How slum redevelopment homes got bigger over the years

Mumbai: This week marks six months since the eligibility survey for the redevelopment of one of Asia’s largest slums commenced. Residents of around 14,000 tenements out of 300,000 and nearly 40,000 structures in Dharavi have been surveyed so far. The exercise is expected to be completed by March 2025.
Once the redevelopment project is completed, around 80,000 eligible families will bag tenements with a carpet area of 350 sqft in the heart of Mumbai, free of cost. This is above the Maharashtra government’s minimum benchmark of 300 sqft and 17% more than those offered in slum redevelopment schemes in the city, according to the Adani Group, which is spearheading the project.
Around 4 km east of Dharavi, in Wadala’s Bhakti Park area, an unfurnished 1BHK apartment with a 340 sqft carpet area is currently going for anywhere between ₹1.15 crore to ₹1.30 crore in the open market, depending on which floor the flat is on, according to a local real estate agent. For a 500 sqft flat, the size that Dharavi residents have also been demanding, a home buyer in Mumbai has to pay more than ₹1.5 crore, with home loans spread over 20-25 years.
This is just another of the many ironies that define this transforming megacity with one of the highest population densities in the world. Almost half of Mumbai’s 12 million residents live in slums, which account for 24% of the city’s habitable area. Tiny shanties in the city’s 2,397 slum clusters often accommodate four to 10 people living in unhygienic, deplorable conditions with few utilities.
When the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) was established in 1995, with the aim of making Mumbai slum-free, the minimum carpet area stipulated was 180 sq ft, which is smaller than a one-car garage. The Dharavi Redevelopment Project Pvt Ltd (DRPPL) proposes to almost double this. Developers operating in the SRA space said they have started getting demands from slum residents to increase home sizes to 350 sqft—to be at par with Dharavi.
In contrast, Mumbai’s home buyers are adjusting to shrinking spaces. A 1BHK apartment constructed by a private developer in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) has shrunk from around 470 sqft in 1995 to 350 sqft, even as realty prices continue to soar, said Rajiv Agrawal, co-founder of Saarathi Realtors and former chief operating officer at Omkar Realtors and Developers.
According to data shared by ANAROCK Property Consultants, a real estate marketing firm, the average flat size in MMR has shrunk by almost 43% since 2013-14. Back then, a 3BHK apartment would have an average carpet area of just over 960 sqft, which reduced to 700 sqft in 2018 and then further shrunk to 550 sqft.
However, while residents of Mumbai’s slums are getting bigger homes, they aren’t necessarily livable.
Slum-free Mumbai
Pre-1995, a committee headed by former chief secretary Dinesh Afzalpurkar made recommendations to the then Shiv Sena-BJP government to establish the SRA and provide 180 sq ft homes to eligible slum dwellers for free. The freed-up land would be utilised to create saleable units.
In the last 29 years, successive governments, in an effort to woo their vote bank, have extended the cut-off date for eligibility and increased the size of the homes given under the SRA scheme. The eligibility cut-off dates have extended from 1985 to 1995 to, now, 2000. Owners of tenements purchased between 2000 and 2011 can benefit from the scheme by shelling out ₹2.5 lakh towards the cost of construction.
Meanwhile, the carpet area of houses allotted under the scheme has progressively increased, from 225 sq ft to 269 sq ft to 300 sq ft. Since 2018, in line with the central government’s affordable housing scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, the Maharashtra government has been giving houses measuring 315-322 sq ft.
In the case of Dharavi, which houses almost a million people across 590 acres, the residents eligible for homes under the DRPPL have been promised 350 sqft, which is 50 sqft more than the norm. This additional space is as good as a separate room. Calculations and estimates show that the project will generate a revenue of ₹20,000 crore.
“As years passed by, the governments took a policy decision to revise the carpet area to provide better permanent alternative accommodation to the slum dwellers,” said Rama Mitkar, deputy chief engineer of the SRA. SVR Srinivas, chief executive of DRPPL, said the fundamental premise of the project is housing for all in humane conditions. “Everyone who is eligible will get a good quality, spacious home in Dharavi,” he said.
Agrawal, who has been managing slum-related projects since the SRA’s inception, said the increase in area is “purely based on the demands of the slum dwellers, who keep seeking bigger rehabilitated homes to accommodate their growing families.” The Adani Group has offered bigger homes than what is mandatory to ensure there isn’t resistance to the project, he added.
Vertical slums
That said, bigger homes does not necessarily mean better or even livable homes. Among the 1,697 SRA schemes in Mumbai, as per its official website, some are success stories, while others end up being vertical slums with a myriad of problems, like poor ventilation and natural light, lack of maintenance and cleaning, overflowing choked drains, dirty water in taps, a shortage of lifts in increasingly tall buildings, and overall poor construction quality resulting in issues like leakage.
The Navjeevan SRA in Malad East made news on September 5 with the death of four labourers during the construction of one of the four buildings. Vishnu Suvare, a resident of the SRA project, claimed that while the first meeting with the developer took place 18 years ago, construction commenced in 2014 and about 400 of the more than 700 families were handed over their tenements only in 2022. One building is still under construction.
“Within a year of us moving in, we have been adjusting ourselves to residing in a home that has perennial leakage. Our complaints are falling on deaf ears,” said Vishnu Chaurasia, another Navjeevan SRA resident.
One of the success stories is the 42-storey Dhobi Ghat SRA project in south Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi area, where four such buildings comprise the rehabilitation component. Several of the nearly 16,000 residents have an unobstructed view of Mahalaxmi Racecourse, the Mumbai Coastal Road and the Arabian Sea.
Govt becomes slum developer
Despite these issues, SRA schemes are here to stay in a city where five in every 10 residents lives in a slum. In August last year, the Maharashtra government decided that apart from private players, government agencies would also partake in the mission to make Mumbai slum-free.
In a joint venture with the SRA, state agencies such as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), the City And Industrial Development Corporation Of Maharashtra (CIDCO), the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC), and the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (Mhada) will redevelop 228 slum pockets across MMR.
All these agencies have been tasked with taking up the non-core mandate of rehabilitating slums. Put together, they will rehouse 219,000 eligible shanties in the years to come, compared with 240,000 homes that the SRA has been able to deliver in the last 29 years.
MMRDA has launched among the first such redevelopment schemes that will free up open land that has been encroached upon for decades. On September 3, chief minister Eknath Shinde, in an official ceremony, handed over rental cheques to the residents of Kamraj Nagar and Mata Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar in Ghatkopar to mark the commencement of the MMRDA’s slum redevelopment project. Under this project, spread over 33.15 acres, 16,575 slum dwellers will be allotted 300-sqft houses.
“We will get additional housing stock of approximately 5,000 homes under this scheme,” said an MMRDA official. “This redevelopment project will generate 75 lakh sqft built-up area for commercial sale and is estimated to fetch ₹10,000 crore from developing the space.
The number of projects undertaken by these agencies are as follows: MMRDA (5), BMC (77), Mhada (24), MSRDC (46), CIDCO (6), Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (57), Mahatma Phule Renewable Energy & Infrastructure Technology (57) and Maharashtra Housing Development Corporation (1).
Will there be further revisions in the size of homes given to slum dwellers? “It is very likely,” said a developer who requested anonymity. “Vote bank politics can further push the envelope, while the law abiding and taxpaying citizen buying a home continues to adjust their families in a shrinking space.”
However, there’s more to it than vote bank politics. There also has to be a balance of multiple factors, such as the economics, planning and the humane side of rehabilitation, said retired bureaucrat UPS Madan, who worked at Mhada. “Any family should ideally have at least a bedroom and a common area. Even the aspirations of the people need to be factored in.”
That said, Madan believes there must be a limit for the size of homes, adding that politics should not come into the picture. “Another methodology that can be looked at is contributory form to provide bigger homes, one of which could be paying to get a bigger home in the housing project,” he said.