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Across several weeks, threatening phone calls recurred. At first, allegedly from a retired cop and a retired army general, subsequently from the police themselves. Finally, one resident states he was called to the police station and instructed bluntly: remain silent or encounter real trouble.

This third-generation resident is one of many resisting a multimillion-dollar redevelopment plan where Dharavi – an iconic Mumbai neighborhood – faces bulldozed and redeveloped by a multinational conglomerate.

"The distinctive community of this area is exceptional in the globe," says the resident. "But the plan aims to destroy our social fabric and prevent our protests."

Contrasting Realities

The dank gullies of the slum sit in stark contrast to the soaring skyscrapers and Bollywood penthouses that dominate the area. Homes are built haphazardly and often missing basic amenities, small-scale operations emit toxic smoke and the air is filled with the unpleasant stench of open sewers.

Among some individuals, the promise of the slum's redevelopment into a modern district of high-end towers, well-maintained green spaces, contemporary malls and residences with two toilets is a hopeful vision realized.

"We lack adequate medical facilities, roads or sewage systems and we have no places for children to play," says a chai seller, in his fifties, who migrated from southern India in 1982. "The single option is to tear it all down and provide modern residences."

Local Protest

But others, like Shaikh, are resisting the plan.

None deny that this community, consistently overlooked as informal housing, is urgently needing economic input and modernization. However they fear that this plan – absent of public consultation – is one that will transform a piece of prime Mumbai real estate into a playground for the rich, displacing the disadvantaged, working-class residents who have resided there since generations ago.

This involved these excluded, relocated individuals who developed the vacant wetlands into a widely studied marvel of local enterprise and business activity, whose economic value is estimated at between $1m and two million dollars per year, making it among the globe's biggest unofficial markets.

Relocation Worries

Of the roughly a million inhabitants living in the dense 2.2 square kilometer neighborhood, fewer than half will be eligible for replacement housing in the project, which is expected to take a significant period to finish. The remainder will be moved to barren areas and coastal regions on the remote edges of the city, risking fragment a long-established neighborhood. Certain individuals will be denied housing at all.

Those allowed to remain in Dharavi will be provided units in multi-story structures, a significant rupture from the organic, shared lifestyle of living and working that has supported Dharavi for so long.

Businesses from tailoring to pottery and recycling are likely to decrease in quantity and be relocated to a designated "commercial zone" separated from residential areas.

Existential Threat

For residents like Shaikh, a leather artisan and third generation of his family to call home this community, the project presents a survival challenge. His rickety, three-storey facility produces leather coats – formal jackets, premium outerwear, studded bomber jackets – distributed in high-end shops in south Mumbai and internationally.

His family dwells in the accommodations underneath and laborers and garment workers – workers from other states – live there, allowing him to afford their labour. Away from the slum, accommodation prices are frequently 10 times as high for a single room.

Harassment and Intimidation

Within the official facilities close by, a visual representation of the Dharavi project shows a very different vision for the future. Slickly dressed people gather on two-wheelers and e-vehicles, buying continental bread and pastries and enlisting beverages on a terrace outside a coffee shop and dessert parlor. This depicts a complete departure from the inexpensive idli sambar first meal and 5-rupee chai that sustains local residents.

"This is not progress for our community," explains Shaikh. "This constitutes a massive land development that will price people out for our community to continue."

There is also concern of the corporate group. Run by an influential industrialist – one of India's most powerful and an associate of the Indian prime minister – the corporation has been subject to claims of preferential treatment and questionable practices, which it rejects.

Even as the state government describes it as a collaborative effort, the business group paid $950m for its majority share. A lawsuit stating that the project was unfairly awarded to the business group is being considered in the nation's highest judicial body.

Continued Intimidation

From when they initiated to publicly resist the project, protesters and community members assert they have been experienced a long-running campaign of pressure and threats – including phone calls, clear intimidation and suggestions that speaking against the development was comparable with opposing national interests – by figures they claim are associated with the business conglomerate.

Part of the group suspected of issuing the threats is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c