Mumbai's Five-Star Slum

Dharavi in Mumbai, India is said to be the biggest slum in all of Asia. An estimated one million people are squeezed into roughly 1,6 square kilometres – leaving each person with a good square metre and a half on which to go about their days. It is not a welcoming place for people who have grown up in more bountiful surroundings. But Dharavi’s inhabitants are an ingenious lot, and the result is a slum with prospects, complete with markets, banks, police station, schools and mostly paved – although very narrow – alleyways.

 [Although quite decent conditions for a slum, it’s still a far cry from being child-friendly]

 

Belonging partly to both south and north Mumbai, the criss-crossing of the electricity grid enables Dharavi to draw upon a 24 hour electricity supply – which in itself is probably more than can be said of a few other parts of India’s most populous city. The opportunity is not lost on the Dharavi locals and the many nifty migrant workers who come to largely from Bihar province. The township generates an annual turnover in the heights of 600$ million making Dharavi quite an industrious part of Mumbai.

Although not highly sophisticated, and often hazardous to one’s health, people here have located quite a few niches which can sustain them and their crowded little part of India’s city of light. Cans and containers are collected from all of Mumbai, and washed if possible, or smelted into aluminium bars if not (few other slums can, to my knowledge, boast of having a furnace to effectively smelt metal). Clay pots are being baked outdoors. Soap and hides are brought in for processing and packaging. It’s a curious mix of trades which, blended with the sewer processing plant on the area’s eastern shoulder, are sure to tickle your nose rather unpleasantly more than once.

 [Handling the clay pots which are manufactured here]

More serious health concern is attached to the one ton of plastic which is recycled here every day; sorted by colour, broken into more easily handled pieces, washed, and smelted into strips which are in turn sold back to the industry. This is toxic material; the kind of plastic which would compel factories to affix warnings on their products discouraging contact with children. No such regulations in place for the workers here though. But making a living always comes first.

The Muslim man who manufactures Hindu shrines is a case-in-point. There have been animosity between the area’s Muslims and Hindus in the past; the 1992-93 Muslim-Hindu clashes which swept across India left hundreds dead in Mumbai alone. Today in Dharavi the Muslims and the Hindus live congregated in separate parts, each sticking mostly to their own. Yet this Muslim man is all smiles as he spreads red paint on the box which will one day decorate a Hindu family’s living room. The language of business seems capable of bridging religious differences.

[The initial view of Dharavi from the railway overpass. Respecting the privacy of the inhabitants, I didn't take many photos from inside the area.]

 

Dharavi is certainly a slum. It’s crowded, it’s dirty and smelly, and the people who dwell here have no deeds to the land they occupy. But human ingenuity breeds in such a place; a force which can transform just about any place. The biggest slum in Asia has amenities far beyond its classification and makes Dharavi into Mumbai’s five-star slum.

[The average dwelling of a family of 5 – some 15 square metres with no toilet. The family rolls out sleeping mats on the floor to sleep]