Dharavi: An Urban Slum & Solid Waste Recycling

It’s Day Four in India, the monsoon weather continues, leaving the roads alternately wet and dry. The sun has rarely been out from behind the clouds. This morning dawned cloudy but not rainy. Today we visited, Dharavi, once considered Asia’s largest slum. Started over 75 years ago by impoverished migrants who migrated from the economically depressed rural areas to the city of Mumbai in search of work and money. The majority of these migrants and residents of Dharavi are men, far away from their families who are left behind in the villages, but there are some women and children as well. The men send money back home periodically and some return to the villages for the harvest season or for family occasions. Our host in Dharavi was ACORN India and Vinod Shetty, Esq., who leads The Dharavi Project. This group is geared towards providing education and resources to the children of Dharavi and helping the residents mobilize to improve their communal conditions.

One of the main industries in Dharavi is the solid waste management and recycling industry. Just about every kind of solid waste from plastics, paper, and glass to white goods, wood, auto parts and sheet metal in every shape and form are recycled by ragpickers or other recyclers and either re-constituted in situ or collated for transport to other processing plants in the city. Residents earn money through the sales of these recyclable materials. For instance a cardboard recycler (of which there are about a 50-75 in a 100 meter stretch of road) receives brown cardboard boxes from all parts of the city, breaks them down by removing staples, and collates them into batches which are then sold to a pulp and paper mill on the outskirts of the city to be converted to papier mache and then re-constituted back into boxes. One of the small businesses we stopped by reported receiving 2000Kg/day of cardboard which it can then sell to the paper mill for Rs.7/Kg for approximately Rs. 14,000/day. Plastic can be sold for Rs. 25-30/Kg. Each day, 10,000 tons of solid waste trash arrives in Dharavi to be processed and without the vital intermediate recycling services provided by the small businesses of the slum factories, the solid waste would be sent to a landfill.

Despite playing such an integral role in the economy and the waste management sector, these small businesses are considered to be part of the informal work sector and lack essential occupational health and safety practices. The workers wear minimal clothing due to the heat exposing limbs, fingers, feet to unguarded machinery blades, welders working with sheet metal from cars use sunglasses in place of welding goggles, and none of the workers use hearing protection despite the near deafening noise.

Hence occupational health and safety represents a possible area of intervention either by ACORN India and The Dharavi Project or an alterate organization interested in amerliorating the health and safety conditions of this key workforce.