'Our Homes Don't Exist on Paper': Dharavi Residents Speak Out on Identity Photo Duplicates Blocking Relocation Claims

At least 3,400 household files submitted under the Dharavi Redevelopment Project have been flagged by authorities for containing duplicate or mismatched biometric photographs, according to residents and community organisers who have been tracking the verification process since early 2025. For families waiting on resettlement eligibility letters, a single image mismatch in the database can mean months of bureaucratic limbo, and, in some cases, the loss of their entitlement entirely.

The problem sits at the intersection of two long-running failures: the rush to digitise decades-old paper records from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, and the inconsistent way in which Aadhaar-linked photographs have been mapped to household survey data collected door-to-door across Dharavi's 15 sectors. When the two systems disagree on a face, the file gets frozen. No letter goes out. No flat gets allocated. The family waits.

A Neighbourhood That Cannot Prove Itself

Residents in Sector 5, near the 90 Feet Road corridor that runs through the heart of Dharavi, say the photograph duplication issue first surfaced in their area around November 2025, when a batch of verification notices began arriving at the Rajiv Gandhi Nagar transit office carrying rejection codes. Community workers at the Dharavi-based NGO Apnalaya, which has been running documentation camps in the settlement for several years, say they have assisted hundreds of families in navigating the dispute process, though the backlog keeps growing faster than it clears.

Families describe a frustrating cycle. A resident submits a correction request to the Slum Rehabilitation Authority office at Bandra-Kurla Complex. The file is sent back to the survey agency for re-verification. The survey agency says the discrepancy originates in the Aadhaar database maintained by the Unique Identification Authority of India. UIDAI's helpline redirects back to the SRA. Three months pass. Nothing moves.

One woman from Kumbharwada, a potter's colony within Dharavi that dates back more than a century, described spending 11 separate days traveling to government offices across the city since January 2026, her household's file bounced between the SRA's Bandra-Kurla Complex headquarters and the collector's office in Fort. She has not been attributed a flat number despite her family's survey eligibility having been initially confirmed in 2024.

Numbers That Tell an Incomplete Story

The Dharavi Redevelopment Project, currently being driven by the Adani Group under a state government contract awarded by the Maharashtra government, covers roughly 240 hectares and is expected to rehouse more than 68,000 families. The first phase of transit accommodation was projected to begin moving eligible residents in 2025, though the photograph-duplication dispute has contributed to delays for a subset of households. The SRA has not released a public figure for how many files are currently suspended pending image verification.

Community surveyors working independently in the area estimate that affected households are concentrated heavily in Sectors 1 through 5, which border Sion to the north and Mahim to the west. Those sectors were among the last to complete door-to-door enumeration, meaning their data was digitised fastest and with less manual cross-checking. The mismatch rate in those sectors appears higher than in sectors surveyed earlier, though no official breakdown has been published.

Documentation camps run by Apnalaya and the legal aid clinic at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Deonar have been processing correction affidavits since February 2026. TISS staff have advised affected residents to obtain a fresh Aadhaar photograph update first, a process that itself requires a booking at an enrolment centre, with the nearest one for many Dharavi residents located at the BKC post office on Bandra-Kurla Road.

Residents with frozen files should begin by collecting a certified copy of their original survey receipt, issued during the 2023-24 enumeration, and presenting it alongside a fresh Aadhaar photograph update at the SRA's dedicated grievance window, which operates on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at the BKC headquarters. Legal aid workers at TISS have also flagged that households with files frozen beyond 90 days may have grounds to file a formal appeal under the Maharashtra Slum Areas Act. The window for such appeals is 180 days from the date of the initial rejection notice, a deadline that several November 2025 filers are now approaching.