INITIATIVE
On Dharavi's Dream Wall: Parks, Clean Water And A Childhood Reimagined
Rakhi Kankane
Over 1,000 students from 40+ Dharavi schools imagined cleaner, greener neighbourhoods through art and science at "Mere Sapno Ki Dharavi 2.0" on Independence Day.
Trees where there is currently concrete. Parks where there is currently congestion. Homes with room to breathe, and neighbours who still gather outside them. These were the images more than 1,000 children from over 40 schools across Dharavi put to paper and canvas on India's 80th Independence Day, as part of "Mere Sapno Ki Dharavi 2.0", an inter-school drawing competition and science exhibition that asked the settlement's youngest residents a simple question: what should this place become?
The event, organised by Adani Navbharat Developers Pvt Ltd (ANDPL), the special purpose vehicle overseeing the Dharavi Redevelopment Project, in partnership with the Dharavi Social Mission, arrived at a pointed moment. Dharavi, home to roughly a million people and widely regarded as Asia's largest informal settlement, sits at the centre of one of Mumbai's most closely watched, and most contested, urban transformation efforts. Against that backdrop, organisers gave the redevelopment's youngest stakeholders a rare platform: not blueprints from planners, but drawings and science models from children imagining clean energy, water conservation, waste management and green public spaces.
Science exhibition added to drawing contest; students now build inventive solutions.
Nehru Science Centre director Arvind Paranjpye with the winners at the event.
This year's edition, building on a smaller pilot held in January 2025, added a science exhibition to the original drawing competition, pushing students to move from illustration to invention, hands-on models tackling the environmental and civic problems they see daily.
The winners captured that shift in ambition. Yashika Kori, from Morning Star English School, took the drawing prize for a vision of Dharavi with more trees and parks; Shaikh Ali of B.S.I.A.S English High School won the science exhibition for a project exploring more careful use of water and energy.
Students from Good Shepherd High School at the event.
The winners pose with their trophies.
Students from various schools participated in the event.
Students embraced the challenge with remarkable enthusiasm, building inventive, real-world solutions.
Nehru Science Centre director Arvind Paranjpye praised the "scientific temper" on display, while local artist Vandana Kori called the initiative proof that children's voices have "a place in the conversation about Dharavi's future", a future that, for the settlement's residents, remains very much under construction. For a community that has often had redevelopment plans made about it rather than with it, the exercise offered something smaller but symbolically significant: a chance for its youngest residents to be asked, however briefly, what they want.