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.

Slum redevelopment is a tedious and complicated service, which often takes a long time to be completed. This is because of a wide variety of reasons. Slum dwellers are often reluctant to move out of the slum communities. This inertia can usually be attributed to fears of a substantial rise in living costs and that of an uncertain future. This uncertainty stems from the fact that Mumbai city is vulnerable to several problems such as monsoon floods, which especially affect slums built on low-lying areas (Chatterjee: 2010, 337). Damages to the slums are further exacerbated by haphazard urban development and the lack of basic facilities, which are issues to be addressed by contractors before they can redevelop the slums.