The much-delayed Dharavi Redevelopment Plan set to return to the drawing board, with little hope of an early launch of what is an ambitious and critical part of the Mumbai Makeover project.

Five years after the Maharashtra government passed a resolution to implement the multi-crore project by adopting a special township approach, an expert committee appointed by the government is now working on an "alternative" plan.

With an entirely new scheme being proposed, not only are further delays imminent, but allegations that the new proposal is designed only at scuttling the existing project are also expected, officials and stakeholders said.

The new proposal involves dividing the 239-hectare slum into about 50 sectors instead of the current five, with slum-dwellers in each cluster themselves appointing developers instead of the government picking developers through a tender process that’s already underway. "We are working on the plan," said D M Sukhthankar, former chief secretary and now on the expert committee overseeing the Dharavi Redevelopment Project. He said the proposal was still at an early stage.

Officials in MHADA said the idea was to divide the slum into clusters of about 1,000 huts each, with conventional SRA schemes taking off in each cluster. Instead of appointing developers for each sector to build commercial and residential towers, the government would pay for amenities and integration among the smaller clusters so that the idea of a new Dharavi township is salvaged.