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Architect Mukesh Mehta has a bold, some say foolhardy, scheme for clearing Asia's biggest slum: sell it.
At first glance, Mumbai's Dharavi slum would not strike anyone as prime real estate. Roughly 600,000 people live in the square-mile warren of rickety shacks and sewage-choked gutters, with one toilet for every 1,440 residents.
Growing over the decades from a sleepy riverside fishing village to a hive of struggling rural migrants, Dharavi has defied all attempts to remove or improve it.
But where others see squalor, Mr. Mehta sees opportunity.
Women wash clothes in the streets of Dharavi, one of the world's largest slums, in Mumbai, India. (Gautam Singh/AP)
By selling off the valuable land the slum dwellers occupy, he hopes to transform Dharavi into an orderly complex of apartment blocks, factories and sports facilities where rich and poor live side by side in harmony.
If his vision comes true, it will boast a new cricket field, five major new roads, a modern hospital, new schools, a nature park, even a driving range for golfers.
Late last month, the state government placed advertisements in 20 countries inviting developers to grab "the opportunity of the millennium" by bidding on the right to transform the slum. Mr. Mehta says more than 40 developers from around the world have expressed interest.
It is a risky and audacious plan, the first of its scale in India. If the slum dwellers object to seeing their shacks torn down for malls and luxury condos, the potential for conflict in volatile, class-ridden Mumbai is real. In a first taste of possible trouble, 6,000 slum dwellers blocked roads outside a government office last Monday to protest against the scheme.
If it succeeds, though, Mr. Mehta believes it could be a blueprint for helping slum dwellers not just in India, but around the globe.
"If I can make Bombay slum-free, I can make any city in India slum free. And if I can do that, we can make any city in the world slum-free," he said.
Pie in the sky? Its critics certainly think so. Over the decades, Indian governments have announced countless schemes to clear or rehabilitate the country's slums. They just keep on growing, springing up in new places as millions of people flee backward rural India for a chance of a better life in the cities.
About 150 million Indians live in slums, which cling to river banks, hillsides, highway edges and airport borders in every city. In Mumbai, more than half of the population of 18 million live in a slum of some kind.
But Dharavi has an advantage that makes Mr. Mehta's scheme more plausible than most: the value of its location.
The heart of Mumbai is on a peninsula. With expansion limited on both sides by the sea, space is precious. Real-estate values have soared as India's economy booms, with values rivalling London or Shanghai despite India's relative poverty.
In one glaring sign of the boom, tycoon Mukesh Ambani is planning to build a 60-storey palace for his family in south Mumbai at a cost of more than $1-billion. Dharavi is in the centre of it all. It lies minutes from the airport. All three of the city's main commuter rail lines pass beside it. Two major highways begin nearby. A swanky business district, Bandra Kurla, overlooks the slum.
If Dharavi's real-estate value can be unlocked, Mr. Metha reasons, both slum dwellers and developers will benefit.
For the chance to develop a valuable location in Mumbai's heart, the winning bidder will be obliged to clear the area of slum dwellings and rehouse 57,000 families free of charge in new apartment blocks.
To entice developers, the state government has eased the conditions for building in the area, granting them more space for new buildings and allowing them to proceed if 60 per cent of the slum-dwellers agree, compared with the previous 70 per cent.
In return, the developers will have to provide all the new infrastructure usually built by government, including roads, drainage, hospitals, parks and municipal offices - in effect creating a whole new ready-built community.
