Slum tours roll in Dharavi with hard-livered tourists taking a reality check.
Slum tours roll in Dharavi with hard-livered tourists taking a reality check.
MUMBAI: “I have to take this one,” exclaims Richard LeBlanc, a high school teacher from Toronto, positioning himself precariously in the two-person-wide lane and training his camera on the hole that calls itself cyber café. In the muddy, rotting intestines of Dharavi, this is no less than a UFO sighting.
LeBlanc and Dubliner Muiris Moynihan clutch hard at their mineral water bottles as they undertake their Indiana Jones adventure through Asia’s biggest slum. Reality Tours and Travels, a cheekily enterprising outfit run by British citizen Chris Way, has started the slum tours, transforming Mumbai’s tattered underbelly into an experiential journey.
Way says Dharavi is an “amazing place” — being the heart of small-scale industries in Mumbai with an annual turnover of US $665 million (Rs3082.94 crore). “The primary purpose of the tour is to highlight this industry and to help dispel this myth that Dharavi is simply a place of squalor and poverty,” he says.
Way got the idea from the popular favela (slum) tours in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. “Last year,” says the 31-year-old from Worcestershire, “I decided to look into running something similar in Mumbai, and soon discovered that its slums, especially Dharavi, have so much more activity and energy than their counterparts in Rio.”
Way’s office sits on a photocopying shop in Colaba near Leopold’s café. His assistant, Krishna Iyer, and tour guide Sunil Adhikari interact with a thin stream of curious backpackers and enlist them for the tour.
The tour begins from the shabby godowns in 13th compound, heart of Dharavi’s recycling district. Adhikari takes the visitors through a slushy mess of muck and rubbish, heaps of used cans, raucous kids, and handcarts.
This is where ragpickers bring back the city’s refuse. Tins and bottles are stripped of their labels and multinationals buy them back for reuse. Plastic containers are shredded like spam discount fliers into many-coloured granules and processed back to new plastic.
A little ahead, sitting outside his tiny soap-making unit, Rizwan Khan looks at the long lenses and comments: “Are these cameras or anacondas?”
As one negotiates the lightless tunnels of slum habitat, Moynihan wonders if the challenging maze set up in Harry Potter’s Triwizard tournament could have been created in Dharavi.
A bit ahead, clicking away at his digital camera, LeBlanc says, “I am just a bit concerned about being a voyeur, though.”
But the Reality Tours guys say people who go on the tours have a genuine desire to understand how a section of society in a different country lives, and not for some kind of “morbid satisfaction in seeing suffering”. The focus of the tour is industry, not poverty, says Way. “Dharavi is not a place where you find people sitting around doing nothing.”
The tour costs Rs600 per head, and 80 per cent of the tour proceeds go to an NGO called MESCO, which runs schools in slums all over the city.
The tour touches the dyeing hub and the papad-making area. It ends at Kumbharwada, where the first settlers of Dharavi arrived in 1933 from Saurashtra and set up a potters’ colony. They still use traditional methods since they cannot afford new technology.
As the click-happy tourists emerge from the bowels of the slums into sunlight, cloth-shop worker Sanjay Barun clicks a photograph of the group with his mobile camera. By then, an excited Moynihan has spotted a Merc zipping past.
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
)
)
)
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}