Asia's Biggest Slum Is a Land of Opportunity

It is a far cry from the impoverished village in Bihar state they left nearly 15 years ago with nothing but the clothes they were wearing and the determination to succeed.

Today, they provide employment to about 80 families, have a turnover of $350,000, and export leather jackets, bags, and shoes to Europe, the Persian Gulf, and North America.

"I started off as a cobbler and then saved enough money to open a small workshop," Kale recounts. "When we opened our shop here, everybody thought we were mad. 'Why do you want such a beautiful shop in a place like this?' they said."

Business boomed until the bloody Hindu-Muslim riots of 1993, which erupted across India after religious Hindu fanatics tore down a Muslim shrine at Ayodhya in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

Dharavi bore the brunt of the violence in Bombay. Age-old animosities - deeply rooted in religious intolerance - were settled with bloodshed that left hundreds dead and thousands of shops, factories, and homes destroyed.

"For three months we couldn't fill our export orders, because so many of our workers fled, and the buyers stayed away," Kale says. "The people who started the riots are now running the government," he says, referring to the Shiv Sena, a right-wing Hindu party that now rules Maharashtra state, of which Bombay is the capital.

Redevelopment scheme

If the new government has its way, the face of Dharavi might change forever in the next few years. One of its election promises was to provide new housing for 4 million slum dwellers, or two-fifths of the population of Bombay.

Under the Slum Redevelopment Scheme, 900,000 huts spread over 2,335 slums will be replaced with concrete apartments, providing every family with free housing measuring 225 square feet.

The scheme sounds simple. The state provides administrative support, and private builders erect free housing for slum dwellers in exchange for being allowed to build flats on the newly created surplus land, which they can sell at market rates.

Slum dwellers have already started forming housing societies, which will give them some say in how their new dwellings will be constructed.

With Bombay's real estate among the most expensive in Asia, and many slums in prime commercial areas, builders should be able recoup their costs easily, or so the theory goes.

"Not all the slum dwellers may be willing to participate in the scheme, and we can't force them to," says Mr. Chatterjee of the Slum Improvement Board. "Then there is the problem of how to prevent the slum dwellers from selling their new flats and starting a new slum somewhere else." In Dharavi, opinion is divided about the new scheme.

Mixed emotions

Although everybody wants more living space, there are those who are afraid that the new concrete high-rises will break the strong neighborhood bonds that exist in Dharavi. "If someone is sick, if someone is in trouble, we always know about it," says Manik Pramanik, a leather worker. "If we move into these new buildings, we may not even know who our neighbor is.

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