[In the labyrinthine slum known as Dharavi are 60,000 structures, many of them shanties, and as many as one million people living and working on a triangle of land barely two-thirds the size of Central Park in Manhattan. Dharavi is one of the world’s most infamous slums, a cliché of Indian misery. It is also a churning hive of workshops with an annual economic output estimated to be $600 million to more than $1 billion.]
By Jim Yardley
Adam Ferguson for The New York Times
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Yet
inside, carpenters are assembling furniture on the ground floor. One floor up,
men are busily cutting and stitching blue jeans. Upstairs from them, workers
are crouched over sewing machines, making blouses. And at the top, still more
workers are fashioning men’s suits and wedding apparel. One crumbling shanty.
Four businesses.
In the
labyrinthine slum known as Dharavi are 60,000 structures, many of them
shanties, and as many as one million people living and working on a triangle of
land barely two-thirds the size of Central Park in Manhattan. Dharavi is one of
the world’s most infamous slums, a cliché of Indian misery. It is also a
churning hive of workshops with an annual economic output estimated to be $600
million to more than $1 billion.
“This is a
parallel economy,” said Mr. Mobin, whose family is involved in several
businesses in Dharavi. “In most developed countries, there is only one economy.
But in India , there are two.”
This
divide exists in other developing countries, but it is a chasm in India : experts estimate that the informal sector is responsible
for the overwhelming majority of India ’s annual economic growth and as much as 90 percent of all
employment. The informal economy exists largely outside government oversight
and, in the case of slums like Dharavi, without government help or
encouragement.
For years,
India ’s government has tried with mixed success to increase
industrial output by developing special economic zones to lure major
manufacturers. Dharavi, by contrast, could be called a self-created special
economic zone for the poor. It is a visual eyesore, a symbol of raw inequality
that epitomizes the failure of policy makers to accommodate the millions of
rural migrants searching for opportunity in Indian cities. It also underscores
the determination of those migrants to come anyway.
“Economic
opportunity in India still lies, to a large extent, in urban areas,” said Eswar
Prasad, a leading economist. “The problem is that government hasn’t provided
easy channels to be employed in the formal sector. So the informal sector is
where the activity lies.”
Dharavi is
Dickens and Horatio Alger and Upton Sinclair. It is ingrained in the Indian
imagination, depicted in books or Bollywood movies, as well as in the
Oscar-winning hit “Slumdog Millionaire.” Dharavi has been examined in a Harvard Business
School case study and dissected by urban planners from Europe to Japan . Yet merely trying to define Dharavi is contested.
“Maybe to
anyone who has not seen Dharavi, Dharavi is a slum, a huge slum,” said Gautam
Chatterjee, the principal secretary overseeing the Housing Ministry in Maharashtra State . “But I have also looked at Dharavi as a city within a
city, an informal city.”
It is an
informal city as layered as Mr. Mobin’s sheared building — and as fragile.
Plans to raze and redevelop Dharavi into a “normal” neighborhood have stirred a
debate about what would be gained but also about what might be lost by trying
to control and regulate Dharavi. Every layer of Dharavi, when exposed, reveals
something far more complicated, and organic, than the concept of a slum as
merely a warehouse for the poor.
One slum.
Four layers. Four realities.
On the
ground floor is misery.
One floor
up is work.
Another
floor up is politics.
And at the
top is hope.
“Dharavi,”
said Hariram Tanwar, 64, a local businessman, “is a mini-India.”
Misery
The
streets smell of sewage and sweets. There are not enough toilets. There is not
enough water. There is not enough space. Laborers sleep in sheds known as
pongal houses, six men, maybe eight, packed into a single, tiny room —
multiplied by many tiny rooms. Hygiene is terrible. Diarrhea and malaria are
common. Tuberculosis floats in the air, spread by coughing or spitting.
Dharavi, like the epic slums of Karachi , Pakistan , or Rio
de Janeiro , is often
categorized as a problem still unsolved, an emblem of inequity pressing against
Mumbai , India ’s richest and most glamorous city. A walk through Dharavi
is a journey through a dank maze of ever-narrowing passages until the shanties
press together so tightly that daylight barely reaches the footpaths below, as
if the slum were a great urban rain forest, covered by a
canopy of smoke and sheet metal.
Traffic
bleats. Flies and mosquitoes settle on roadside carts of fruit and atop the
hides of wandering goats. Ten families share a single water tap, with water
flowing through the pipes for less than three hours every day, enough time for
everyone to fill a cistern or two. Toilets are communal, with a charge of 3
cents to defecate. Sewage flows through narrow, open channels, slow-moving
streams of green water and garbage.
At the
slum’s periphery, Sion Hospital treats 3,000 patients every day, many from Dharavi, often
children who are malnourished or have asthma or diarrhea. Premature tooth decay
is so widespread in children that doctors call them dental cripples.
“People
who come to Dharavi or other slum areas — their priority is not health,” said
Dr. Pallavi Shelke, who works in Dharavi. “Their priority is earning.”
And that
is what is perhaps most surprising about the misery of Dharavi: people come
voluntarily. They have for decades. Dharavi once was known for gangs and
violence, but today Dharavi is about work. Tempers sometimes flare, fights
break out, but the police say the crime rate is actually quite low, even lower
than in wealthier, less densely populated areas of the city. An outsider can
walk through the slum and never feel threatened.
Misery is
everywhere, as in miserable conditions, as in hardship. But people here do not
speak of being miserable. People speak about trying to get ahead.
Work
The order
was for 2,700 briefcases, custom-made gifts for a large bank to distribute
during the Hindu holiday of Diwali. The bank contacted a supplier, which
contacted a leather-goods store, which sent the order to a manufacturer. Had
the order been placed in China , it probably would have landed in one of the huge coastal
factories that employ thousands of rural migrants and have made China a manufacturing powerhouse.
In India , the order landed in the Dharavi workshop of Mohammed
Asif. Mr. Asif’s work force consists of 22 men, who sit cross-legged beside
mounds of soft, black leather, an informal assembly line, except that the
factory floor is a cramped room doubling as a dormitory: the workers sleep
above, in a loft. The briefcases were due in two weeks.
“They work
hard,” Mr. Asif said. “They work from 8 in the morning until 11 at night
because the more they do, the more they will earn to send back to their
families. They come here to earn.”
Unlike China , India does not have colossal manufacturing districts because India has chosen not to follow the East Asian development model
of building a modern economy by starting with low-skill manufacturing. If China ’s authoritarian leaders have deliberately steered the
country’s surplus rural work force into urban factories, Indian leaders have
done little to promote job opportunities in cities for rural migrants. In fact,
right-wing political parties in Mumbai have led sometimes-violent campaigns
against migrants.
Yet India ’s rural migrants, desperate to escape poverty, flock to
the cities anyway. Dharavi is an industrial gnat compared with China’s
manufacturing heartland — and the working conditions in the slum are almost
certainly worse than those in major Chinese factories — but Dharavi does seem
to share China’s can-do spirit. Almost everything imaginable is made in
Dharavi, much of it for sale in India , yet much of it exported around the world.
Today,
Dharavi is as much a case study in industrial evolution as a slum. Before the
1980s, Dharavi had tanneries that dumped their effluent into the surrounding
marshlands. Laborers came from southern India , especially the state of Tamil Nadu, many of them Muslims
or lower-caste Hindus, fleeing drought, starvation or caste discrimination.
Once Tamil Nadu’s economy strengthened, migrants began arriving from
poverty-stricken states in central India .
Later, the
tanneries were closed down for environmental reasons, moving south to the city
of Chennai, or to other slums elsewhere. Yet Dharavi had a skilled labor force,
as well as cheap costs for workshops and workers, and informal networks between
suppliers, middlemen and workshops. So Dharavi’s leather trade moved up the
value chain, as small workshops used raw leather processed elsewhere to make
handbags for some of the priciest stores in India .
During
this same period, Dharavi’s migration waves became a torrent, as people streamed
out of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the teeming, backward northern states now at
the locus of rural Indian poverty.
“After
1990, immigration was tremendous,” said Ramachandra
Korde, a longtime civic activist commonly known around Dharavi as Bhau, or
brother. “It used to be that 100 to 300 to 400 people came to Dharavi every
day. Just to earn bread and butter.”
Leatherwork
is now a major industry in Dharavi, but only one. Small garment factories have
proliferated throughout the slum, making children’s clothes or women’s dresses
for the Indian market or export abroad. According to a 2007 study sponsored by
the United States Agency for International Development, Dharavi has at least
500 large garment workshops (defined as having 50 or more sewing machines) and
about 3,000 smaller ones. Then there are the 5,000 leather shops. Then there are
the food processors that make snacks for the rest of India .
And then
still more: printmakers, embroiderers and, most of all, the vast recycling
operations that sort, clean and reprocess much of India ’s discarded plastic.
“We are
cleaning the dirt of the country,” said Fareed Siddiqui, the general secretary
of the Dharavi Businessmen’s Welfare Association.
Mr. Asif,
the leather shop owner, is a typical member of Dharavi’s entrepreneur class.
Now 35, he
arrived at the slum in 1988, leaving his village in Bihar after
hearing about Dharavi from another family. He jumped on a train to Mumbai. He
was 12.
“Someone
from my village used to live here,” he said. “We were poor and had nothing.”
Mr. Asif
began as an apprentice in a leather shop, learning how to use the heavy cutting
scissors, then the sewing machines that stitch the seams on leather goods,
until he finally opened his own shop. As a poor migrant, Mr. Asif could never
have arranged the loans and workspace if Dharavi were part of the organized
economy; he rents his workshop from the owner of the leather-goods store, who
got the order from the supplier for the briefcases for the bank.
Today,
nearly all of Mr. Asif’s workers are also from Bihar , one of
the myriad personal networks that help direct migrants out of the villages.
Mohammad Wazair earns roughly 6,000 rupees a month, or about $120, as a laborer
in Mr. Asif’s workshop. He sends about half home every month to support his
wife and two children. He is illiterate, but he is now paying for his children to
attend a modest private school in their village. He visits them twice a year.
“In the
village, what options do we have?” he asked. “We can either work in the fields
or drive a rickshaw. What is the future in that? Here, I can learn a skill and
earn money. At least my children will get an education.”
Politics
“Now the
place is gold,” said Mr. Mobin, the businessman.
He is
sitting on the top floor of his building, surrounded by men’s suits in the
apparel shop. His family began in the leather business in the 1970s and has
since moved into plastic recycling, garments and real estate. Slum property
might not seem like a good investment, but Dharavi is now one of the most
valuable pieces of real estate in Mumbai. Which is a problem, as Mr. Mobin sees
it.
“People
from all over the city, and the politicians, are making hue and cry that
Dharavi must be developed,” he said. “But they are not developing it for the
people of Dharavi. They will provide office buildings and shopping for the
richer class.”
As Mumbai
came to symbolize India ’s
expanding economy — and the country’s expanding inequality — Dharavi began
attracting wider attention. Mumbai grew as Dharavi grew. If the slum once sat
on the periphery, it now is a scar in the middle of what is a peninsular,
land-starved city — an eyesore and embarrassment, if also a harbinger of a
broader problem.
Today,
more than eight million people live in Mumbai’s slums, according to some
estimates, a huge figure that accounts for more than half the city’s
population. Many people live in slums because they cannot afford to live
anywhere else, and government efforts to build affordable housing have been
woefully inadequate. But many newer slums are also microversions of Dharavi’s
informal economy. Some newer migrants even come to Dharavi to learn new skills,
as if Dharavi were a slum franchising operation.
“Dharavi
is becoming their steppingstone,” said Vineet Joglekar, a civic leader here.
“They learn jobs, and then they go to some other slum and set up there.”
Dharavi
still exists on the margins. Few businesses pay taxes. Few residents have
formal title to their land. Political parties court the slum for votes and have
slowly delivered things taken for granted elsewhere: some toilets, water
spigots.
But the
main political response to Dharavi’s unorthodox success has been to try to raze
it. India ’s political class discovered Dharavi in the 1980s, when
any migrant who jabbed four posts into an empty patch of dirt could claim a
homestead. Land was scarce, and some people began dumping stones or refuse to
fill the marshes at the edge of the Arabian
Sea .
Rajiv
Gandhi, then India ’s prime minister, saw the teeming slum and earmarked one
billion rupees, or about $20 million, for a program to build affordable, hygienic
housing for Dharavi’s poor. Local officials siphoned off some of the money for
other municipal projects while also building some tenements that today are
badly decayed. The proliferation of shanties continued.
Three
decades later, the basic impulse set in motion by Mr. Gandhi — that Dharavi
should be redeveloped and somehow standardized — still prevails. But the
incentives have changed. Dharavi’s land is now worth hundreds of millions of
dollars. Private developers do not see a slum but a piece of property
convenient to the airport, surrounded by train stations and adjacent to a sleek
office park.
A sweeping
plan approved in 2006 would provide free apartments and commercial space to
many Dharavi residents while allowing private investors to develop additional
space for sale at market rates. Many Dharavi civic and business leaders
endorsed the plan, even as critics denounced the proposal as a giveaway to rich
developers.
For now,
the project remains largely stalled, embroiled in bureaucratic infighting, even
as a different, existential debate is under way about the potential risks of
redeveloping Dharavi and shredding the informal networks that bind it together.
“They are
talking about redeveloping Dharavi,” said Mohammad Khurshid Sheikh, who owns a
leather shop. “But if they do, the whole chain may break down. These businesses
can work because Dharavi attracts labor. People can work here and sleep in the
workshop. If there is redevelopment, they will not get that room so cheap. They
will not come back here.”
Matias
Echanove, an architect and urban planner, has long argued that Dharavi should
not be dismissed as merely a slum, since it operates as a contained residential
and commercial city. He said razing Dharavi, or even completely redeveloping
it, would only push residents into other slums.
“They are
going to create actual, real slums,” he said. “Nobody is saying Dharavi is a
paradise. But we need to understand the dynamics, so that when there is an
intervention by the government, it doesn’t destroy what is there.”
Hope
Sylva
Vanita Baskar was born in Dharavi. She is now 39, already a widow. Her husband
lost his vigor and then his life to tuberculosis. She borrowed money to pay for
his care, and now she rents her spare room to four laborers for an extra $40 a
month. She lives in a room with her four children. Two sons sleep in a
makeshift bed. She and her two youngest children sleep on straw mats on the
stone floor.
“They do
everything together,” she said, explaining how her children endure such tight
quarters. “They fight together. They study together.”
The
computer sits on a small table beside the bed, protected, purchased for $354
from savings, even though the family has no Internet connection. The oldest son
stores his work on a pen drive and prints it somewhere else. Ms. Baskar, a
seamstress, spends five months’ worth of her income, almost $400, to send three
of her children to private schools. Her daughter wants to be a flight
attendant. Her youngest son, a mechanical engineer.
“My
daughter is getting a better education, and she will get a better job,” Ms.
Baskar said. “The children’s lives should be better. Whatever hardships we face
are fine.”
Education
is hope in Dharavi. On a recent afternoon outside St. Anthony’s, a parochial
school in the slum, Hindu mothers in saris waited for their children beside
Muslim mothers in burqas. The parents were
not concerned about the crucifix on the wall; they wanted their children to
learn English, the language considered to be a ticket out of the slums in India .
Once, many
parents in Dharavi sent their children to work, not to school, and child labor remains a problem in some workshops.
Dharavi’s children have always endured a stigma. When parents tried to send
their sons and daughters outside the slum for schooling, the Dharavi students
often received a bitter greeting.
“Sometimes,
the teacher would not accept our children, or would treat them with contempt,”
said Mohammad Hashim, 64. “Sometimes, they would say, ‘Why are you Dharavi
children over here?’ ”
Mr. Hashim
responded by opening his own school, tailored for Muslim children, offering a
state-approved secular education. He initially offered the curriculum in Urdu
but not a single parent enrolled a child. He switched to English, and now his
classrooms are overflowing with Muslim students.
Discrimination
is still common toward Dharavi. Residents complain that they are routinely
rejected for credit cards if they list a Dharavi address. Private banks are
reluctant to make loans to businessmen in Dharavi or to open branches. Part of
this stigma is as much about social structure as about living in the slum
itself.
“They all
belong to the untouchables caste,” said Mr. Korde, the longtime social
activist, “or are Muslims.”
But money
talks in Mumbai, and Dharavi now has money, even millionaires, mixed in with
its misery and poverty. Mohammad Mustaqueem, 57, arrived as a 13-year-old boy.
He slept outside, in one of the narrow alleyways, and remembers being showered
with garbage as people tossed it out in the morning. Today, Mr. Mustaqueem has
300 employees in 12 different garment workshops in Dharavi, with an annual
turnover of about $2.5 million a year. He owns property in Dharavi worth $20
million.
“When I
came here, I was empty-handed,” he said. “Now I have everything.”
Dharavi’s
fingerprints continue to be found across Mumbai’s economy and beyond, even if few
people realize it. Mr. Asif, the leather shop owner, made leather folders used
to deliver dinner checks at the city’s most famous hotel, the Taj Mahal Palace . The tasty snacks found in Mumbai’s finest
confectionaries? Made in Dharavi. The exquisite leather handbags sold in
expensive shops? Often made in Dharavi.
“There are
hundreds of Dharavis flourishing in the city,” boasted Mr. Mobin, the
businessman. “Every slum has its businesses. Every kind of business is there in
the slums.”
But
surely, Mr. Mobin is asked, there are things not made in Dharavi. Surely not
airplanes, for example.
“But we
recycle waste for the airlines,” he answered proudly. “Cups and food
containers.”