SLUMMIN IT

Mumbai exists in the minds of many as a collection of clichés: men playing cricket under an array of colonial Victorian-era buildings, extravagant Bollywood films and Slumdog Millionaire, a film that feeds directly into another of the more powerful and enduring images of Mumbai, the people who live in the city’s slums. Dharavi is the slum featured in Slumdog Millionaire and is one of India's largest slums, a 0.7 square mile city within a city that over a million people call home. The child actors in Slumdog Millionaire were cast from here and may well still live here.

A million people live in an area the size of a small farm (175 hectares)

Tourists can visit Dharavi as part of a guided tour to see how the other side of India live. We went with a tour group called Reality Tourism, who gives most of its earnings back to the communities that it visits. The tours are led by a local guide, who is sensitive to the needs of the local community. They also have a strict no-photo policy that showed me that this was a company concerned with the emotions of the people whose lives we were imposing ourselves on. My concern before agreeing to go on a slum tour was finding the right tour, hoping to avoid the wrong sort that would be exploitative and tacky, trading off the misery of others and leading to flawed judgements being cast by tourists. Images can easily be used to distort the realities of life in the slum, which misses the point of this tour, which is to showcase the innovation and enterprise inherent in the slum. No cameras means that small groups of people can travel relatively inconspicuously and without imposing too much of the lives of the slum dwellers. Only one person, a young Australian, out of our group of eight decided to take photos. She was unrepentant even when she was caught by our guide, shocked that she should have her rule-breaking pointed out publicly. She seemed to be the type of tourist who would fail to see the value of the work done here, instead focussing on the squalor and poverty of people’s existence here. 

Small-time industries like this are common in Dharavi

Visiting Dharavi was an eye-opener. A slum it maybe but it is different than what I expected- families had small established houses to live in, we only saw one rat and there is a staggering amount of industry (it has been called the heart of Mumbai’s small-scale industries), that caters to many industries from the more traditional pottery, leatherwork and textiles to the recycling that processes recyclable waste from Mumbai and other parts of India. Small-scale activities like this are believed to bring in about 665 million dollars a year. Women made poppadoms and laid them out to dry on cane umbrellas. There were schools and kindergartens, mainly funded by NGOs (the tour group we went with funds a kindergarten and a community centre) and temples, mosques and churches existed almost side by side. There was little sign of the sectarian violence of 20 years ago that led to violent clashes between Muslim and Hindu and the setting up of separate Muslim and Hindu quarters.

Working conditions are tough

Dharavi may have been one of the more humbling places I have been but that didn't mean that the people were humbled by their living conditions. Instead, these people seemed proud of Dharavi. Not once were we asked for money (rupees, chocolate, pen is a familiar mantra known by many travellers to India) by children as you would be on a regular basis when visiting sights. We walked down small alley-ways, catching glimpses of day to day life inside the small rooms that families call home, all the time being careful to avoid the low hanging roofs, open drains and potentially live wires that haphazardly exited out from the houses. Shyer kids peered out of the doorways while the braver ones were seemingly content to wave and say goodbye to the foreigners who intruded in their living quarters. One boy was especially proud of his pet dog, walking it on a shiny, new red leash, others played cricket in confined spaces. The residents of Dharavi are making the most of a pretty limited way of life.

The narrow alleys of the slum

That’s not to gloss over what Dharavi is. It is made up of a collection of people, from all over India, who work long hours for 120 rupees a day, about the price of a big bottle of beer, eking out an existence in conditions that most Westerners would find abhorrent. The men who work in the cottage factories work in conditions that are unpleasant and with materials that are probably toxic. Sanitation and hygiene is a major problem. There is only one toilet for every 1400 people, so many people resort to using creeks that run through the slum as a toilet, with an obvious consequence being the spread of disease as well as contaminating a potential water source in an area that is already suffering from problems with inadequate drinking water supply. Children play on rubbish heaps that double as toilets, taking advantage of one of the relatively few open spaces in the slum.

Where the laundry goes

But this is a tour that didn’t showcase poverty but made a story out of the success of the slum, if that’s not too much of an oxymoron. People in Dharavi are just like the rest of us, just less well-paid, working each day to make enough money to eat and pay the rent (the rent for an average house in Dharavi is said to be about $4 or 200 rupees). Slums are still part of the Mumbai cliché just like Victoria Terminus, the most imposing of the collection of colonial buildings or the men played cricket in whites dirtied from diving around on hard, dusty and uneven playing surfaces. But dig a little deeper and the cliché of slum squalor starts to slip away, replaced by a positiveness and self-belief that seems to drive much of Indian society today.

http://realitytoursandtravel.com/default.html

(All photos are sourced from the Reality tours website)