While I was in Mumbai in January, I took part in a walking tour of one
of its biggest slums. I remember reading about these tours of Dharavi, one of Mumbai’s
most population-dense neighbourhoods, when they started a few years ago and
spawned a debate on ‘slum tourism’. “It’s voyeuristic to peek into poor
peoples’ lives,” slammed some. “This is a reality of Indian cities, and how 55%
of the population of Mumbai lives,” pointed out others. My take is that slums
are certainly a facet of every Indian city and ignoring them won’t make them go
away. But I don’t know if I would have
chosen to go one of these tours if I wasn’t researching a travel article on ‘off-beat’
walking tours in Mumbai...
As we began our walk, our guide Dinesh from Reality Tours shared a few pertinent facts about Dharavi. This is the third most densely populated
slum in the world. It’s home to one million people who live in an area of 1.75
square kilometres. This means each Dharavi resident has less than 2 square metres of
living space. “Poor people do not live here,” Dinesh told us. “Poor people live
on the streets. Everyone in Dharavi works.” There are over 10,000 industries
operating here with an annual turnover of approximately US$665 million. People
living in Dharavi have migrated here from all over India in search of a
livelihood. A neighbourhood like Dharavi represents the history of Mumbai, a
city of migrants. There are 100 distinct ‘nagars’ with people from different
regions, religions, castes, classes.
The streets and houses of some parts of Dharavi looked very similar to
other ‘modest’ housing I’ve seen in many Indian cities. Though homes here are
certainly modest in size, they are mostly permanent structures made of cement
and brick. But other parts were definitely more squalid, with narrow lanes and
cramped dwellings contrasting sharply with other sections of Dharavi. The huge
plastic drums lined up in the alleys are used by each household to store the
water only available for a few hours a day.
We passed barbershops and small provision stores, and fruit and
vegetable vendors. Dharavi also has its wide ‘main roads’ lined with shops and
small businesses. It looked like a self-sufficient community where everything
is available. Dinesh took us to a variety of workshops and small businesses in
the industrial area, where we saw bakers removing huge pans of puff pastry out
of wood-fired ovens, sewing, batik and embroidery workshops, others making
machine parts, leather bags, and even burqas for the Middle East market.
But it was the plastics recycling unit in what is called the 13th
compound which made the biggest impression on me. The air here was thick with
the toxic smell of burnt plastic. There is where the city’s plastic garbage
ends up. The workers here sort, clean, crush, shred, dye and melt plastic waste
into small pellets which are sold to manufacturers and then made into things
like umbrella handles and buckets. The workers squatted on the ground, sorting
shampoo bottles and plastic food containers into neat piles according to colour
and the type of plastic.
We carefully climbed a narrow metal ladder up to the roof where a
panorama of Dharavi’s rooftops of corrugated iron stretched all around us. A
mosque dominated the skyline. Photography was not allowed on this tour, but
this is a view I’ll remember for a long time.
Photos courtesy of Reality Tours
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