Carlin Carr, Mumbai Community Manager
The Dharavi Redevelopment Plan (DRP) stands physically at the center of the city and metaphorically at the nexus of a debate over the future of redevelopment. On the one hand is the government’s grand scheme to join hands with private developers to rehouse the poor in free 225-square-foot flats, using the leftover space to construct luxury buildings that can be sold at market rates. Activists who stand opposed to this model say the DRP fails to acknowledge that the issue is more complex: the one-square kilometer is also home to thousands of small-scale businesses, often sharing spaces with residential plots. The mixed-use, low-rise settlement is a typology that many neighborhoods all over the world envy.
The diverging stances can be traced to the early days of the DRP when no one knew much about Dharavi. The lack of accurate figures on who lives there, where they came from, and what services are available continues to this day — decades later — to be cause for speculation, despite many exercises in counting.
In a new book, Dharavi: The City Within, Kalpana Sharma traces the history of Dharavi in her essay, “A House for Khatija.” In it, she explains that former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited the slum in 1985 — and, afterward, allotted Rs. 100 crore ($15million) to redevelop the area. The committee he appointed to draft a proposal — which was headed by Charles Correa, one of India’s most renowned architects — had essentially no data on which to base their ideas, since no mapping had ever been attempted there. Surprisingly, the committee thought a detailed exercise in data collection was too “painstaking,” and opted instead to hire the Hyderabad Remote Sensing Agency to do an aerial survey. From above, Dharavi looks like a sheet of cookies that have baked into one; it’s hard to distinguish where one house ends and another begins. The committee counted a population of 250,000 in Dharavi.
The real numbers were obviously much higher, and the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and its partner organization SPARC knew this was a gross underestimation. Together, NSDF/SPARC launched a community-led census where they trained residents and, importantly, had them report back to their neighborhoods on a daily basis. Sharma says that transparency is extremely important in these exercises, as is trust. Households are more willing to give information to neighbors they know than to government-sent enumerators. Data from ration cards, voter registration lists, and rent lists also helped inform the final outcome. Not only did this survey produce vastly different numbers — calculating the population of the area at more than 600,000 in 1986 — but a bigger picture emerged as well: “…although Dharavi was being looked upon as one slum even by the planners, the residents did not see themselves as part of one settlement. Instead, each settlement had a distinct identity,” writes Sharma.
Importantly, the community-led survey informed the people, empowering them to better understand their position in the future of their settlement. The map that emerged told the story of land ownership, where businesses were and how long certain communities had lived on that land. With their new information in hand, residents formed a committee, Dharavi Vikas Samiti, which continues to fight for the community’s rights to this day.
The two very different approaches to collecting data in Dharavi illuminate the larger diverging viewpoints on the area’s future. Yet, the community-led exercise continues to be an important milestone, as residents could then begin to develop a narrative around what their own future should be, not simply based off of anecdotal ideas but hard evidence.
Photo credit: Senorhorst Jahnsen