Bugamma Alluri Dasu, 56, has been agonised about her imminent ouster from Dharavi since reports of the Adani group, one of India’s largest corporate houses, redeveloping Mumbai’s largest slum began to circulate. 

The 10x15-square-foot room – her most cherished possession – at the edge of the foul-smelling Mithi nullah was declared illegal by the civic body last March as she lacked the original papers proving its existence before the Maharashtra government’s cut-off date of January 1, 2000, for the regularisation of the slums.

In 2000, when the river bank was still wide, she and her husband erected bamboo poles in the marshy land, covered them with a blue tarp, and made the floor of their jhopda, or hut, out of hardened cement bags. 

“Yeh sab khaadi ka zamin tha, koi ghar nahi tha. Hum logo ne tadpatri auri goni banake ghar banaya, neeche pura kichhad aur gutter ka pani tha (This was marshy creek land, there were no houses here. We used tarps and sacks to make our home, and underneath was mud and water from the sewers),” said Dasu, a domestic worker, when recalling the area’s landscape more than two decades ago. 

It was the time homeless migrants like her – from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and other parts of Maharashtra – filled the marshy swamp of mangroves to construct tin-shed houses, stacking chokingly against, and on top of each other in the hundreds of narrow gullies, to create Dharavi’s Sector 5, its newest extension.

Salima Bi Shaikh, 54, has received a similar letter from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, declaring her three-storeyed structure in the Rajiv Gandhi Nagar Chawl ineligible. Although she has all the required documents proving her residence, a spelling error in names has landed her tenement on the ineligible list. Her name incorrectly appears as ‘Salim Abhishaikh’ in some official documents, while her husband Sarmat Shaikh appears as ‘Sarmat Soni’.

More than 60 percent of Dharavi’s tenements have such discrepancies or lack adequate paperwork. These ‘illegal tenements’ constructed until 2011, including Dasu and Shaikh’s homes, will be rehabilitated under the ambitious redevelopment project outside Dharavi, but at the cost of Rs 2.5 lakh, making their ouster from the current slum certain.