Across India, poverty is a palpable issue. There is no way to ignore the severity of the issue when at every traffic light it’s literally knocking at your window. If you had to pinpoint the epicentre, most people would turn their eyes to Mumbai, which has earned the dubious honour of being home to the world’s largest slum - Dharavi. For so many years the city has chosen to avert its eyes from the homeless masses across the city, or at best provide palliative measures to help these residents survive but now a larger operation is underway.

The Indian Railways have agreed to rehabilitate the 12 lakh slum dwellers who currently live on 78 hectares worth of land belonging to the Central and Western railways. This project has been undertaken in collaboration with the Maharashtra Government, the The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP Mumbai chief Ashish Shelar states that this scheme has been on the cards for years “As the slums are on the central government land, they cannot be rehabilitated under the SRA scheme of the state government. We have been demanding their rehabilitation as part of the BJP government’s policy of ‘housing for all’.”

Though this sounds outwardly positive, there is very little said by way of how this rehabilitation will be undertaken. The upheaval of 12 lakh people is no small task and without a solid plan trying to re-home this many people could end up more detrimental than beneficial and we hope that this project is followed through with the same good intentions with which it was conceived.