Two days ago, thanks to Sej's thorough research on Bombay last year, I went on a tour given by a company called Reality Tours and Travel. The tour was not of Colaba, or Haji Ali Pier, or the Gateway of India, but of Dharavi, the place famously known as Asia's biggest slum.
Sej and I had been looking forward to going on this tour for months (no worries, she vows to see it next time). We knew it was not just a slum, but an area buzzing with industry. The combination of poverty (or low income) and industry is particularly interesting to us as public health enthusiasts.
I met Davindra, my tour guide, at the Mahim train station in Bombay. I had no idea where we were going, but it turned out that the station was merely a meeting place; Dharavi is within minutes of Mahim.
Davindra is a slight teenager from a Gujarati family. He immediately tells me that he lives in Dharavi. He's studying "b comm" which will earn him a bachelors in business (commerce). He is the eldest of four children, and his three siblings are girls. When I recount these facts to my aunt, with whom I'm staying not twenty minutes from Dharavi (but worlds apart), she and her friend cluck sympathetically for Davindra's parents, who have been saddled with the financial responsibility of three girls.
But this tour isn't about Davindra, as curious as I am to know about his life. He's very knowledgeable about Dharavi; he was picked and trained by the travel agency for his friendliness and relative ease with the English language.
While many people call Davindra's home a slum, it's really not (and he is quick to tell me so). Dharavi takes up 432 acres of land in an excellent location of Bombay, close to the financial sector and the residential sector, as well as the seaface. There are officially (read: government-recognized) about 60,000 families living here, but the true number, Davindra says, is actually 900,000.
We make our way to the rooftop of one of the slum buildings, where plastic waste is being melted and reformed into little green pellets to sell as raw material. I see groups and groups of people on each roof, working with plastics, socializing, looking at us...everyone doing something. No one is sitting idle.
Davindra tells me as we survey all the activity around us that Dharavi is currently being threatened by a bid to turn the area into a special economic zone. Will it happen, I ask? He has no idea, but tells me that while the government promises to relocate families, it will be difficult (to say the least) for all these workers to shift their businesses and families to new locations. He recalls the government's vow to rehabilitate slum areas by 2005; they failed miserably. Despite this, a few Dharavi dwellers are supportive of the special economic zone project, somehow believing that they will be among the tiny fraction of those who will receiving new housing.
Throughout the tour, I see factories dedicated to making soaps, snacks, pots, and clothing. Recycling is an important industry in Dharavi, so after garbage is sorted by ratpickers, plastic trash is sold here to be reprocessed. The money Dharavi residents spend on buying plastic garbage, they recoup by selling remanufactured plastic pellets. They also recycle tin cans and barrels, peeling off labels, heating them up, and banging them back into shape before reselling them to various companies. This "slum" is also where ALL Mumbai leather comes to be tanned.
The tour continued with a stop to the school funded by Reality Tours and Travels, where slum children learn English (Davindra tells me that Dharavi parents know how important education is, and push their kids to complete at least a basic education). It ended with his inviting me to his own home, which is in the pottery area of the slum, dominated by families that migrated from Gujarati a couple generations back. His home is neat and tidy (it's literally as big as a hallway), and his mother and sister are napping on the floor in the kitchen. The home has tiled floors, painted walls, electricity, a ceiling fan, a TV, and a refrigerator. It is undoubtedly super-cramped, but it's not a slum dwelling by any stretch.
I don't know what will happen to Dharavi...will the special economic zone pushers win? I'm very wary of "slum rehabilitation" projects. I can see why it's frustrating that Dharavi takes over prime real estate in a city like Bombay (where some apartments are more expensive, per square foot, than anywhere else in the world), but if public health was more of a priority, maybe the first low-income families would not have felt the need to settle here back in the 1860s, when Dharavi was nothing more than a landfill.
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