We the Invisible was a report based on a 1985 census of about 6000 households, funded and carried out by the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers, to ascertain the scale and nature of Mumbai's pavement dwellers. Slum dwellings had proliferated in the city, and the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai had been granted permission to demolish pavement structures by a Supreme Court ruling.
"We the Invisible" revealed that pavement dwellers were not transient populations, but people who had lived for over two decades in the city. It showed approximately half of the pavement dwellers to be from the poorest districts in the state of Maharashtra, with the other half came from the poorest parts of wider India. Many came as victims of drought, famine, earthquakes or religious persecution or riots. Others came as a result of a complete breakdown in their livelihoods where they had been living.