Mumbai: A company hired by billionaire Gautam Adani will start collecting data and biometrics of one million residents of Mumbai's Dharavi slum from February as part of its redevelopment project.
The survey will be key in deciding who among the residents of Asia’s largest slum will be eligible to receive a free home in the area.
Eligibility Criteria
Only residents that have lived in Dharavi before the year 2000 will be eligible for the free housing. The last survey of the area was conducted 15 years ago and some estimates show about 700,000 ineligible inhabitants could be relocated outside Dharavi, which has sparked worries of lost livelihoods or high rent payments for those people.
The Survey
In the door-to-door survey, the Adani-led firm will use questionnaires to gather details of Dharavi occupants, whether they use the premises for residential or commercial purposes, proofs of ownership and biometric data, said SVR Srinivas, head of Dharavi Redevelopment Authority which is overseeing the project. “Teams will go to each and every house... biometric data will be collected,” Srinivas said in an interview. “Objective is that all eligible people should get houses and no ineligible people should get undue advantage,” he added.
Adani has hired global teams for the project and Srinivas said he expects the redevelopment to start within a year.
DRA to decide on the fate of slum-dwellers
The survey will be done in two parts with a pilot phase one executed within three to four weeks with a few hundred residents. The full exercise will take nine months. The final eligibility of the residents who will get free homes or relocated will be decided by the Dharavi Redevelopment Authority, and more staff will be hired soon to oversee the survey and the project, Srinivas said.
The redevelopment project of the 640-acres of Dharavi has been secured by the Adani Group in collaboration with the Maharashtra government.
