Dharavi slum - Mumbai

Last week, I took rather an emotional and personally moving tour of the Dharavi slum in Mumbai. Billed as the second or third largest slum in the world, I've driven past it many times and have wanted to take a visit for some time now.

I mentioned this to a colleagues and told him I was considering taking one of the tourist visits (yes they have tour guides - supposedly ethical ie no pictures and all money gets ploughed back into the local area via NGOs), and he insisted he took me there.

Little did I know that this was his first time there too - despite having lived in Mumbai for 30+ years (he told me this after we got out and also fessed up to being a black belt in Karate).

I'd read up on it of course e.g. National Geographic has good coverage as does Wiki - (please click on the green links --interesting reading) ... I knew there were countless hundreds of thousands of people crammed into a small space - with one lavatory for every 1700+ homes ... but I honestly did not really know what to expect.

I walked round for about an hour. The conditions were Dickensian - worse still - redolent of the middle ages I guess ... intolerable by modern Western standards - three generations of families living in an area the floor space of which must be equivalent to the average family car ... with two or three such dwellings stacked up on top of each other (roofs leaning in and touching @ the top). Whole families sat on their 'door steps' facing each other less than 2ft apart. Between them was a 6 inch wide/10 inch deep gulley/drain full of stagnant water. Not good. For the most part, I felt perfectly safe - although my colleague told me (afterwards) that it was really not a clever thing to do.

On the upside, and this surprised me - the areas in front of the shacks were clean of rubbish and there was no smell. And I got the impression that people were reasonably content living under these conditions. This was confirmed by my colleague - he said that many folks here were earning (for Delhi) reasonable money - recycling materials or manufacturing things or undertaking small services (I saw one guy ironing shirts) - and they relished the sense of community.

All this is coming to an end.

Dharavi occupies a piece of prime real estate smack bang in the middle of Mumbai - the land is worth a fortune. So after 100 years or so of living like this, it's all getting pulled down (supposedly) in 2009 - with mass evictions. I can't bear to think about the additional misery about to land on these folks.

M