1 A Comprehensive Analysis of the Slum Redevelopment Market in Mumbai Madhumitha Ardhanari 1) Introduction A highly fascinating market to analyse is the market for slum redevelopment in Mumbai. Mumbai is one of the most bustling cities in Maharashtra, India. About seven million people in Mumbai live in slums, which constitutes more than half of the city’s population. The country’s government has attempted to clear the slums since the 1950’s with little success in order to make way for economic development. This strategy was later recognized to be ineffective and the government’s focus turned to slum redevelopment in the 1970’s. However, the slums in Mumbai continue to be impoverished and persist. In fact, Dharavi, which was known as Asia’s largest slum for a few decades, was surpassed in size by four other Mumbai slums in 2011. This means that slums in Mumbai are expanding while the quality of living in slums has not improved significantly. At the same time, redevelopment projects in slums in the city garner lucrative profits, a single project can fetch over Rupees 7,000 crores (approximately 1.29 billion USD). The most conventional reasons for this sluggishness of the market for slum redevelopment has been attributed to bureaucratic inefficiency and governmental corruption. For this reason, many scholars writing on this discourse argue for less state intervention and more private regulation for a more efficient market. However, these calls for lesser state regulation are inadequate as it is important to understand the unique challenges faced by the government, institutions and inhabitants of Mumbai before being able to decide what level of regulation is the most appropriate for slum redevelopment in Mumbai. I argue that the market for slum redevelopment in Mumbai requires a closer analysis of the stakeholders and regulatory structures present in order to evaluate the quality of state intervention. It is important here to distinguish the service of slum redevelopment from slum clearance. Slum clearance refers to the removal of informal settlements by the government. It was a policy adopted by the Indian government in the 1950’s. Since the social value of slums in India was largely ignored, slum communities were often uprooted in this process. Moreover, there were often few safety nets for the people moving out of the slums, who became further impoverished. Slum redevelopment, in contrast, refers to large-scale improvements to the slum landscape that are targeted at enriching slum communities rather than eradicating them. This is done through installing basic infrastructure such as building proper housing and services such as electricity, clean water and sewage for the communities in question. Moreover, slum redevelopment is not simply imposed by the government; it stems out of the close relationship between the central, state and local governments and slum communities. The current situation in Mumbai is an upshot of over 60 years of policy planning. Slum redevelopment is important in opening up ways to improve living standards in developing countries while not removing agency from slum communities. Since Mumbai is a city with some of the biggest slums in Asia, studying the city’s market for slum redevelopment can provide meaningful lessons to other developing countries so that their development can be more equitable – where an increase in economic wealth is translated to the poorest of the country. Moreover, learning points from Mumbai can also inform theory.