This week marks the half-year milestone since the start of the eligibility survey for the rehabilitation of one of the biggest slums in Asia. Thus far, surveys have been conducted among the occupants of around 14,000 tenements out of 300,000 and roughly 40,000 structures in Dharavi. It is anticipated that the exercise will be finished by March 2025.
After the renovation project is finished, almost 80,000 qualified families will receive free tenements in the centre of Mumbai that have a 350 square foot carpet. According to the Adani Group, which is leading the project, this is 17% more than those supplied in city slum redevelopment plans and beyond the Maharashtra government’s minimal threshold of 300 sq. ft.
In Wadala’s Bhakti Park neighbourhood, around 4 km east of Dharavi, an unfurnished 1 BHK flat with 340 square feet of carpet space is presently selling for 1.15 crore to 1.30 crore on the open market, depending on the level it is on, according to a local real estate agent. In Mumbai, a home buyer must pay over ₹1.5 crore for a 500 sq. ft. flat—a size that inhabitants of Dharavi have also been demanding—with home loans spread out over 20–25 years.
This megacity, which has one of the greatest population densities in the world, is characterised by numerous ironies, of which this is just one more. Slums make up 24% of Mumbai’s livable land and are home to over half of the city’s 12 million inhabitants. In the 2,397 slum clusters of the city, tiny shanties frequently house four to ten individuals who live in filthy, horrible circumstances with few services.
Mumbai’s homebuyers, on the other hand, are getting used to smaller spaces. In the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), a private developer’s 1BHK apartment has shrunk from approximately 470 sq. ft. in 1995 to 350 sq. ft., despite the ongoing surge in real estate prices, according to Rajiv Agrawal, co-founder of Saarathi Realtors and a former chief operating officer at Omkar Realtors and Developers.
Source: Hindustan Times
