Wednesday 13 March 2019

Mumbai (1) Dharavi, the World's Largest Slum

Slum Tourism - Morally Justifiable or Not?

Arriving in Mumbai

Jet Airways was 35 days from going out of business, but no one knew that at the time, and our 600km flight southeast from Bhuj to Mumbai passed without incident.

Bhuj-Mumbai, 600km

The only item on the day’s agenda was a ‘slum tour’ in the afternoon. We had been feeling uncomfortable about this since it was first suggested. I trusted Pioneer Tours judgement, but it sounded too much like spoiled rich kids in the early part of last century heading off to stare at the poor (curious little people!) and laugh at them behind their backs. Was I expected to go the full Bullingdon and burn some 2,000 rupee notes in front of a homeless person?

A rep from Pioneer met us at the airport with a car. Mumbai, he pointed out, is a city built on a peninsula and our hotel was near the tip. We could save a lot of driving up and down, he said, by doing the tour of the Dharavi slum now. We agreed - it was time to face up to our misgivings.

The Mumbai area has a superficial similarity to the Lake district and Furness peninsula.
Imagine Barrow-in-Furness had grown to cover the whole peninsula and nearly reached Windermere

To Dharavi

The slum guide was scheduled to meet us outside a branch of Coffee Day a few kilometres to the south. Dismissing the possibility that this was all an elaborate scam to steal our baggage (who could possibly want two weeks of unwashed laundry?) we loaded our cases into the car and were driven to the rendezvous.

We met our guide, D, a young man with a ready smile, at the appointed place and as it was 10.30 we had coffee. There are 1,700 Café Coffee Days [Update at end] across India. Bright, clean, and air-conditioned with a mainly young, affluent clientele, they feel a long way from the slums - though Dharavi is only a short walk away. As we talked to D, a man with a university education but born and brought up in Dharavi, we realised that although social gap might be wider than the physical gap, it was not as unbridgeable as we had presumed.

Slumdog Millionaire was set and filmed in Dharavi and he was keen to tell us how hurtful he found the film’s grossly inaccurate depiction of his home and fellow citizens. ‘These are not the idle poor,’ he told us (though these may not have been his precise words), ‘they work hard in thousands of small businesses, and they work with optimism, not despair.’ He was so determined to overturn the preconceptions the film had given us, I felt it was not the moment to tell him I have not seen Slumdog Millionaire.

After a short walk through the streets of Mumbai, probably India’s cleanest city, we were able to look down, literally though certainly not metaphorically, on its largest slum. D's attitude was that of a young aristocrat about to show off his ancestral pile and we were privileged to be there…

Looking down on Dharavi

…indeed we picked our way through sacks of God knows what as though they were Louis Quinze furniture.

Picking our way through the sacks

A Little History

Mumbai was founded 2000+ years ago on a group of seven islands. In medieval times they were owned by the Sultanate of Gujarat, but in 1534 Gujarat came under pressure from the Mughal Empire. The Sultan requested Portuguese support, offering them the islands in return. The Portuguese accepted, but as the islands were of no great importance they were passed to England in 1611 as part of the marriage settlement of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza. In 1668 they were leased to the East India Company at £10 a year and by 1675 the population had mushroomed to 60,000. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, land reclamation projects coalesced the islands into the peninsula, allowing Mumbai to grow into a major port. Its importance was further enhanced by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the population soon topped 1 million.

Deeper into Dharavi

Mumbai now has some 20 million citizens. The affluent areas near tip of the peninsula (see next post) can make you wonder if you are still in India, but like all successful cities, Mumbai drags in people from near and far hoping to share in the wealth. Dharavi, only 2km² in area, is home to a million such people.

Inside Dharavi

Dharavi may be packed with people, but the area D showed us was more packed with businesses - it is less intrusive to poke your nose into people's workplaces than their homes.

Dharavi businesses specialise in taking the waste from the rest of Mumbai, and further afield, and turning it into something useful. India is awash with litter, and the plastic recyclers will never be short of raw materials. Huge sacks of plastic bottles and containers are brought in by truck and sorted here. Then they are turned into pellets and taken away to be recycled into more plastic bottles.

Plastic Waste, Dharavi

Slightly more sophisticated work goes on nearby. Inside a dark doorway, redundant phones, calculators and tablets were being disassembled to retrieve the valuable material inside.

Recycling electronic equipment

Elsewhere we saw men skilfully fashioning waste wood into small shrines - every Hindu home needs somewhere to offer devotion to their favoured deity. D was keen to point out that all the workers here were Muslims.

We also saw workshops where soap was made. Waste grease and alkali are all that is need to make industrial soap, though not without fumes. There is little ventilation in Dharavi, and the welfare of workers is not the highest priority.

Soap Production (I think), Dharavi

Health and safety nightmares are not hard to find. Below an unprotected drive-belt whirrs round in a narrow space at just the right height to catch loose clothing, while behind a young man sits with his hand on or dangerously close to a rotating shaft. That will probably be fine for years, then one day something unexpected will happen and he will suddenly discover he has fewer arms than yesterday.

Poor health and safety practices, Dharavi

And it is not just the businesses that are dangerous, the whole of Dharavi is a fire hazard. Largely constructed from inflammable material there are no fire escapes, no fire extinguishers (that I saw, anyway), narrow walkways and ad hoc electrical systems. The tangles of cables that cause regular blazes in Indian markets were rarely visible, but they does not mean they were not lurking unseen.

A two-man chapati team worked with an open brazier. I can vouch for the quality of the product, if not the safety of the system.

Chapati Production, Dharavi

There are other food producers – Dharavi has many mouths to be fed -….

Food Production, Dharavi

….and small potteries, all of which work with high temperature equipment.

Pottery, Dharavi

Among all this industry, there are spaces for children to play…

Children's Play Area, Dharavi

…there is even some play equipment, though you do not usually see a boy sitting on a slide with his pet goat.

Play equipment and goat, Dharavi

A relatively upmarket leather shop stands beside the playground - a tannery is hiding somewhere in Dharavi. Hindus will not work with leather, leaving the field open for Muslims. I bought a leather belt here, something I had been meaning to do for ages, they kindly punched in a couple of extra holes for my putative future weight loss. [Update: It worked, too, until the Covid lockdown altered my lifestyle].

Leather Products, Dharavi

As we returned through the playground, we remarked on the number of children not in school. Minutes later we came across the two children below; Google informs me that Dharavi has over 100 schools so education seems readily available.

School children (with tangle of cables above)

Visiting Dharavi, Some Thoughts

It was not an awkward visit, largely because our guide, D, was at home in Dharavi and at ease with everyone we met. ‘Slum tourism’ (I had not realised it was ‘a thing’) started in the 1880s in London (Whitechapel, Shoreditch) and New York (Manhattan’s Bowery and Lower East Side) and carries on today in Mumbai, South African townships, Brazilian Favelas and an increasing number of other locations, including Baltimore’s blighted neighbourhoods (The Wire did for Baltimore what Slumdog Millionaire has done for Dharavi). Many carefully chosen words have been written about the motives of the tourists, though ‘curiosity’ usually comes top of the list. Journalists, always willing to be outraged, have written about ‘voyeurism’ and ‘poverty porn’ but having done it I think such trips, properly handled (as ours was) can be worthwhile experiences; ‘education’ is only ‘curiosity’ with a shirt and tie.

Location of the World's Major Slums,
From Wikipedia, Map by Walké, data from Mike Davis, reproduced under CC BY-SA 3.0

And Dharavi itself? D was endlessly upbeat about his home patch, stressing its industrious workforce and green credentials. He was largely right, there is much recycling and slum dwellers are not lazy, Dharavi is a huge reservoir of willing, if not necessarily skilled, workers. But therein lies the problem, they are doing jobs nobody else wants for wages we have difficulty getting our heads round – a 12-hour day will earn you US$16 a week, D told us, far less if you are the chapati maker. I have no evidence, but strongly suspect the workers are (ruthlessly?) exploited by those higher up the food chain who live in far greener parts of Mumbai.

I doubt, though, that their remuneration is significantly different from many of the people we met yesterday in and around the Great Rann of Kutch or the farmers whose families we visited last week in the northeast of Gujarat. And despite their grim surroundings, a Dharavi dweller can walk from the slum to the heart of India’s wealthiest city, and where there are great riches there are great opportunities. Sadly, for most we met in Dharavi those opportunities will never be more substantial than their dreams.

To the Tip of the Peninsula

Taking our leave of D, we were driven down the peninsula to the India Gate and checked into our hotel, a clean, relatively small establishment, nestling among far grander properties.

Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Mumbai, grandest of the grand

We took a walk round, Mumbai's Colaba district, the first tourist hotspot we had encountered on the whole trip. Shoeshine men approached me in droves, anxious to clean my sandals. I had not notice, but now I looked, they were certainly in need of it, the once brown leather hidden beneath the salty dust of the Rann of Kutch. But I had invested a lot of time and money in getting them like that, and I did not want them cleaned, not yet anyway.

I will say no more now, as this district forms part of tomorrow’s tour.

Mumbai seafront opposite the Taj Mahal Hotel

After extensive comparisons we dined in the Leopold Café. When the Pakistan based Lashkar-e-Taiba extremist group attacked 10 sites in Mumbai in November 2008, this café had been the one of the first. Gunfire and a grenade killed 10 here and injured many more.

Happily unaware of the above and no longer constrained by dry Gujarat, we started with a couple of large gins, and then drank Kingfisher beer with a vegetable biryani, rotis and chicken Lahore, our first meat in over a week. We spent a lot of money, at least by local standards, but enjoyed our return to the pleasures of unnecessary excess (with just a twinge of guilt).

Excess gin, Leopold's Café, Colaba, Mumbai

[Update: VG Siddhartha opened the first Café Coffee Day in Bangalore in 1996. By 2019 there were 1,752 branches and Siddhartha was seriously wealthy. On the 31st of July 2019 his body was found near the mouth of the River Nethravati in southern Karnataka. He had jumped from a bridge further upstream. There are questions over the profitability of Coffee Day and the tax situation of the company and Siddhartha himself. Ernst & Young are currently looking at the company’s books and cafés are closing.]

Gujarat

Part 1:Ahmedabad (1) Liquor Licences, Mosques and Tombs