This is the fourth in a series of papers chronicling the negotiations over plans to redevelop Dharavi, Mumbai’s vast informal settlement. It also describes current plans to redevelop land beside Mumbai’s international airport, where more than 85,000 households live on a 110-hectare (275 acres) site. In both these settlements, each with populations equivalent to a sizeable city, the government plans appear to be driven more by an intent to support commercial
developments than to address the needs of their residents.

For long we have been fed lies. Mumbai has no scarcity of houses and the key to the truth lies in using digital technology to unlock the city's housing potential.

India has the world’s second largest urban population (after China). This paper shows the large disparities within this urban population in healthrelated indicators. It shows the disparities for child and maternal health, provision for health care and housing conditions between the poorest quartile and the rest of the urban population for India and for several of its most populous states.

Replicating Manhattan with all its imposing skyscrapers in Mumbai does sound like a dream come true. But do highrises offer a sustainable solution for our land starved metros that are rapidly suffocating under the weight of an ever increasing populace and a crumbling infrastructure?

The politics of inclusion in the Sabarmati Riverfront Development project, an urban mega-project in Ahmedabad, has been predicated on a “flexible governing” of the residents of the riverfront informal settlements. Such flexible governing has allowed state authorities to negotiate grass-roots opposition and mobilisation, modify the project to gentrify the riverfront further, and even officially represent the project as inclusive although questions of social justice have been profoundly disregarded over the past decade and continue to be insufficiently addressed.