"You should visit Dharavi once, you will be able to see it beyond these widely reported facts and statistics about it," said Varsha Gaikwad, a four-time MLA from the Dharavi Assembly constituency. A Congress leader, Gaikwad is a resident of Dharavi herself.
The largest slum of Asia, and the third largest in the world, the facts and the figures, the trivia, the pandemic, and the people at Dharavi have been making headlines for decades. The issue of the redevelopment of Dharavi, however, stopped making headlines until recently when the Adani Group won the bid for its revamp.
For 19 years, the Dharavi Redevelopment Project has lingered on. Scores of developers have backed out after winning the bids, scores of IAS officers having been CEOs of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), and the processes being reframed several times.
Whether the Adani Group will be able to make the redevelopment a success remains to be seen, but redeveloping Dharavi, a "city within a city" as they call it, is easier said than done.