We went on a harrowing, sometimes heart-breaking tour of the Dharavi slum in Mumbai today. It was a guided tour, with proceeds going to a most joyous school, which we visited at the end. Over one million people live in an area roughly the size of Central Park, which they say makes this the densest "city" in the world. Most of the slums--that hold half of Bombay's people--are much smaller.
There are central water sites scattered throughout Dharavi--everyone must go get the water for their family. You fill metal buckets with drinking water and bring them to your place. You also own a large barrel near the waterspout--this is for your family baths and washing (because a barrel would take up too much room in a 100 square foot dwelling with eight people inside).
As depressing and hopeless as it seemed, there are a few signs of hope. there is an increasingly large recycling industry, processing recyclable waste from other parts of Mumbai. There are something like 15,000 single-room factories there. Some of them are doing incredibly toxic operations right among the living quarters.
We toured plastic, paper, and even metal recycling factories. Factories doesn't do it justice--we saw an aluminum recycling operation in a high ceilinged room, maybe 20 x 30 feet. It had two forges. After people had washed aluminum cans (beer, Coke, etc.), they were dried, and then fed into buckets in forges. When melted, the aluminum was poured into molds that created six pound aluminum ingots. These are transported--like everything else--via someone's back--out to the highway and sold back to the canneries, breweries, and soda plants that made them in the first place. And the cycle begins again...
I think you can see some apartment buildings in the photos above. These are on the edge of Dharavi, and are built on razed slum dwellings. Because of these illegal mini-factories, some people are actually able to move into small apartments. Our tour guide claimed that in ten years those apartments would cover what was the slum. That is hard to believe. These apartments remind me of some of the worst projects in Bed Sty or Harlem in NYC in the 70`s. Nonetheless, they are an exponential leap from the slum rooms. However, they are a hard sell too--in the slums, there is no rent, no electric or water or sewer bill. You don`t buy paint or light bulbs. The 100 rupees (two or three dollars) you make in recycling, tanning leather, or sewing don`t go very far outside the slum.
And despite the disease, the smell, the rubble, and grinding poverty, there was some hope--we saw children in a Muslim school joyously shouting their numbers from 1 to 100 (in English of course). We saw many smiles, and some laughter. Many kids shook our hands and wanted to say hello. Most adults ignored us, but many would smile and joke. The other slums have no work available, and hard and dirty as the work is, it gave the people in Dharavi some sort of leg up. There were doctors around.
As terrible as things are, there is at least a shred of hope. I don't know what we can do to help the people of Dharavi, but I hope we somehow can. There are possibilities and some glimmer of hope if they can just get a little more help. Let's face it--their money comes from being seriously exploited by companies manufacturing without health and safety regulation, no taxation (this is almost all underground) and paying wages one fifth of what they would pay in other places. Isn't there some kind of middle ground for benevolent capitalists...or is that an oxymoron?
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