My departure from India involved 14 hours in Mumbai between my train from Goa and my flight to Melbourne, Australia. With a now-healed stomach, I decided to make good use of my time and throw myself into the largest slum in all of Asia: Dharavi.
Dharavi, drawn into the Western conscience by the movie Slumdog Millionaire, packs a million people in the area of 2 square kilometers. Contrary to my expectations, the slum is a humming business machine that produces over $650 million USD in goods and services annually. Much of the work there involves recycling and re-use, with trash from Western countries dumped in India for processing purposes.
I found a local company that provided “no impact” tours through the slum. That means that you are not allowed to photograph, speak with or otherwise interact with the local residents. I respected this approach, because I didn’t want to go “see the slum dwellers” as a Western family would “go to the zoo” on their day off. Moreover, they used a sizeable chunk of their revenue to run a kindergarten in Dharavi. The pictures below are all from a professional photographer.
Walking through the slum (that word, while charged with negative connotations, is referenced in Indian law for the purposes of affirmative action and minority protection) floods you with smells, sights, sensations and emotions that cannot be described in a simple blog post. The majority of people deal with working conditions and hours that would send the average American crying to their employment lawyer. And Indians seem to do it with a smile.
That is the Indian paradox. You see people in conditions that make you feel intense guilt for the privilege that you enjoy and yet they endure their “torment” with a smile.
My only problem with the tour company’s work is their approach to education. And my gripe is definitely from a Western point of view and might even come across completely ignorant based on the Indian reality. For me, in America, education is the ticket to class mobility. My family were immigrants and started in the lowest rung economically and through education, hard work and more than a bit of luck, we are now all upper middle class and above. Education was the tool that lifted us through class barriers.
I directly asked them if they were gearing their educational efforts towards enabling the kids to get out of the slum as they grew up (revolutionary) or simply to improve their existence within the slum (evolutionary). I don’t claim that one is better than the other, but I do believe it is imperative to have a goal when you are embarking on an economic development project. They didn’t have an answer – they were just providing education for the sake of it.
Despite this lack of focus, I really believe that they are doing a good thing. Western viewpoints of poor people are often very skewed and often downright ignorant, my own views included. This was definitely one of the highlights of my India trip and I highly recommend it if you find yourself in Mumbai.
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