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Something to think about - September 2005
This report on Dharavi was submitted to PM’s Office in 2003-04. Part I of the report is available at www.diehardindian.com/thoughts/sep2005.htm
Industry in Dharavi
Legal industries
Please note: Survey data on numbers, might need updates due to dynamic nature of Dharavi
Robert Appleby – from the book: City of crows
The Dharavi Dhobighat is one of those everyday miracles of a practical nature that India seems to excel in producing, and which are far less susceptible of explanation than a ropetrick. A small tank collecting water from the gutters running along the railway track provides a livelihood to a small community of Gujarati dhobiwalas (laundrymen), who wash the clothes, sheets and blankets of the local community. The water is black and filthy, often with garbage floating in it, the clothes are boiled in oil drums over fires stoked with rubber tyres and then beaten and scrubbed on dirty stones and laid out to dry on the railway tracks – and yet the end result is starched, clean clothes. And these clothes which have all been washed together, must then be returned to their correct owners. Probably everyone has tried to decipher the little marks the dhobis make on your clothes; what is even more remarkable that even though your clothes accumulate a lot of profusion of these marks, they never seem to get confused.
In the monsoon, of course, the whole procedure becomes even more complex and fraught. “Wait until it rains just after we have put the clothes out to dry on the tracks - then you will see us run!” In August 2000, it rained nearly everyday, and there was indeed a lot of running.
Illegal activities
Essence of the Entrepreneurial spirit in Dharavi – A narration
The people of Dharavi have laboured hard, rankled hard, to strike it rich. Popular stereotyping has reinforced the image of Dharavi as a place of dirt and filth, breeding criminal activities. But Dharavi represents Mumbai's real cosmopolitanism, a place where people from different regions of India have forged new identities and lives through sheer grit and determination. If the people of Dharavi have shown initiative and enterprise, it is not because the city helped them to realize their dreams, rather this was despite the way the city has treated them.
City of Crows (By Robert Appleby, an English photographer based in Italy spent weeks tramping through Dharavi)
When Mumbai downtown office workers break for a snack, they are likely to eat idlis or sweets made here for consumption on the pavement outside the Bombay Stock Exchange. Leather goods, traditional pottery items, clothes - a vast range of goods are made in Dharavi for sale in India and abroad. And though the stigma of living here still attaches to them, many young residents are studying computer science and business administration and opening businesses here and elsewhere. Far from being an economic refugee camp, as it is so often portrayed, Dharavi is a vibrant, energetic business and manufacturing district for many of its residents.
There are problems, of course, the typical insecurities of the slums: the threat of having your house demolished by the authorities, unavailability of capital for new businesses, the constantly changing legislation which threatens livelihoods and homes, the grinding bureaucracy in the way of every new venture, lack of infrastructure and overcrowding - these are some of the complaints most often voiced by residents.
As a woman living on the edge of the Central Railway said to me while I was photographing her washing her family’s clothes just a couple of metres away from the passing commuter trains: “If we could ask for one thing, it would be better sanitation. And to keep our homes”. In the meantime in Kumbharwada, many young people are turning to new occupations, such as carpentry, diamond cutting and the merchant navy, and plastic is replacing earthenware as a material for many of the articles produced here.
But division of work along community lines is still a central feature of life here. This is strikingly evident in the case of plastics recycling, for instance, where each stage in the process is handled by a different community, often from very different parts of India. The bags are first collected by scavengers, often gardulas (brown sugar smokers), and sold to muslim merchants who then deliver the bags for washing to a lane of tamilians off 60 Feet Road. Their task is to wash and dry the bags, after which they are again packed off to another part of the slum for further treatment.
But despite the riots, the ten years since the riots have proved beneficial for Dharavi in many ways. In particular, the police presence in the slum has increased, with small stations on many streets, and this has largely driven out the more blatant forms of organised crime, and enabled a middle class to emerge in what was previously a notoriously mafia-dominated area.
New legislation has enabled residents’ associations to engage building contractors to redevelop their dwellings into multi-storey apartment blocks, and it is tempting to see such initiatives as a tacit recognition by the authorities that the solution to the “problem” of Dharavi is to give the people themselves the tools to improve their condition. Dharavi itself is fast becoming a desirable residential area, with its new buildings near to the Western and Central Railways conveniently located for commuters to other parts of Bombay.
My visits to Dharavi impressed upon me the boundless energy and ingenuity of its people, and their ability to in-corporate traditional values into the changes forced on them by the pressures of life in Bombay. The challenges and obstacles are overcome every day, often in unexpected ways.
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