We started the tour by walking over a pedestrian bridge into the slum. From here on it we wouldn't b allowed to take any photos out of respect for the residents there. I was able to snap a quick pic of one of the main roads of the slum that we were approaching. It looks like a lot of roads here, actually, so I asked the tour guide what makes a slum a slum. He responded that the definition is when the government owns the land but the people living/working there own the buildings. Normally people will own both the land and the building of their homes, but in slums they only own the latter. There are both "official" and "illegal" slums - in the former the government has given permission for these people to live there, but in the latter they just moved in without any approvals. In either case the slum residents are constantly in danger of being evicted if the government decides it wants to use the land for some other purpose.
Dharavi is an official slum, meaning that it is provided with basic amenities and infrastructure by the government - power, water, sanitation, police, etc. It was established in the early twentieth century by the Brits and has evolved and grown into one of the biggest slums in the city (if not the biggest). It has about one million residents, which is staggering when yo think about it. The population density in this slum is far above that of the entire city (and Mumbai is one of the most densely populated cities in the world). The funny thing is that the people who live there aren't necessarily poor. Doctors and engineers live in slums sometimes. Their houses will be above average in terms of the standard of living, but they continue to live there even if they can afford to live elsewhere. Speaking of which - Dharavi is considered expensive by slum standards - primarily due to the central location of the slum within the city. Rent costs between 2-3k rupees per month (about $35-50) for a 10 sq meter flat. Between 5-8 people will live in each of these flats. The flats are of higher quality than I had been expecting, though. They are permanent structures rather than temporary housing and have tiled floors and upholstered furniture. Of course I only peeked into a few, and I may have just been seeing the richer homes, but I was surprised nonetheless.
The slum is divided into two parts - a commercial area and a residential area. Interestingly enough, the residents of the residential area don't work in the slum but instead work outside in higher paying jobs (housekeepers, taxi drivers, etc) than what is offered in the slums for employment. The workers in the commercial area are typically migrants from other parts of India - mostly the northeast - who have left their families behind to make money. They will work for 9-11 months a year and then go home to see their families during the rainy season or whenever they can. Since we are in the rainy season now, this means that the commercial area was a lot quieter than it normally is - though I still wouldn't call it quiet by any means.
The commercial area has a bunch of different industries and we were able to see people working as we toured around. One of the biggest industries there is recycling - trash pickers from around the city will collect bits of plastic and bring them to the slum, where they will be sorted, cleaned and then pressed into sheets that will then be sold to manufacturers. Thankfully this plastic is not allowed to be used for packaging foodstuffs but will go into things like plastic chairs and toys. Another type of recycling we saw was for paint cans. Workers will clean off the remnants of the paint inside the can by chipping it with a chisel, will take off any labels, beat the can into the proper shape (if there are any dents, etc) and then burn the paint can to finish the job before selling it back to paint manufacturers for reuse. The people doing these jobs don't make a lot of money at all - 100 rupees per day maybe, which is why they can't afford to live in the slums. Instead they will sleep in the factory for free - the owners allow this because it provides free nighttime security and ensures that the workers are always on time in the mornings. These people have low life spectacular due t the highly toxic fumes they encounter on a daily basis - the average worker lives to be 55-60. Some business Owens will distribute safety equipment - glasses, masks, etc. - but the workers don't wear them because of the heat, and the owners don't enforce any rules about safety compliance.
Another major industry in the slum is the production of leather goods. The skins of slaughtered animals will be delivered to the slum for washing and drying (this room smelled TERRIBLE as you can imagine), then they are sent outside the city for tanning. The city of Mumbai apparently prohibited animal skin tanning within the city - something to do with the large Hindu population I think. Then the tanned skins are returned to the slum and are turned into commercial leather goods. One of the crazy things about this is that the leather production facility has a lot of heavy machinery operating in the open with no security controls anywhere. A little kid could try to climb up on one of these machines and get seriously hurt! I asked my guide, who told me that the factory workers self-regulate safety concerns and make sure no one gets hurt. I don't know about you, but I didn't find that very comforting...
After the commercial district, we ventured into the residential area. This area is divided into a Hindu section and a Muslim section. These two religions used to live in the slum together, but a riot in 1992 between the two groups in response to a Muslim attack on a Hindu holy place elsewhere in India necessitated the separation. This riot was actually shown in Slumdog Millionaire if you remember (Side note - some of the movie was filmed in Dharavi). Apparently the tensions between the two religious groups are much better today, but you never know when they might reappear and cause violence. Of course commerce and relationships will cross these religious boundaries in the slums - for example a Muslim man makes hand carved shrines that Hindu people band to house their family idols in their homes. Neither side cares that a Muslim man made the Hindu religious artifact - its just business. The Hindu side of the slum tends to be nicer than the Muslim side - our guide explained that this was because most Hindu households have two incomes - one from the husband and one from the wife - whereas most Muslim households only have a single income (from the husband). I'm not sure what to make of that - on the one hand I'd like to be respectful of all cultures, and on the other, part of me is screaming "let the women work for crying out loud!"
The Hindu women do most of their work out of the home. They work as seamstresses, baking papadum, making pottery, or dyeing cloth to be turned into clothing. These careers allow them to stay at home with their children and still make some money. They will usually stop work around 4 to attend to domestic household duties. I admire these women - kneading dough in a sweltering kitchen with infants strapped to their backs and toddlers crying nearby. It makes it difficult for me to ever be able to complain about having to do "hard" work.
During our time in the residential section, we stayed off of the main roads and instead used the very small alleys - most have barely enough room for me person to fit through. There are twists and turns - the slum seemed like an endless maze of these pathways. Thankfully our guide knew exactly where we were going, but I can't imagine having to navigate around there on a daily basis. My sense of direction is bad enough when there are street signs and GPS - if I had tried to explore this slum on my own, you would have found me sucking my thumb in a corner somewhere, playing with Google maps on my iPhone and crying softly. Some people do try to explore the slums on their own - I'm thankful I went with a guide.
Surprisingly, safety isn't a big issue in Dharavi. They have a pretty strng police presence throughout the area. Also, the high population density creates an intimate sense of community. If someone were to commit a crime - no matter how minor - they would be shunned by the community and possibly punished outside of the legal system in other ways. Everyone here is poor, so it's very frowned upon to steal from or commit violence against one another - there's a feeling that "we're all in this together." as for foreigners, the likelihood that we would be attacked or robbed is small as well because the people in the slums don't want to attract negative attention from the government that may cause evictions. After all, the government does own the land, and if some foreigners were attacked on it, they would feel pressured by the international community to react in some way.
The biggest two issues facing the slum residents are sanitation and healthcare. Diseases Exist in These slums that people in the US haven't been at risk of contracting in decades. Apparently something like one third of the world's TB cases are in India, primarily in the slums. Polio, malaria, malnutrition, diphtheria, and just plain diarrhea cause deaths every day here. Granted, the slum was cleaner than I had expected, but that's not saying much. We passed by an impromptu garbage dump at one pint. People were picking through the trash for scraps, and a small child was defecating in the middle of the pile. Apparently about 30% of the residents don't use bathrooms but rather take care of their business out in the open. Most of the residents use community toilets - there are about 670 of these around the slums, and are not kept in very good condition. Plus an average of 1,500 people per day use each toilet, so you can only imagnine the level of filth in there. Only about 1% of the slum population has a toilet in their houses. Most people will just have a spigot for washing dishes and bathing (for the women - men and children bathe in the open). The slum only has access to running water for 2-3 hours per day, so people will fill up these huge plastic bins with water so that they have access to it throughout the day. They will boil water to make it drinkable and keep it in the clay pots that some of the local women make. The system seems to function just fine, but the work involved in just getting clean drinking water is distressing to my Western sensibilities.
We end the tour by heading to the tour company's NGO headquarters in the s,um. By this point, I am completely and utterly soaked to the bone. It started raining about 30 minutes not our 2 hour walking tour, and in a moment of pure genius I forgot to bring umbrella with me that morning. By the end of the tour, I looked like I had jumped into a lake fully clothed, purse and all. My feet made squishing noises in my shoes with every step I took. It was awful.
All in all, I am very glad that I took this tour. It gave me a perspective on the lives of millions of people who live in a very different Mumbai than the one in which I have been living. While I wouldn't choose this living situation for myself, it wasn't as bad as I had imagined it to be.
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