M-East Ward (henceforth M Ward) is one of the twenty-four administrative divisions of Mumbai and is home to over 800,000 people. Spread over 32 square kilometers, it is one of the poorest areas in the city. The child malnutrition levels in the area are comparable to Sub-Saharan Africa. Life here is full of poverty, insecurity and everyday violence. This is a result of concentrating several hazardous and ‘negative’ land uses in this area over the years, rather than distributing them across the city. It also reveals a neglect of the vulnerabilities of people in the ward.

At the same time, the ward bears testimony to the capacity of these very people to struggle against adversity, to hold on and improve the place through their effort and ingenuity, and to counter the forces that produce ongoing peripheralisation: a capacity, in other words, to argue for a more just city. The stories and processes of peripheralisation are deep and varied. They include concentration of environmentally hazardous activities and socially harmful uses, waves of relocation and periodic displacements, and an overall lack of investment in mobility, social infrastructure and public spaces. We recount some of these in what follows.

People in the ward are predominantly Dalit, Muslim and from other socio-economically vulnerable groups. Many issues faced by these groups are exacerbated by the secondary citizenship of the urban poor, the lack of official recognition of their life, the lack of data and knowledge about several processes at work, and patchy solutions that lack accountability and adequate resource support.

M Ward is thus a periphery that continues to absorb the costs of the development of the city at large, symbolising the unevenness and polarisation within a city that aspires to be world-class.