Contributed by guest writer, Augusta Dwyer 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… (more)
(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Guests at 9:53 AM)