The urban development in Mumbai has presented a choice between two concerns, the first being the city’s social policy, that required directing public investment towards the improvement of infrastructure and sanitation, and provision of adequate housing for most of its inhabitants; the second being the vision of its business and political class of developing a leading commercial and industrial center, or what Gordon (1978) calls its Urbs Prima in Indis policy.

While the latter has almost always been pursued at the expense of the former, the former has been reluctantly conceded only when both have been seen to be interdependent. in the decades after independence, the Urbs Prima in Indis ambition has been pursued under the aspiration of achieving ‘world class’ status by emulating other cities: Paris in the 1950s and 60s, New York in the 70s and 80s, Singapore in the 90s, and Shanghai in the first decade of the new millennium (Mahadevia and Narayanan 2008). Each of these periods, including the colonial period, has seen shifts in ‘slum’ discourse and policy, something that this essay will explore, along with the consequences of these shifts on the city’s poorer inhabitants. it appears that for more than a century, the municipal government and the various parastatal agencies operating in the city have been more efficient at dis-housing than housing the urban poor. however, the scale and intensity of dis housing since liberalization in 1990s have increased dramatically (ibid).