Poverty masks huge enterprise in Asia’s biggest slum

MUMBAI – The first sight for anyone flying into India’s richest city is a sea of corrugated and tarpaulin-covered roofs beside a narrow, filth-choked river.

It is an aerial view of Dharavi, considered Asia’s biggest shantytown, two square km of open sewers, muddy lanes and ramshackle tenements that is home to almost a million people. But strip away its squalid veneer and Dharavi bares a unique entrepreneurial spirit, and multi-million dollar micro-businesses, that breaks all the stereotypes of a slum.Past scavenging crows feeding on dead rats, past children scampering through trash, one arrives at the plastic recycling factory of Nisar Ahmed.Here, half a dozen men toss plastic boxes into massive grinders that chop them into tiny pieces and melt them down into multicoloured pellets, ready to be cast into, perhaps, cheap plastic toys.”Dharavi has a huge plastic recycling industry, and we are one of the biggest,” Ahmed told Reuters sitting in his soot-blackened, one-room factory with a tangle of electric wires hanging from the roof.”There are other industries as well like chemical, pottery, soap-making, leather goods, electrical equipment and many more.”A RICH SLUM Arguably the most prosperous among the world’s biggest shantytowns, Dharavi has about 5 000 single-room factories and hundreds of cottage industries that together have a turnover of around US$1 billion.Practically every home here produces something to sell – incense sticks, poppadoms, pickles, soft toys and candles among the many crafts.”Most know Dharavi as a slum where poor people live,” said Abu Khalid Anjum, president of Dharavi Businessmen’s Welfare Association.”Not everyone knows how productive this place is.”In Dharavi, leather is the main product, much of which is exported to the Middle East.Then there are the foundries, which make everything from buckles to brass fittings.Gold jewellers sit next to people making junk-metal ornaments, bakers and potters, clothiers and cobblers, motor welders and paint makers and countless other craftsmen.There is, however, a dark side as well to Dharavi’s entrepreneurial spirit – a thriving black market for drugs and fake fashion goods and electronics, run by some of Dharavi’s disaffected youth organised into gangs.A FISHING VILLAGE Until the end of the 19th century, this area of Mumbai, then known as Bombay, was a mangrove swamp inhabited by Koli fishermen before migrants from southern and western India arrived to seek their fortune in the country’s financial capital.Over decades, Dharavi’s “jhoparpattis” or slums became the first port of call for dispossessed workers and penniless Mumbai newcomers, resulting in the most diverse of neighbourhoods in India’s most diverse city.Dharavi had once been on the northern fringe, but an expanding Mumbai sprawled toward the famous slum, eventually surrounding it and turning the once malarial swamp into a real estate goldmine worth an estimated US$10 billion.Nampa-ReutersBut strip away its squalid veneer and Dharavi bares a unique entrepreneurial spirit, and multi-million dollar micro-businesses, that breaks all the stereotypes of a slum.Past scavenging crows feeding on dead rats, past children scampering through trash, one arrives at the plastic recycling factory of Nisar Ahmed.Here, half a dozen men toss plastic boxes into massive grinders that chop them into tiny pieces and melt them down into multicoloured pellets, ready to be cast into, perhaps, cheap plastic toys.”Dharavi has a huge plastic recycling industry, and we are one of the biggest,” Ahmed told Reuters sitting in his soot-blackened, one-room factory with a tangle of electric wires hanging from the roof.”There are other industries as well like chemical, pottery, soap-making, leather goods, electrical equipment and many more.”A RICH SLUM Arguably the most prosperous among the world’s biggest shantytowns, Dharavi has about 5 000 single-room factories and hundreds of cottage industries that together have a turnover of around US$1 billion.Practically every home here produces something to sell – incense sticks, poppadoms, pickles, soft toys and candles among the many crafts.”Most know Dharavi as a slum where poor people live,” said Abu Khalid Anjum, president of Dharavi Businessmen’s Welfare Association.”Not everyone knows how productive this place is.”In Dharavi, leather is the main product, much of which is exported to the Middle East.Then there are the foundries, which make everything from buckles to brass fittings.Gold jewellers sit next to people making junk-metal ornaments, bakers and potters, clothiers and cobblers, motor welders and paint makers and countless other craftsmen.There is, however, a dark side as well to Dharavi’s entrepreneurial spirit – a thriving black market for drugs and fake fashion goods and electronics, run by some of Dharavi’s disaffected youth organised into gangs.A FISHING VILLAGE Until the end of the 19th century, this area of Mumbai, then known as Bombay, was a mangrove swamp inhabited by Koli fishermen before migrants from southern and western India arrived to seek their fortune in the country’s financial capital.Over decades, Dharavi’s “jhoparpattis” or slums became the first port of call for dispossessed workers and penniless Mumbai newcomers, resulting in the most diverse of neighbourhoods in India’s most diverse city.Dharavi had once been on the northern fringe, but an expanding Mumbai sprawled toward the famous slum, eventually surrounding it and turning the once malarial swamp into a real estate goldmine worth an estimated US$10 billion.Nampa-Reuters