India trip part 8: Dharavi Slum & Dhobi Ghat
62% of the people who live in Mumbai live in slums. 62%!!! On what is only 6% of the city's land! 1/3rd of the residents have no access to clean water. And in 2015, Mumbai will become the world's largest city. It will have more people than Australia or all of Scandinavia. IN ONE CITY. Seriously, think about draining every human being in Scandinavia into one city with poor infrastructure. 30% of the city's GDP happens in the slums (the output OF DHARAVI SLUM ALONE is 600 million to 1 billion US DOLLARS a year. I believe a JFC! is in order. Now, Dharavi is a particularly successful slum, but all of them have significant economic output.
A "hutment" that might not be any larger than a parking space yet usually hold 4-12 people there can go for 9k without title. That means these families who are living in shanties with no water access have at one point had more money than I've ever had at any time in my life, or my mom has ever seen at one time in HER life. That's pretty crazy to think about, and I think it does a lot to shatter this dirt-poor, lounging around in doorways and stairwells with flies in their eyes type image many westerners have in their head about slum dwellers.
Mumbai is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the WORLD. In order: London, NYC, Moscow, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, MUMBAI. Rent averages 5k-10k a month. USD! Call center agents, who are upper middle class in most of India only make 3-4.5k a YEAR, for comparison. In South Mumbai (the fancy area) rents are $9-10.2k per square meter (for comparison, in Delhi it's $2k-3k, and in Bangalore it's $950-2k)
Right before I left for India I did a project on Mumbai Slums for my Housing class, so that's why I'm dropping some knowledge on ya'll. I have an underutilized powerpoint sitting right here, full of facts! And, I would like to remind you that the west was full of these slums until the hygeine movement in the 1939. In our planning classes we hear how every slum in the western world was cleared and how it has always been seen as a good thing, and the highways now usually go through areas where the slums used to be. But, only 1/3rd of the number of houses destroyed in those clearances were ever rebuilt. America still has an ENORMOUS shortage of housing to this day.
Plus, this was probably the best part of the trip for me. Now THIS was India. Not the gorgeous forts (just wait for my jaipur and Delhi posts you guys... unbelievably beautiful) or any of the other tourist traps. This was where Indians live, work, and where few tourists ever go. Our beloved Couchsurfing hostmom, Anu took us & her other couchsurfer from San Francisco here, so she was able to translate for us and talk to everyone and it was a really amazing experience. I knew all this stuff (having studied development and especially dharavi itself just the week before) but Thomas and Helen- especially Helen with no knowledge of development and a former wealthy SF financial person at all was BLOWN away. It absolutely destroyed all her preconcieved ideas of slums and the people who live in them. It was actually really fantastic to see someone's very worldview shift before your eyes.
That tall building is supposedly some government-built housing for the poor.
That's a microfinance bank!
I wonder if all the classist/racist people who complain here about how nice poor black women dress here in thes tates would also yell about these people, all dressed well but living in slums and having TVs and ipods? :p Isn't weird how people everywhere of all classes know they need to dress well to have jobs and respect in their communities and like to treat themselves every once in a while?
Barber shop! Thomas joked about going to get a beard trim there and poor Anu though he was serious and panicked. Haha. "NO YOU WILL GET TETNUS!"
Doggie is patiently waiting for some scraps.
Small Ganesh Temple
Up on that second floor is the first factory we visited. My very heavy purse swung when i was going down that very steep staircase and it literally almost swung me off. I grabbed the side in time but the whole street gasped! Yay, international embarassment! x_x
This is me taking the picture before this one! OOooooOoo. And lol @ humidity + my hairs. Kinda looks cool in the back, but noooooooot in the front!
That's me! Up the steep ladder of near-death!
We always asked before we took anyone's pictures, which they (especially Anu) thought was BIZAARE, but I didn't want us to be rude Americans and so forth. They were very happy to be in my pictures, and posed for us. And we posed for their camera phones sometimes too! They all thought it was pretty cool to see foreigners in their work and were super friendly and wonderful!
Rule #1 of travel: All kids in every country anywhere love to have their pictures taken by foreigners and will beg you to take them and look through them in your camera.
The other half of the factory (I think this is the one that was on the second floor). They were making dresses for Dubai!
We were actually in here for kind of a long time talking to people. I think the universe took my camera just because i missed good shots and got shit like this when i had plenty of time to do better.... :( I just didn't want to feel rude...
Two person leatherworking factory! Dharavi is known for it's leather products.
Another factory doing mechanized embroidery for Dubai.
Those kids outside were showing us around. :)
These factories are technically illegal. They don't pay taxe. They make so little money that if they were suddenly taxed at the regular city level, they would all fold and millions of people would become unemployed.
“No onlooker asked, Why fix a house when the airport authority might demolish it? Almost everyone here improved his hut when he was able, in pursuit not just of better hygiene and protection from the monsoon but of protection from the airport authority. If the bulldozers came to flatten the slum, a decent hut was seen as a kind of insurance. The state of Maharashtra had promised to relocate those families who had squatted at the airport since 2000 to tiny apartments in high-rises. To Annawadians, a difficult-to-raze house increased the odds that a family’s tenure on airport land would be acknowledged by the relocation authorities. And so they put their money into what would be destroyed.”
Boo, Katherine (2012-02-07). Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity (p. 86). Random House, Inc..
Shiv Sena political party = NO BUENO
Extremely conservative, they are pro-native maharashtrans (the state mumbai is in) to the detriment of everyone else, and mumbai is like NYC, probably most of the city is not ethnically Maharashtran, people are still flooding in from all over the country, especially since farmers are really struggling to even keep their families alive these days.
Redlining is a term American planning types use to refer to the time when banks LITERALLY took out maps, drew red lines around the black neighborhoods, and made a rule that they would NOT under any circumstances lend money to anyone who lived within those lines. It was perfectly legal, and it prevented those families from getting home loans to move out of there. It also meant they couldn't get loans for their kids to go to school or to fix up their houses or anything. What we think of as the "ghettos" are all usually within those old redlining districts.
Well, this still happens in India. If someone gives a Dharavi address, the bank probably won't loan to them and might not let them open an account. Employers probably won't hire them either. They associate all slumdwellers (though it isn't even true) with the Dalits- the untouchable castes or Musllims. India is, in case you are unaware, an extremely discriminatory country.
I don't like peta but I do LOVE being in the country of (largely) vegetarians. <3 Everywhere was catered to ME, and Thomas had to sometimes go out of his way to find somewhere with meat. It was so beautiful. ;_; < tears of joy
More public housing.
The city really wants to tear down all the slums because the real estate is estimated to be 10 billion USD and they want to sell it to private developers to make offices and luxury apartments for the wealthy. Luckily poor Indians have pretty good political representation so the fight has been going strong for quite a while. But they still do intermittant clearances which can get very violent.
Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail [ child star of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE ] was asleep when a police officer woke him up and told him to leave his family’s home, he said. Shortly after that, the shack and about 30 more were destroyed.
“A police officer took a bamboo stick to hit me, and I was frightened,” said 10-year-old Azhar.
“They didn’t give prior notice. We didn’t even get a chance to take out our belongings,” said Shameem Ismail, Azhar’s mother, who has lived in the shanty town for more than 15 years. She has no legal right to the land. “I don’t know what I am going to do,” she said, sitting on a bed she had dragged from the wreckage. Next to her was a plastic bag stuffed with belongings.
- http://www.celebitchy.com/51136/slumdog_millionaire_child_actors_slum_home_destroyed_by_government/
Mumbai wants to get rid of it's "Slumbai" image and bring down the percentage of slumdwellers from 62% to 10-20%. That is insane.
“I have witnessed many demolitions in different parts of the world. But this is one of the most brutal evictions that I have seen.” - UN envoy for adequate housing
This is Dhobi Ghat. It is a pretty famous place for some reason. This is where the Dhobiwallahs would wash the city's laundry and hang it out to dry. Nowadays with washing machines they mostly just do hospital/institution's laundries now.
Anu says that during tourist season (which is NOT during the very hottest point of the year, which is when we were there) this is full of people and vendors.
It's not just foreigners who come to see it, either.
OH HAI, ME!
We had rented a taxi that day.
Anu!
