrapers and luxury apartments that loom over the area. Residences are assembled randomly and frequently without proper sanitation, informal businesses release harmful emissions and the air is filled with the unpleasant stench of uncovered waste channels.

To some, the promise of a renewed Dharavi into a developed area of high-end towers, neat parks, modern retail complexes and homes with proper sanitation is an optimistic future realized.

"There's no adequate medical facilities, paved pathways or water management and there's nowhere for kids to enjoy," explains a tea vendor, fifty-six, who relocated from his home state in 1982. "The sole solution is to clear the area and build us new homes."

Local Protest

Yet certain residents, like the leather artisan, are resisting the redevelopment.

Everyone acknowledges that this community, historically ignored as an illegal encroachment, is desperately requiring financial support and improvement. But they are concerned that this project – lacking resident participation – might transform valuable urban land into a playground for the rich, displacing the disadvantaged, working-class residents who have been there since the nineteenth century.

It was these marginalized, relocated individuals who built up the vacant wetlands into a widely studied marvel of community resilience and economic productivity, whose production is worth between $1m and two million dollars per year, making it among the globe's biggest unregulated sectors.

Relocation Worries

Out of about 1 million residents living in the crowded sprawling zone, fewer than half will be qualified for alternative accommodation in the project, which is projected to take an extended timeframe to complete. Additional residents will be moved to undeveloped zones and salt plains on the distant periphery of the city, potentially fragment a long-established neighborhood. Certain individuals will receive no residences at all.

Those allowed to remain in Dharavi will be given apartments in tower blocks, a substantial change from the evolved, communal way of dwelling and laboring that has sustained this area for many years.

Industries from tailoring to clay work and waste processing are projected to decrease in quantity and be moved to a designated "commercial zone" far from residential areas.

Livelihood Crisis

For residents like Shaikh, a workshop owner and multi-generational resident to call home this community, the project presents a survival challenge. His makeshift, three-floor operation creates leather coats – tailored coats, premium outerwear, fashionable garments – marketed in premium stores in the city's affluent areas and overseas.

Household members resides in the spaces below and his workers and tailors – workers from north India – also sleep there, allowing him to sustain operations. Outside Dharavi's enclave, accommodation prices are often 10 times as high for basic accommodation.

Pressure and Coercion

In the government offices close by, an illustrated mock-up of the Dharavi project illustrates a very different vision for the future. Well-groomed residents gather on cycles and e-vehicles, acquiring western-style bread and croissants and having coffee on a patio adjacent to a restaurant and dessert parlor. This depicts a stark contrast from the 20-rupee idli sambar morning meal and 5-rupee chai that supports Dharavi's community.

"This represents no improvement for us," says Shaikh. "This constitutes a huge property transaction that will render it impossible for residents to remain."

Additionally, there exists distrust of the business conglomerate. Run by an influential industrialist – one of India's most powerful and a close ally of the government head – the conglomerate has been subject to claims of preferential treatment and questionable practices, which it rejects.

While administrative bodies describes it as a partnership, the corporation paid $950m for its controlling interest. A lawsuit claiming that the redevelopment was questionably assigned to the corporation is pending in the nation's highest judicial body.

Continued Intimidation

After they started to publicly resist the redevelopment, protesters and community members state they have been subjected to a long-running campaign of harassment and intimidation – comprising phone calls, clear intimidation and insinuations that speaking against the initiative was tantamount to opposing national interests – by individuals they assert are associated with the corporate group.

Among those accused of making intimidations is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c