Dharavi revamp: Residents plan protest if work doesn’t start soon

An association of Dharavi residents on Sunday threatened to protest if the state government does not award the Dharavi Revamp project to Seclink Technology Corporation (STC), which won the bid in February.

The ambitious Dharavi Revamp project aims to turn India’s largest slum into a plush township.

Rajendra Korde, who heads the Dharavi Redevelopment Committee (DRC), said there was no reason to deny STC the work.

“For the past 15 years, we have only been shown dreams of redevelopment. Now that a company has managed to get the tender, the state has been dragging its feet for the past six months. We are living in unhygienic conditions. If the project does not start now, we will adopt various ways of protests,” said Korde.

He threatened “rallies, raasta roko, rail roko and hunger strikes” if their demands were not met at the earliest.

The Seclink Group, which was founded in 2017 and is based in United Arab Emirates (UAE), will be funded by the Royal family of the UAE. It had won this project in the tendering process, as it quoted Rs 7,200 crore, outbidding its competitor Adani Infrastructure, which bid at Rs 4,539 crore. The revamp plan envisages giving 350 square-feet carpet area homes along with a handsome corpus to existing residents.

The state has referred the matter to the advocate general, seeking clarifications and the matter is on hold right now.

However, sources in the state government said there is a plan to re-tender the project.

Ravindra Waikar, state minister for housing, said the Dharavi revamp project will soon be a reality.

“There are some technical issues on which we need some clarity, and we will start the project soon,” said Waikar.

Since its inception on February 4, 2004, the project has faced a lot of problems. The two main hurdles incudes the eligibility factor, where it was found that 63% people in sector 3 are non-eligible, and the other was the large scale pull-out by developers owing to the flip-flop stance by the successive government.

First Published: Aug 19, 2019 00:25 IST