Dharavi is a test case for an urbanising India

According to a World Bank forecast, 600 million Indians will live in urban areas by 2036. The environmental challenge and opportunity is thus urban, not rural.

On June 17, to mark the quarter point of the 21st century, Sight and Sound released a list of twenty-five films of the century. Pa. Ranjith’s Kaala starring Rajinikanth found mention. Newspapers reporting this achievement referred to Kaala as a ‘socio-political’ film. Kaala depicts Dharavi’s resistance in the face of land grab attempts by a politician-realtor. The film’s recognition comes at a time when Dharavi is in the news for resident and activist protests over its redevelopment. So, ‘socio-political’ is a clear label. But Dharavi’s struggles, on and off screen, are also socio-political because of ‘environmental injustice’. Working classes who laboured to make a marshland inhabitable and economically valuable are now vulnerable to gentrification and relocation. The poor make a place, but the rich replace and displace them. Dharavi is a test case in sustainable development for an urbanising India. Its redevelopment must be environmentally just. 

Environmental injustice

Environmental justice is more than a slogan associated with anti-development protests. It has more specific activist and scholarly origins as a US-based grassroots movement against environmental inequality. In the case of the US, racialised minorities experienced disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards even as white Americans were shielded from pollution and profited from it. Environmental justice activists and scholars redefined the environment as any place of work, residence, and play. For them, wilderness cannot monopolise what the environment means. Even the Brundtland Report invoked the environment in this sense — “Environment is where we live,  and development is what we all do here to improve our lot.” 

This movement, despite its foreign origins, finds a natural home in India. Environmental injustice marks our post-Independence history.  India diverted natural resources — wood, water, and minerals — at subsidised costs to an urban and rural elite. This disrupted the livelihoods of millions of ‘ecosystem people’, namely, Adivasis, pastoralists and fishers. Displaced by dams, mills, and mines, they became ‘ecological refugees’ in cities. 

Twenty-first-century India continues this legacy of environmental inequality. Consider this: we degrade our environment, but also produce billionaires! Recent statistics and rankings are instructive. 

In March, the World Inequality Lab labelled India a ‘Billionaire Raj’. Their paper on income and wealth inequality revealed that the top 1 per cent held 22.6 per cent of income and 40.1 per cent of wealth in the country. This report reinforces a 2023 Oxfam report that warned of a widening gap between the rich and the poor in India. The bottom half of India shares 3 per cent of the wealth. India’s 169 billionaires saw their wealth surge since the pandemic. 

Now, set these economic growth facts next to the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) released in June; India ranked 176 out of 180 countries, scoring a lowly 133 on climate change mitigation and ranking 178 on biodiversity conservation. Creating billionaires is parallelled by the destruction of millions of hectares of forest land. India lost 2.33 million hectares of tree cover between 2000 and 2023. This deforestation released 1.12 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. Carbon intensive biodiversity loss will have benefitted our mining, palm oil and timber billionaires … and burdened forest livelihoods. 

Air pollution from industries and vehicles are major contributors to India’s carbon emissions as well. A 2023 paper in Scientific Reports demonstrated the extent of environmental injustice. Dalits, Adivasis and religious minorities suffered greater pollution exposures. This has much to do with circumstances the Inequality Lab report mentions, namely disproportionate social and political influence due to extreme income and wealth concentration. 

Mumbai exemplifies the billionaire incline and environmental decline contrast. The Global Rich List 2024 reports that it beat Beijing as Asia’s billionaire capital, with 93 members. Meanwhile Dharavi exemplifies climate injustice. It withers in heat waves, gets flooded in extreme monsoons, and suffers from malaria and dengue. 

Gentrification 

Dharavi is now a slum dogged by a billionaire. The Adani Group won the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP) bid. Activists allege land grab. Officials, however, clarified that after rehabilitation, Adani will transfer land back to the Dharavi Redevelopment Project/Slum Rehabilitation Authority (DRP/SRA). 

The word ‘makeover’ and ‘facelift’ appear more often in reports of this project, than uplift. Facelift, along with ‘beautification’ and ‘restoration’, are gentrification synonyms. Affluent castes and classes move in and price a place out of its working-class residents. Slum demolition and resettlement in India involves elite capture—shiny apartments and malls replace shanties. 

In a highlight encounter scene in Kaala, Rajinikanth tells ‘Hari Dada’ Abhayankar (Nana Patekar), “cleanliness, clean, pure...all this is your mask”...”land is power for you, land is our life”. 

Land is power, and gentrification is realty’s ally. Market analysts project a $5 trillion or 15 per cent GDP share for realty in 2047, when India completes one hundred years of Independence. We are well on our way there, with India’s ultra-high-net-worth individuals investing much in real estate. 

All eyes on Dharavi

The World Bank forecasts that by 2036, Indian towns and cities will be home to 600 million people. This is 40 per cent of our population. So, India’s biggest environmental challenge and opportunity is not rural, but urban. We aspire to be net zero in 2070, and urban emissions, or emissions to support the urban, should be the policy focus. And Dharavi’s redevelopment is a test case of environmentally-just sustainability. 

So, what is a measure of environmental justice for the Dharavi project? The EPI summary says human development, not GDP, is a stronger environmental performance indicator. Amartya Sen, whose Capabilities Approach informs human development, critiques sustainable development for its view of humans as ‘needy’. They need recognition as active agents. Dharavi only figures as a needy space, one that needs development, needs resettlement, or needs sanitation. But its residents’ entrepreneurial skills, place attachment, and community solidarity merit a place at the table as well. They have the moral right and knowledge to co-create any green growth design for Dharavi. 

(The writer is Lead, Ecosystems and Human Well-being Programme, ATREE)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.