Nothing is too snobbish for Dharavi any longer.

Not glossy catalogues of Valentino and Fendi in leather “boutiques”. Not even precise ripoffs of their designs, too expensive for local retail stores, that Dharavi’s sweatshops manufacture for offshore markets in Dubai and South Africa. For, what’s Made in Dharavi could be designed in Italy or France.

Asia’s largest slum—a tag that refuses to go away although the shanty-sprawl is now pockmarked with numerous clusters of tightly packed-in apartment complexes and even a pair of under-construction 16-storey “towers”—is more upwardly mobile than ever before. The state government will, very soon, request Expressions of Interest from global big daddies of construction to participate in the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), an ambitious Rs 10,000-crore plan and part of Mumbai’s belated makeover scheme.

If—and that is a very big if—the DRP works according to design, Dharavi will be a brand ambassador of urban renewal in seven years: More than 500 acres of shanties and unremarkable buildings transformed into five organised, self-sustained sectors. Each sector will be the size of two Nariman Points, with plush housing, malls, multiplexes, pottery institutes, leather designing centres, a proposed cricket museum and stadium, gardens, parks and world class public transport.

“Not only will slumdwellers be rehabilitated in the same sector their homes are in, but they won’t even have to go to a neighbouring sector for a morning jog,’’ says Iqbal Singh Chahal, officer on special duty for DRP. From obtaining clearances from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) for bid-winning developers to lay civic amenities, including sewers and water pipelines, in the Dharavi Notified Area to planning a Special Economic Zone on 16 per cent of the Dharavi triangular landmass, the lavish plans pull out all stops.

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