Can India’s richest man remake Mumbai’s biggest slum?

Dharavi is a square mile of corrugated iron, concrete blocks and plastic sheeting in the middle of Mumbai, crammed with humanity. With perhaps one million residents, the slum is one of the world’s biggest. As a setting for outlandish rags-to-riches stories, it may be the best-known. In Slumdog Millionaire, which won eight Oscars in 2009, a Dharavi youth’s hardscrabble experiences helped him win the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. In Gully Boy, a more recent Bollywood potboiler, a slum-dwelling rapper overcomes prejudice to win the hearts of the city’s Westernised overclass. But Dharavi’s latest saga may be its most dramatic yet.

Slap bang in the middle of India’s space-constrained financial capital,

the slum is a huge obstacle to Mumbai’s

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and therefore India’s

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development.

The state government of Maharashtra, in which Mumbai sits, has for nearly two decades therefore been trying to entice private developers to Dharavi with promises of rich returns. Yet it has failed, chiefly because of the main impediment to most big infrastructure projects in India. Many of the slum-dwellers don’t want to move. And in India, poor people have votes.