Contested Property: Housing Rights, Land Monetization, and Institutional Histories of Slum Rehabilitation in Mumbai

This paper traces the three-decade history of Mumbai's Slum Rehabilitation Scheme since its inception in the early 1990s to reveal the contested character of property rights and development politics in contemporary Mumbai. Pushing back against a presentist tendency that puts disproportionate weight on emergent processes of neoliberalization and financialization, our analysis reveals the path dependent forms and institutional legacies of earlier political-economic arrangements and political contestations also shaping contemporary property rights and land policies. The case material draws from interviews, policy analysis, property market assessments, and newspaper and other media discourse on property rights and land monetization in Mumbai to trace the evolution of the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), the state agency responsible for managing slum redevelopment in Mumbai. In contrast to assessments that emphasize a singular shift toward neoliberalization and financialization, our findings reveal three broad period in which shifts in slum land regulation and redevelopment outcomes in Mumbai have occurred. These shigts are closely linked to broader economic and political transformations occurring at national and global levels. However, by centering the contestations between developers, residents facing displacement, political leaders, civil society organizations, and the SRA, we find that the agency of key actors and contestations between them have had as much influence on these shifts as overly structural accounts would suggest. These contestations have shaped the incremental tweaks that help explain the longevity and popularity of the scheme, even when similar initiatives have failed to take off in other Indian cities. By focusing on institutional change and the contested politics that have shaped efforts at slum rehabilitation and property rights claims in Mumbai, this research contributes both to understanding the historical evolution of slum redevelopment in Mumbai and the historicization of property rights, governance, and urban transformations in the Global South and more broadly.