Mumbai Migrant Families Excluded From Housing Policy Decisions Reshaping Their Lives

The notices arrived at Dharavi's 90 Feet Road in late June, laminated sheets in Marathi and Hindi, taped to corrugated iron doors and chai stall shutters, informing residents that their eligibility surveys under the Dharavi Redevelopment Project would begin the first week of July. For the roughly 6,500 families in Sector 5 alone, the paper was the first official communication many had received in months.

Mumbai's migration housing debate has rarely been louder or more unsettled. The Adani-led Dharavi Redevelopment Project Authority, operating under the Maharashtra government's 2022 mandate, is attempting the largest slum rehabilitation exercise in Asia, a 259-hectare site housing an estimated 800,000 to one million people. But the arrival of monsoon, combined with renewed tension over who counts as a "eligible" resident, has pushed community frustration past a tipping point this week.

The Eligibility Fight

The policy problem is specific and consequential. Under the current redevelopment framework, only residents who can prove continuous occupation of their Dharavi structure prior to January 1, 2000 qualify for a free 350-square-foot rehabilitated flat. Anyone who arrived after that cutoff, and Dharavi absorbed enormous migration from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh throughout the 2000s and 2010s, faces either a market-rate purchase or relocation to transit camps as far away as Mahul, a heavily industrialised neighbourhood near the Trombay refineries roughly 18 kilometres from Dharavi.

Community workers from Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan, the housing rights organisation that has campaigned in Dharavi for over a decade, say the pre-2000 cutoff is being applied inconsistently. In some lanes near Kumbharwada, families with decades-old ration cards are being asked to produce additional proof of residence. Families near the Dharavi Main Road who arrived in 2003 or 2005 are receiving rejection notices without formal hearings. The organisation has documented over 1,200 disputed cases since March 2026.

The voices from inside these lanes carry a consistent theme: the process is happening to them, not with them. Residents describe survey officers spending less than ten minutes per household. Women running home-based businesses, the leather and pottery workshops that make Dharavi one of Mumbai's most productive micro-industrial zones, generating an estimated ₹5,000 crore annually, say nobody has asked what happens to their livelihoods when structures are demolished.

Monsoon Pressure and the Transit Camp Question

The timing matters. July is when Mumbai's housing vulnerabilities become impossible to ignore. The city's disaster management records show that between 2019 and 2024, over 40,000 people were displaced annually from informal settlements during the June-September monsoon, with Dharavi, Kurla and Govandi among the most affected zones. This year, after a particularly heavy June, the India Meteorological Department's Santacruz station recorded 812mm of rainfall in June, well above the 30-year average, the pressure to relocate families has intensified.

But residents being moved to transit accommodation are raising alarms about where that accommodation is. Mahul, the most commonly cited transit location, sits adjacent to the Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum refinery complexes. A Bombay High Court order from 2019 had previously called Mahul "unfit for human habitation" due to air quality. Community groups say this order is being quietly bypassed. The Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority has not publicly addressed the Mahul air quality question in its 2026 communications about Dharavi transit.

For families whose working lives are built around proximity to the garment markets of Bandra-Kurla Complex or the wholesale trade at Masjid Bunder, a transit camp 18 kilometres away is not a temporary inconvenience. It is an economic rupture.

What happens next depends heavily on the July survey outcomes. The Dharavi Redevelopment Project Authority has set an internal target of completing household surveys in four sectors by September 30, 2026. Housing rights organisations plan to file fresh representations with the Maharashtra government before July 15, demanding an independent grievance officer embedded in each sector. For families on 90 Feet Road and the lanes branching off Dharavi Cross Road, the answer they need is simpler: whether anyone in an official position is listening at all.