At the core of the issue in the protests is that the decision to improve the lives of Dharavi’s million-strong residents doesn’t take their agency into account.
“People like me have nurtured Dharavi for decades. Now suddenly we’re being told that we’ll be shifted to a ‘better home’. But has anybody even bothered to ask us if we really want to do that? We’re happy here only,” Kanta Bai, 70, who has been selling vegetables in the area for over three decades, told Nikkei Asia.
Dharavi’s proposed redevelopment, then, is a conjugation of two elements: first, the exploitation of the economically underprivileged; second, a top-down definition of development that imposes life-altering changes on marginalized citizens.
At the heart of the protests is the assertion that it should be the residents of Dharavi who decide what redevelopment means to them.
