The sobriquet is threadbare but fitting: Dharavi is India in microcosm, diverse, deprived, and determined to survive—by wit or wile. Barely 10 percent of the frenetic commercial activity is legal. Most of the workshops are constructed on government land, power is impudently filched or metered at domestic rates, and commercial licenses are rarely sought. There is just one toilet for every 1,500 residents, not a single public hospital, and only a dozen municipal schools.

Yet, the average household earns between Rs 3,000 and Rs 15,000 per month, driving an insatiable consumer craze. The money has spawned a new slum gentry, self-made petty tycoons who have struggled to rise above their destiny. And so, the unthinkable has happened: Dharavi has become respectable. Glitzy pubs, bold beauty parlours and swish little leather boutiques are pushing through the squalor, like uneasy hothouse flowers in an inhospitable junkyard.

Today, this pile of dirt is worth its weight in gold. The reason is simple. In a city where every square foot has been systematically plundered and exploited, Dharavi is still virgin territory for Mumbai’s rapacious land sharks, who have, for decades, nipped at its fringes.

Now plans are afoot to swallow it whole, with a Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP).The blueprint, drawn up by an NRI architect, Mukesh Mehta, is predictably utopian: Builders get 535 acres of prime land, in return for providing free housing to 52,000 families—plus hospitals, schools, international craft villages, peace parks, art galleries, an experimental theatre and a cricket museum!

... contd.