Young Blood: Mumbai Will Move You!

So imagine you're sitting at home, just enjoying a rest after a long hard day at work. The family are there with you and while you're chatting away you hear a knock at the door: someone from the local council has popped round to let you know that they are just doing some building work in the area... Oh and you have a couple of hours to move yourself, and any possessions, out of the house because the council are about to smash the s**t out of it.

You wouldn't stand for it would you?

Well the poorest residents of Mumbai in India have had to put up and shut up as their slums are being demolished to make way for the latest wave of modern India's 'development'.

A commission set up by the city has gone ahead with plans to wipe out one of Mumbai's largest slums in a suburb called Dharavi, which houses 57,000 families, in order to make way for new commercial and residential properties. UPS Madan, project director for the Mumbai Transform Support Unit, says the idea behind the project is to bring "decent living" to the city's slum dwellers.

Bollocks it is.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer in development, but there is a certain way to go about it and this is not it. The people of Dharavi have been given no compensation or even a place to live. The government has told them that when the £2 billion building project is completed in a couple of years the poverty stricken families can each have one of the newly built flats, but until then, they have to find another slum to live in or just stay on the streets.

And if that wasn't enough for these people, there is the problem of India's poorest trying to make a living while they are homeless. You see, most people who live in the slums offer some sort of service from outside the home. A blacksmith or a recycled goods seller would carry out the work on the street in front of their home, but with no house to work in front of, their business (and income) disappears.

"The Dharavi redevelopment should not be thought of as just a housing project. Almost every house is involved with some kind of economic activity," says Sundar Burra, a campaigner for the slum population.

As India tries to turn itself into one of the industrial and economic world leaders, their democratic and humanitarian values appear to have been shoved to one side. Back in July, 2007 around 15,000 people living in poverty marched through Mumbai to let the government know they opposed the redevelopment. But they were just ignored and the plans went ahead anyway. The same process has already happened to slums in India's third largest city, New Delhi.

A heartbroken slum resident, Hanso Devi, told a CNN reporter in New Delhi: "They did it so fast that there was no time to take out anything. And the bulldozer broke everything on the way".

It might be crowded, with human faeces all over the streets, and no supply of clean water, but this is 'home' to thousands of people and they can only sit back and watch whilst their property is bulldozed to the ground.

So I'll ask you again, would you stand for this?