Improving Life in Mumbai's Largest Slum

It is difficult not to be daunted by Dharavi. Mumbai’s largest slum
– indeed the largest slum in all of Asia – many taxi drivers outside
the train station at Mahim junction don’t even want to go there.
Finally one agrees, negotiating the narrow streets around the station
then onto a highway crossing the noisome mangrove swamp lining the
Mithi River, its name, sweet, an insult to its present state.

When he was a boy, Santosh Sabat could see the train station from
his family’s shanty house, and there was open space all around. People
would put down stones or lengths of lumber to cross its streams and
wetlands.

By now, however, 600,000 people live in Dharavi. It is packed with
all kinds of shops and small businesses, 62 pongal houses, where
legions of young men pay a few rupees a month to sleep, Mumbai’s
largest recycling industry, which employs 5000 workers, leatherworks,
potteries, and the infernal little place I see when I first emerge at T
Junction, a murky room filled with a huge mound of discarded shoes and
sandals, where three women toil in the suffocating heat, franticly
rubbing and cleaning them for resale. In the dual-front attack of sun
and desolation on this mean little lane, their ill-paid work -- and the
life that must call for this -- seems as bleak as any could possibly be.

Santosh, 37, has lived here all his life; he brought his wife here
from Orissa, and his two sons, Sagar, 11, and Samir, 7, were born here.
Four years ago, after losing his job at a textile factory, he purchased
a cable installation business. He earns good money by Mumbai standards,
between 10,000 and 12,000 rupees a month, but not enough to find better
lodging than what he has now, a two-storey structure typical of many
Dharavi slum houses, plastered brick on the first floor and corrugated
metal sheeting forming the walls and roof of the second.