The Durable Slum Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai

Liza Weinstein

Orient BlackSwan

232 pages, Rs. 695

Directly opposite Mumbai’s newest and most expensive commercial developments lies Dharavi, a slum where one million squatters live in makeshift housing on 535 acres of prime urban land. Weinstein draws on a decade of research to explain how, despite innumerable threats, the slum has persisted for so long and achieved a precarious stability. She describes how economic globalisation and rapid urban development are pressurising authorities to eradicate and redevelop Dharavi, and how political conflict, bureaucratic fragmentation and community resistance have kept the bulldozers at bay.