How economically advanced are the slums in India? What kinds of products do they produce?

'How economically advanced are the slums in India?'
Advanced is a loaded word in general and especially so in the context of slums. Generally, we're taught to denigrate slums and look down on people who live there. The truth is, in the face of both governmental inertia and societal apathy, slums develop out of necessity and are a veritable bee-hive of economic activity and resourcefulness, the likes of which are unprecedented in all other social strata and endeavors. Not only that, over time, the economic activity of slums becomes the very life blood of not only cities in which they exist but through the inexorable process of globalization, its tentacles feed every part of global economic activity. Nowhere is this truism clearer than in Dharavi, the sprawling slum at the heart of Mumbai, India's most populous city, and its financial and entertainment capital.

Dharavi's location: very economically advanced

• To its north, the Mahim-Sion link road
• To its south-west, the central railway line
• To its south, the western railway line
• Close proximity to Mumbai's newest, swankiest business district, the Bandra Kurla Complex.
• Thus, Dharavi is surrounded by 4 railway stations, several bus-lines, and is close to both international and domestic airports of Mumbai (1).
• Location-wise it doesn't get better than this (see figures below from 2, 3, 4), especially for swamp land that a little more than a century back was deemed worthless, and thus ignored and neglected by governments.
• Total area? ~550 acres (~175 hectares), i.e., smaller than New York's Central Park, but with an estimated, astounding density of ~18000 people per acre in some areas, i.e., 6 to 8X more dense than Manhattan.
• Even densities of up to 336, 643 have been measured in some areas of Dharavi (5).

A very brief history of Dharavi explains why its location is now so economically advanced

• Predating the current city of Mumbai, in the late 17th century, local Koli fishermen lived in the swamp lands near the Mithi River.
• Recognizing the great potential of a natural harbor, in 1534 the Portuguese captured seven separate islands, the as-yet-non-existent Mumbai, which became a wedding gift to England's Charles II in 1662.
• Promising 'free settlement, freedom of religion and unregulated trade', the British East India Company encouraged internal migration to stock the growing city with the labor necessary to feed its global trade from this vital port city (1).
• Starting in the 1800s, the city of Mumbai began reclaiming land to accommodate its increasing population. Over time, the reclaimed land in the swampy areas near Mahim river became Dharavi (3).
• The government back then considered Dharavi unfit for inhabitation.
• Swamp land near-impossible to build on, inconveniently far from the then city center, deemed of no interest.
• For a century, impoverished migrants from all over India seeking economic opportunity in the booming port city had little choice but to settle in places like Dharavi.
• It was 'unregulated, available and free of cost' (1).
• As the city of Mumbai grew further north from its southern base, communities labeled undesirable were forcibly evicted to the then city edges, i.e., nearer to Dharavi.
• The impoverished migrants provided a ready supply of cheap labor and conveniently in return, the city, government, employers needed to provide little in terms of services.
• Not housing, not stable employment, nor health care, let alone investment in terms of insurance and pensions.
• New migrants and the original inhabitants, the Kolis, developed the land themselves, without any government support.
• Over time, families and relatives of pioneer migrants came to settle and Dharavi's population grew in distinct patterns of caste, religion and occupation.
• As the then city proper South Mumbai boomed, those unable to afford housing there also gravitated towards Dharavi.
• Historically, the colonial overlords lived in the wealthier South Mumbai and that old class divide still brands the city even as it consumes its neighboring environs in its insatiable appetite for growth (see figure below from 6).
• In the process and over time, Mumbai's growth around and beyond the previously shunned and derided Dharavi has today made it one of the most monetarily valuable and coveted real estates in the world.

• Eventually, with the city council being forced to recognize Dharavi as part of Mumbai's central municipality (7), a few public toilets and water taps were installed.
• With this denominational change, Dharavi residents earned at least a modicum of respect.
• Estimated anywhere from half a million to a million in number, they'd become important vote banks for local politicians.
• Ever since, they exist in a constant tussle between their original no man's land identity limned in sheer pluck and ingenuity, and the western-oriented dreams of politicians, city planners and Mumbai's middle class who aspire to live in a 'world-class' city, whatever that means.
• Already there's a pattern to note. Cities attract two types of migrants, those considered desirable and the rest, undesirable.
• The former tend to be the affluent or middle class while the latter are typically the rural impoverished who leave ancestral homes for better economic opportunities in cities, often in desperation.
• Historically, cities and their governments didn't care about the latter migrants so didn't prepare for them, welcome them or even accommodate them in a civilized and methodical manner.
• Dharavi serves as a convenient poster-child for this process. Today comprising ~80 neighborhoods, ~1 million inhabitants and ~100,000 microenterprises, migrants living there include potters from Gujarat, leather tanners from Tamil Nadu, embroidery specialists from Uttar Pradesh, and many others.
• By and large, they are either Muslims or Hindu lower castes including the so-called untouchables.
• They may have left their ancestral land behind but they brought with them the specialized knowledge pertaining to family trades, culture and practices. These formed the bedrock of Dharavi's economic activity.
• Sign of chameleon-like adaptability, today recycling is one of Dharavi's major economic activities.
• Unencumbered with environmental, factory or labor regulations makes Dharavi's labor and production costs low, at the expense of health, safety and longevity.
• Current cottage industries in Dharavi include large-scale recycling, leather tanneries, metal work, wood work, machinery manufacturing, printing, garment finishing, and shoe, luggage and jewelry manufacture (8).

'What kinds of products do they produce?'

Dharavi's recycling business

Dharavi is estimated to recycle ~80% of Mumbai's plastic, numbers estimated to be far higher than those in the UK (9; see figures below from 4, 10, 11). As the world's ninth most populous city, this is no mean feat.

Dharavi's potteries (figures from 11, 12, 13, 14).

From hand embroidery to leather goods to goat intestines that will eventually end up as surgical thread (see figures below from 4, 11, 15), Dharavi's economy is complex, mulifaceted, just like the migrants who've made it their home.

Dharavi is already organically exporting its microenterprise, mixed-use space economic model to other slums

Dharavi's staggering complexity, ingenuity and industriousness begs the question, what's a slum?

 

What is a slum?

Apparently, the word slum was first used to describe dense, impoverished and unsanitary housing of 1820s London (16). The UN's attempt to define slum, 'Slums are neglected parts of cities where housing and living conditions are appallingly poor. Slums range from high-density, squalid central city tenements to spontaneous squatter settlements without legal recognition or rights, sprawling at the edge of cities' leaves much to be desired and unsatisfactory when applied to Dharavi. A more detailed attempt captures key slum attributes, with the worst ones having all of them (16):

• 'Lack of basic services: Inadequate access to safe water sources and sanitation facilities is the most significant feature. It is sometimes supplemented by absence of electricity, waste collection systems, surfaced roads, rainwater drainage and street lighting.
• Substandard housing or illegal and inadequate building structures: Houses are often constructed with non-permanent materials. Given local conditions concerning climate and location, these materials may be unsuitable for housing.
• Overcrowding and high density: A majority of the slum dwelling units suffer from high occupancy and the living space per inhabitant is scarce.
• Unhealthy living conditions and hazardous locations: Due to lack of basic services, such as sewage, waste and pollution management, unhealthy living conditions occur. Buildings may also be constructed on hazardous or unsuitable land.
• Insecure tenure: Lack of formal documents entitling settlers to occupy land bring about an insecurity in residential status.
• Poverty and social exclusion: As a cause and consequence of slum conditions; income and capability poverty restrain human and economical development.
• Minimum settlement size: A single household cannot be referred to as a slum since the term constitutes a precinct.'

Is Dharavi a slum?

• Strictly using the UN's more detailed yardstick, no doubt Dharavi is a slum (see figure from 17 on the left). But the reality is far more nuanced and murky.
• Even a straightforward survey of Dharavi's inhabitants puts paid to the notion of ranks of the desperately impoverished belonging to the lowest rungs of society.
• As Mumbai grew upward, around and beyond Dharavi, reaching out to and encompassing its  erstwhile suburbs, its perennial, desperate housing shortage drove new waves of Dharavi migrants, from blue collar workers like carpenters and electricians to white collar workers such as engineers, graphic designers and even those in the civil service such as clerks and police, all pulled to Dharavi by a common thread, affordable housing (see figure below from 18 on the right).
• For example, a study showed that 'in Mumbai in May 2006 we had 4,426 Police Constables (13 more than there were a year earlier) and 81 Police Inspectors living in slums: officers of the law who are illegal residents of the city' (14).
• According to Krishna Pujari, who organizes a controversial slum tour through Dharavi, 'All sorts of people live in Dharavi. MNC [multinational corporation] workers, BPO [business process outsourcing] workers, 60 percent of our police force' (10).

In Dharavi, lack of modern amenities equals lack of basic dignity

• Lack of proper water supply, sewage systems, toilet facilities makes cholera, malaria, typhoid, dengue common in Dharavi.
• Unregulated, toxic industries (tanneries, paints, plastic recycling) further contribute to chronic diseases.
• In Dharavi's leather accessories manufacture, 15 to 17 hour days are common, including 2 to 3 hour breaks for lunch and dinner. Only ~1% of these enterprises and workers have access to on-premise toilet facilities (8).
• Such callousness reveals an unpleasant though essential truth. Querying the use of the word slum is far from an exercise in semantics. It holds a mirror to our values. Inconsiderate, superficial, unthinking, uncaring? Sure, slum’s fine. Introspect and probe? Slum’s revealed as yet another way to shun and otherize.
• By now, copious news coverage and sociological research confirms that, lack of public or private investment notwithstanding, Dharavi generates valuable economic output for Mumbai and beyond.

In terms of its economic output, quite unlike modern, organized labor with entrenched long commutes and other environmentally unsustainable practices such as high-rise sleeper/bedroom communities, strip malls, colossal car showrooms, etc, it's not just a question of what but also how.

• Much of Dharavi is mixed-use space, i.e., living and working quarters cheek by jowl.
• Small-scale microenterprises, with most businesses employing 20 or less.
• The recycling aspect of Dharavi's economy makes it even more avant-garde.
• Whatever is intended by the use of the phrase 'economically advanced', Dharavi far outpaces conventional notions of sustainable economic development.
• Enlightened politicians and city planners, if such species do exist, could see in this aspect of Dharavi an economy of the future, the much-vaunted, eminently desirable Circular economy.
• Desirable because other than abandoning a wantonly destroyed Mother Earth to take to permanent space stations or colonizing Mars or some such science fiction fantasy a la WALL-E, sustainable economic development is the only way out for humans and for Mother Earth.
• From such a perspective, instead of looking to teach down to, Dharavi becomes a place to learn from.
• A natural experiment in urbanology, what Dharavi lacks is the modicum of dignity that non-slum dwellers take for granted, clean running water at home, hygienic sewage drainage, indoor toilets, basic health care, job safety and security, and regulated pay.
• As for what it takes to make a sustainable living-working space in the 21st century, Dharavi's natural experiment already points us the way ahead. If that isn't economically advanced, I don't know what is.

Bibliography

1. Page on bekon.lth.se
2. Eriksson, Charlotta. "Dharavi: Space, time, human condition towards a theory on unplanned settlements." (2013). http://www.diva-portal.org/smash...
3. Page on artdurnev.com
4. Page on yimg.com
5. Echanove, Matias, and Rahul Srivastava. "The High-Rise and the Slum: Speculative Urban Development in Mumbai." (2012): 789-813. Page on berkeley.edu
6. Mumbai case study
7. Engqvist, Jonatan Habib, and Maria Lantz. Dharavi: documenting informalities. Royal University College of Fine Arts, 2008.
8. Page on nceuis.nic.in
9. Waste not, want not in the £700m slum
10. 404 page - Motherland Magazine
11. National Geographic Magazine - NGM.com
12. Page on comm-dev.org
13. Megha Gupta's Dharavimarket.com aims to sell products by Dharavi's craftspeople across the world - The Economic Times
14. Page on udri.org
15. http://kaustuv.net/projects/MIRG...
16. http://mirror.unhabitat.org/pmss...
17. Dyson, Peter. "Slum tourism: representing and interpreting ‘reality’ in Dharavi, Mumbai." Tourism Geographies 14.2 (2012): 254-274.
18. Larsson, Emma, and Maja Nilsson. "Towards sustainable sanitation in slum areas: A field study in Mumbai." (2013). http://www.diva-portal.org/smash...

https://www.quora.com/How-economically-advanced-are-the-slums-in-India-What-kinds-of-products-do-they-produce/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala