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Committee of Experts

c/o “Priya”, 5^th floor

Worli Sea Face

Mumbai 400 030

7 July 2009

Hon. Shri Ashok Chavan

Chief Minister of Maharashtra

Mumbai

Dharavi Redevelopment Project

Dear Chief Minister,

As our earlier letters to Government regarding our strong reservations about the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP) have not been acknowledged, we are sending you this as anOpen Letter for all to read.

Since the time we were appointed as a Committee of Experts to advise on the planning and implementation of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project, we have seen a number of presentations by Mukesh Mehta, the Consultant and Project Manager appointed for the project, as well as presentations by several bidders. Having seen these, we have concluded as follows:

1.      The DRP is a sophisticated land grab. Over the years, residents from various parts of the city have been made to settle there by Government, while taking great care not to give them proper legal rights of occupancy. This legalization is something that should have been part of the people’s rights when they were first settled there, and is something that was high-handedly denied to them at the time.

2.    Strictly speaking, the land they occupy should be considered as leased to them for a long period, say 99 years, on the terms that would have applied at the time of first occupation of the land.

3.     The residents of Dharavi have established not just homes but thriving businesses and livelihoods. The proximity of residences with workplaces is what makes many of the businesses efficient and competitive. The present plan for redeveloping Dharavi makes no provision for reconstructing these networks.

4.    The residents of Dharavi are being offered free reconstruction, and the legalizing of their status, but this is in exchange for (a) shifting into less than half (47%) of their original land area and (b) the destruction of their livelihoods.

5.     They are now being offered in-situ free pucca housing in exchange for being shifted into less than half of the land they currently occupy.  The rest of the land thus released from occupation will be commercially exploited and significant profits are expected to accrue both to Government and to the developers entrusted with the project. The project is being driven by personal greed rather than the welfare of the residents of Dharavi.

6.    Densities in Dharavi are already the highest in the world. Moving residents into 47% of their original area, and adding new occupants in the remaining area, will densify the area beyond practical viability.

7.     We should recognize that Dharavi is a thriving place, with residents who co-operate with each other and have learned to live harmoniously in very trying physical circumstances. They have managed remarkably well with hardly any Government support. Infrastructure is very poor and needs to be drastically improved. Nevertheless, within this framework the residents of Dharavi have built successful businesses and demonstrated astonishing resilience and enterprise. There is much to learn from them about the way in which we could manage future urban growth that contributes significantly to the economy of the country.

8.    We believe the correct solution to redeveloping Dharavi would be to give up the notion of making a profit out of it, either for Government or for builders, and to focus instead on the interests of the residents of Dharavi. We need to see how to provide them with proper infrastructure, in particular sanitation and water supply and garbage collection, with viable transport arrangements (that incidentally minimize the growth of private motor car traffic). The residents should be encouraged to redevelop Dharavi themselves, locality by locality, as and when they feel ready to do this, in accordance with a prescribed overall master plan and a set of guidelines to control the redevelopment. Legalization of their status could be made conditional on their completing proper reconstruction.

9.    In essence, what is called for is an alternative approach to the redevelopment of Dharavi which takes into account the wishes and preferences of the people who live there.

Yours faithfully,

D M Sukthankar                                                 Sundar Burra

A Jockin                                                              Vidyadhar Phatak

Chandrashekhar Prabhu                                   Shirish Patel

Neera Adarkar                                                    Arvind Adarkar

Sheela Patel                                                        Anirudh Paul