Dharavi Slum

On my third day in Mumbai I go on a tour of Dharavi slum. Initally I am uncomfortable with the idea of paying to be shown round a slum as though it were a zoo. My hostel tells me that 60% of the money I pay goes to the slum, 30% to the guide, and only 10% to the hotel. Im not completely convinced but it makes me feel a bit better.

Our guide meets us (there are 12 all together) outside the hostel and says we will be taking the train. His name is Devdan, he is 17 and lives in Dharavi. He tells me that he does between five and seven tours a week. The money he gets pays for his studies in accounting. The train takes about half an hour. It has metal seats and big open doors which people hang out of some what unnecessarily as there is plenty of room inside, but maybe it is cooler that way. On the way several blind beggars wonder up and down the asiles singing for money. When they get to the end, the person they bump into turns them around and they carry on. At one point we hear a loud clap as a young woman in a sari enters the carridge and blesses every passenger before clapping some more and coming around again asking for money. The girl next to me, who has been travelling in India for three months, tells me that the woman is a hermaphrodite, and considered lucky. 

When we get to our stop we cross the bridge which gives us a view of the slum. It is not quite as good as the view you get from the window of a plane, of which the undercarridge almost skims the corrugated iron and tarpaulin roofs threatening to knock the whole lot over, as you land in Mumbai airport. Devdan tells us that the slum is one square mile and home to one million people, with one loo to every fifteen thousand people. 

It turns out that my concerns about paying to view people in poverty were unnecessary. As we are led off the main street running though the centre of Dharavi (where there are shops, resturants and even banks) and into the narrow alleys we see some of the estimated fifteen thousand one-room busissness and factories that run out of Dharavi. My guide book tells me that a quarter of a milliom people are employed in these factories amd they turn over $700 million a year. The biggest of these businesses is waste recycling, particually plastic. We visit one factory where two men are sorting out different coloured plastics and another is putting them into a chipper without much concern for his fingers, although as far as I could see he still had them all. Every now and then a group of children come in carrying huge bags of plastic, mainly bottles, on their heads to be sorted. I think about the huge collection of water bottles I have already collected and disgarded and feel slightly less guilty. We are told that the chipped plastic is then sent to another factory to be made into rope for jewellery. We see lots of other factories including a leather works and textiles, both of which have huge industrial machines crammed into tiny rooms which had probably been built around them as they would not have fit through the tiny doors or though the alleys. 

Next we go into a residential area. Here the alleys are even narrower and enclosed over head but so low that even I have to duck to avoid hitting my head or walking into the low hanging electrical cables. Devdan tells us that all of Dharavi has 24hr electricity and that every child goes to NGO schools until the age of sixteen. There are women and children sitting on door steps all of which are spaced about a meter apart. The women are all beautifully dressed in colourful, bead and sequined trimmed saris and wear lots of jewellery. There are less than half the number of women on the streets as men, but the homes are cool and quiet, so this seems to me a good idea rather than forced domesticity. Maybe they don't think so, but they seem to find it funny that we would want to walk around in the middle of the day. 

We weave our way along the paths for several minutes until we find ourselved out into a big open space piled high with litter, topped with playing children. Devdan tells us that the area had been cleared as the start of a $40 million redevelopment programme. In return for eviction and the demolotiin of Depharavi, residents would get rooms in the new appartments, hospitals and colleges, there is almost universal objection. A family would get 255 square feet, less than many have now, and there would be no room for their businesses. Instead of a brand new development, residents say they want simple improvement of the conditions they already have.

 Our tour ends at one of the locations the film 'Slumdog Millionaire' was filmed. I don't recognise it. Devdan tells us that lots of people living in Dharavi did not like the film as it showed none of the shops, businesses and schools but 'only the very very bad bits'. I agree. My preconception about the "largest slum in Asia" as a miserable place full of desperately poor people with no occupation other than begging was completely wrong. The residents said they felt lucky to live there rather than on the streets, everyone had a home, electricty, a job, education and a community.