Dharavi, India's largest slum, eyed by Mumbai developers

MUMBAI, INDIA — Reincarnation is Kallu Khan's stock in trade.

His workshop floor is a swamp of cardboard strips hacked from salvaged boxes. Laborers scoop them up, work them over and give them new life as smaller boxes, which Khan then sells to stationery and packing companies.

In another warehouse a few doors down, dozens of rubber soles cut from discarded shoes also await a second chance. Next to these, a mountain of plastic castoffs -- toys, computer keyboards, car parts -- is separated by squatting workers, to be melted down into tiny pellets before being reborn in some new form.

One man's junk is another's fortune in Dharavi, the largest slum in India. With the economy and consumption soaring, recycling is good business here, a source of jobs for thousands, from scavengers to sorters to manufacturers.

Their collective toil is just part of the daily bustle in this teeming shantytown in India's financial and entertainment capital. About half a million people live and work in Dharavi -- recyclers, tailors, leather tanners, laundrymen, potters, cloth dyers and shopkeepers, all jammed into a single square mile of narrow alleys and rickety buildings made from corrugated metal sheets.

They are some of Mumbai's poorest residents. They also happen to be sitting on some of the world's most valuable real estate.

In a boomtown starved for room to grow, Dharavi occupies a prime location at the junction of two commuter rail lines close to the heart of the city. One of Mumbai's swankiest new business parks, the Bandra-Kurla Complex, a diorama of concrete and glass that shimmers in the tropical heat like a mirage of order and progress, looms just beyond a fetid bog of mangroves used by many of the slum dwellers as a toilet.

Because of their location, Dharavi's residents have been locked for years in a tug of war with government officials who look hungrily at such choice land and dream their own dreams of reincarnation.

If the officials get their way, the slum will be demolished and reborn as a gleaming collection of high-rise apartments, office towers and manicured parks. Residents who arrived before 2000 would be re-housed elsewhere in Dharavi in small flats of 225 square feet -- smaller than a suburban American garage -- while an influx of richer folk and big companies would turn the area into one of Mumbai's fashionable addresses.