Photo Essay: Dharavi, Mumbai

February 10, 2009 in images, india, links, photos, places

This photo essay depicts the scrappy, entrepreneurial side of the slums of Mumbai. Cobbled together homes sit side-by-side with cottage industries in Dharavi, including some very industrial ones like recycling outfits which together reclaim eighty percent of Mumbai’s plastic, people that grind down paint chips into a powder than can be re-constituted into usable paint, and places that pound the dents out of big oil cans and sell them back to oil companies and consumers. Dharavi challenges a lot of easy generalizations about slum living: 85% of Dharavi homes have television, and it is a sort of microcosm for the unflagging entrepreneurial spirit of India as a whole, producing an annual economic output estimated to be between $650 million and $1 billion.

Prince Charles recently called Dharavi (the setting for Slumdog Millionaire) a “model for sustainable living,” and as BoingBoing-er Cory Doctorow points out,

I visited Dharavi with an NGO back in September, and I’m inclined to agree with Charles — the poverty in Dharavi seems to be of a different character to the poverty elsewhere in Mumbai. Here you see poor children who nevertheless are shod, are playing, attending school, and not begging. Not to say that Dharavi is a paradise or even pleasant to live in — the toxic fumes from the plastics recycling plants are reason enough to want to raise your children elsewhere — but that, as compared to government schemes to cram poor people into tower-blocks, Dhravi has a lot going for it.

Unfortunately, since it occupies some extraordinarily valuable real estate in the heart of Mumbai, it is set to be razed to make way for shiny skyscrapers, a plan which is, needless to say, bitterly opposed by the residents of Dharavi.

EDIT: I forgot to mention this originally, but I thought these photos make a good counterpoint to the slums depicted in Millionaire (et al.), which some have criticized as a “stylishly shot collection of clichés”.

EDITx2: Fellow wordpress.com-er Marcus Fornell has posted a bunch of photos of Dharavi on flickr.

Foreign Policy Photo Essay: India’s Real-World Slumdogs