Dharavi Slums – Day 4
I am all about shopping bargains when a sale comes around the corner. Always looking forward to finding a high-end outfit for half the price, but after visiting the Dharavi slums, I am now more aware where my threads come from and who makes them. On the fourth day, the social entrepreneurship group and I had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Dharavi slums. Spread over 1.7 km2 with a population of over 1 million people in the world, it is considered as one of the largest slums in the world. We met with Vinod Shetty, director of the Acorn Foundation India and the organization that runs the Dharavi Project.
The goal of the Dharavi Project is to advocate for the welfare and legitimize the profession of “rag-pickers” or garbage collectors and informalized laborers that have become the essential players responsible for the sustainable recycling, waste-management, and unregulated work for the Dharavi slums. On a daily basis, the city of Mumbai accumulates an estimated 8000 tons of garbage for a population of approximately 25 million and where municipal government fails to bridge the gap on garbage collecting, the “rag pickers” are the unnoticed heroes that bridge this gap.
Visiting the Dharvai slums was a sensory overload experience at every level. The first vision at sight was a landscape that has been bulldozed a month early by the the municipal or state government. The excuse was to clear and fix the water pipes, but it is believed that the ultimate goal of the bulldozing was to reinforce the power of the government over the illegal settlement. Mumbai is growing consistently every year and Dharvai is considered prime real estate land because it sits right in the middle of the city. The bulldozing of this small portion of Dharvai is no different from the historical contact of District 6 in Cape Town, South Africa. Still the inhabitants of Dharvai do not stop and continue on surviving and thriving everyday working by picking up garbage and working in the unregulated factories.
From my western perspective, it very easy for some of us to criticize of the social injustice of working in garbage and in unsafe and unregulated factories, but for a man that leaves his family and children behind in his village, it becomes a lifeline to pursue higher income and a better livelihood. Dharvai becomes home and where they find work.
As I walked through the small muddy alleyways of Dharvai, I passed by a man that was working a whole room of automatic embroidery machines. At that moment, I related to the man.
My father spent over a decade in the embroidery industry working $12.00 an hour. It was his first job after escaping the civil war in El Salvador and the job that supported my family. My father worked the night shift and in the mornings he made us breakfast and took us to school. As I looked at the man working with finesse the embroidery machines it made me wonder how lucky I was to have my father at home, while this man worked and possibly was miles away from his family.
I eventually realized that the fancy clothes that I buy back in the US or anything that is made in India can possibly come from a man working the embroidery machines in a slum like Dharvai.
It made me more aware and put a human face to the clothes I wear.
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