Dharavi Slums

On Monday, we had the opportunity to visit Dharavi, the largest slum in Asia which houses a million people right in the center of Mumbai, on a small, sensitively conducted tour with four Public Health professors, including Ritesh, and myself. As I am writing this, Ritesh is hurrying me to wrap it up so we can head out, so I will post his description of it copied from an email to the family back home, instead of trying to find words for the often unfathomable conditions:

"A few of my colleagues, Petra and I visited the Dhavari slums yesterday. It the largest and quite possibly the oldest slum in Asia. What a place. As you can imagine, extremely poor, dirty, depressing in many ways, but with so much activity and life. We were surprised to learn that its over a 150 years old and that there exist myriad of cottage industries, many based on recycling plastics, aluminum and various containers; they make jeans, print patterns on cloth, bake, dye leather, make machinery, make soap, make clay pots of all kinds, etc. It is really quite amazing what happens there. None of us had imagined this. Lot of the production is happening under grim and dangerous working conditions. Somehow I can’t reconcile how such skillful and enterprising people live in such squalor. It’s hard to put into words at moment as I think I am still processing the onslaught of information, sensations and emotions."

There was a strict no-photo policy, but we did get permission to take a quick picture up on one of the roofs, and also of some of the better-off folks near the pottery-making area.

After the slum tour, we visited the local public hospital

view of the slum from the hospital window - note the smoke from melting aluminium