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.

Confronting the Rich-Poor Divide of Globalization

Our third day in India had us conducting a site visit to an Aastha Parivar (“Family of Support”) site that centered to helping and empowering individuals working in the Mumbai sex trade. The visit to the Women’s Welfare Society, a community based organization (CBO) that provided educational, clinical, and social support to the sex workers was interesting in that it challenged many of our conceptions of the community and our role as public health experts and educators. Shortly after we arrived for our service project (to help train the CBO leaders and volunteers, we quickly realized the shoe was quite literally on the other foot. It was they who had much to teach us and our role was to listen and learn about what were the actual ground conditions. In sharing our training materials and seeking feedback to improve them, we learned how the women in the trade dealt with health issues and how they already negotiated respite to conserve their health and support one and other.

Ultimately we left with several excellent ideas to improve upon the training materials and a lot of exchange of good will on the part of both sides. Some of the key lessons include the age old need to survey real-time ground conditions in developing public health training materials, really listening to the target audience to learn what their concerns are, and realizing that in the end everyone is part of the human family and that all women around the world share the same concerns, stories and ways of coping.

From the depths of Byculla and Grant Road, our team proceeded to the heights of cosmopolitan Mumbai and the Colaba area with its fancy shopping, hotels, monuments and skyscrapers. Although, somewhat disorienting, it nevertheless provided an interesting contrast to the earlier experience and added to our understanding of the multifaceted nature of the city and country.

People Watching: Observations at a Major Indian Airport

Waiting for some of my colleagues to arrive at Mumbai International Airport, provided the great opportunity to people watch as planeloads of passengers streamed out of the airport into a waiting India. In keeping with the rise of India as one of the world’s important economies, its visitors and returning residents brought with them explicit evidence of economic and social success: bulging suitcases, fashionable clothes and shoes, electronics and much more. One striking element was the enormous range of people from across the international, social, business, and religious spectrum that passed through that airport exit.

Standing quietly in a corner of the exit lounge I noticed a female member of the Airport janitorial staff also observing the crowd, her face slightly drawn in as she watched the stream of plenty pass her by. She was dressed in an Airports Authority provided uniform, complete with a simple but tasteful sari, a nice long sweater coat, and comfortable closed toe and well-soled shoes but still it was clear that she did not fully belong to the class of people walking by us. No doubt she benefits to some degree by her employment at a major international airport which is enormously busy at all hours of the night and day but her demeanour and expression indicated the possible existence of another life outside the airport, perhaps in some chawl or one of those tenement areas we would visit later in our trip. At one point her supervisor swung by and held a brief conversation discussing work shift issues in what I noted to be a very polite tone.

Every so often, spying some minor trash falling off a luggage cart, the housekeeper would step out from her place in the corner to sweep the lobby area with a long-handled, ergonomically sound, Swiffer-style floor-sweeping implement, a great improvement in of itself from its predecessors -- the handheld dirty floor rag and a bucket of equally grimy water or the 2 foot long traditional short broomstick or “jhadoo” that was most certainly not ergonomic. Clearly, her occupational work conditions have improved with respect to her work clothes, which lend a certain amount of respect to her person, and work implements, which demonstrate improved ergonomics and reduced manual and inhalation contact with unsanitary environmental conditions such as unhygienic and dusty floors.

Suddenly, a family of passengers passed through the lobby on their way to the main exit door: a harried mother travelling alone with a mountain of luggage, followed by her 6 or 7 year old feisty take-charge daughter pushing a cart herself, who was busy shepherding her mom in front and her baby brother behind, and of course the toddler brother pushing his own stroller but barely able to see over its top and weaving a crazy path across the lobby floor much to his sister’s chagrin. In that instant, the janitor immediately became animated and both of us broke into amused grins as we watched the hilarious progress of this family across the lobby and out the exit. After that brief piece of entertainment, the janitor turned to me and still smiling made the sapient, and in some sense proud, observation that the little girl was a tough cookie who would manage well in life!

It made me wonder what else the janitor was thinking about in making her remark. Did she have a young daughter who she hoped would someday do well in life? Was she thinking about how her own professional work conditions have improved over the years? At how she’s given more respect as a woman floor sweeper and dignified with a respectable uniform, treatment, and working implements, in a country that has traditionally held a challenging views of social class? It would appear there has been progress in India over these past 10 years yet some essential economic and social differences remain. The hope lies as always in the children of the future generation who are always able to draw a smile out of adults, and I suspect the janitor on some level thinks the same.