Slum Tours in Mumbai

an article about reselling the SRA flats

and, actually, only part of the SRA website is impressive. the rest is under construction.

oh, i'm googling the day away:

from an interview with activist and architect Chandrasekhar Prabhu at haftamag

6. Given that 50% of Mumbai lives in the slums, what is your view of the current Slum Rehabilitation Scheme?

The slum-dwellers are not benefiting out of this scheme. Instead of a rehabilitation scheme, what is happening is that the slum-dwellers are thrown back into the slums. 60% of the slum-dwellers are selling back the houses given in the rehab scheme within one year and moving back to the slums. This slum rehab scheme is among the worst things that have ever happened to this city.

Nowhere in the world do you permit the developer to earn Rs10,000/sqft against an investment of Rs500/sqft. With so much disproportionate income, the builder is always tempted to buy the slum-dweller off. It's a typical sociological predatory tendency which has also been seen in Sao Paulo and Brasilia.

I believe a slum has to be understood as social phenomena. Most residences within the slums are residential-cum-commercial. For example, Lijjat papad, which employs 5 lakh women, works out of the Dharavi Slums. These women get the dough in the morning, make the papad and lay it out in the open for the sun to bake throughout the day. How would you expect these women, who stay and work in these slums, to move to multi-storey apartments? Their earnings are in their houses because their houses are on the ground.

The schemes are not catering to the poor and are always meant to make money for the builder. The committee which formulated the current rehab scheme had no slum dwellers, but only builders. Now, would someone making such a scheme make it in a way to benefit someone who the same builder is going throw out? It was never meant to be a slum dwellers scheme. The Govt also appointed a committee under Mr. S. S. Tinaikar, former BMC Commissioner. He made a 700-page report whose summary says that this slum rehab scheme is of the builder, by the builder, for the builder; it should hence be stopped forthwith and an alternative scheme should be worked out with the contribution of all stake-holders.

ok so can someone get me the right numbers?

they say that builders are tipped to make an obscene amount if all the slum people are to be rehabilitated.

i want to sound conservative and say 33,000 crores ($7.5 billion) .. thats definitely the minimum.. but in the back of my mind i remember a much more obscene figure which i dare not publish here..

can anyone confirm that it was more than $7.5 billion?

was it mumbai mirror where the article first appeared.

Yes, IR, strangely, it was Mumbai Mirror which first broke the story on the scam that is SRA. They even had proof of how people moved out of some slums were rendered homeless & unemployed. The figure is much more than Rs. 33000 crores. I've heard tell that the Deshmukhs have made a killing on this market - by proxy, of course.

there's something else that just stuck me about the dharavi/cabrini green comparision.

in the 50s, 60s and 70s, tenements and slums were pulled down all over the US (and the UK and elsewhere) and were replaced with "modern" public housing projects --- high-rise tower blocks that were supposed to lift the poor out of their misery. instead, these high-rises proved overwhelmingly hard to maintain and to police --- and created a sense of isolation among residents and a destruction of community. so now, the policy for public housing is to tear the monstrosities down and build smaller apartments and town houses, arranged in a way to foster community.

in cabrini green, of course, this meant that lots of people were displaced. but in philly, the martin luther king towers were torn down a few years ago --- these were an incredible eyesore and created a crime problem for the whole neighbourhood, which otherwise had been gentrifying --- and very lovely mixed-income townhomes have replaced them. (of course, now there are complaints that the contractors were corrupt and the new houses are shoddy... and i'm sure that some people were displaced... but it really is an improvement.)

i just wonder what those new tower blocks will look like in a decade --- if there are still any former slum dwellers living in them, of course. it's just sad to see mistakes repeated. those tower blocks will just be another sort of slum... and perhaps even a worse sort.

True that during the 50's 60's and 70's most of the tenements and slums were demolished to make way for new housing, the few that are left have been renovated and sold as whole or converted into duplex apartments, the 2 up 2 down terraced slum as become the quaint cottage. It wasn't what the people were living in at the time, it was more to do with the social deprevation coupled with inadequate education, you could put them in a upper middle class district and in a very short time it would turn into a slum area. But lets not divert too much, even a visit from the ladies guild or one from the pandora's box of fool hardy ideas drummed up by the sociology department doesn't help the slum dwellers, guided tours/ tea and sympathy aren't the answer. We all know they live there, you couldn't miss it even if dust flew in your eye, education and social/urban regeneration is really what they need, it wouldn't matter how much money was donated to them, they'd still be living the monotony of slum life.

If this kind of thing gets money to the people who need it and helps promote activism to help slum-dewellers then I say great.

However, as with all such things, I have my doubts, particularly from a moral standpoint.

It's kind of like taking photos of families creamting their dead relatives at Manikarnika ghat in Varanasi or Arya ghat Kathmandu - some people have no shame about doing it while others have issues with it.

ok so found some more information from non verified sources but they do not look unreasonable.

there are 30 lakh slum dwellings in mumbai.
Per dwelling, builders are expect to make around 1cr as profit. thats $220,000.
So 30 Lakhs or 3 million means.. 30 lakh crores. Since 1 lakh Cr is approx $22 billion, 30 lakh crores = 660 Billion USD.

Comeon.. this cant be for real.
The builders couldnt be making 660 Billion or even 330 Billion USD from this....

Someone say i am wrong..

Good writeup on this in a recent Wall Street Journal issue..

I'd like to go back to the OP for a sec. Unlike most people posting here, I've actually been on the tour in Mumbai, as well as a similar tour in Delhi. As part of a writing project, I've spent the past three months researching slum tours worldwide (conducting interviews, reading development papers, etc). I've also visited slums independently all over Africa and been an aid worker in northern Uganda and South Sudan. So I hope I can offer a fairly educated viewpoint.

It's so, so easy to make a snap judgment of "slum tours." When I first heard the term, I, too, was appalled. But in my research, I've come to quite a different opinion. The amount of money brought into developing countries by tourists is ENORMOUS. How much of that trickles down to people living in the slums? Not a lot. These tours are at least doing SOMETHING to get travelers thinking about life on the urban edge. Sure, a tourist can donate the same amount of money to a charity. But what will he have learned? Will he tell people back home about what the slums are like if he hasn't been there himself?

And let's not forget that most people are essentially selfish beings. We give something, we want to get something in return. I'd love to believe that if we just knew more about poverty, we would all be giving up our cars and skiing holidays to donate half our income to charity. Not gonna happen. (Let's forget for now that monstrous international aid organizations aren't exactly angels when it comes to moral fiber.) Tourists are the same--which is why offering them something (a tour of Dharavi, or Soweto, or Kibera) is an important part of the bargain. On the scale of things, I think that writing a quick check to an NGO in exchange for a less guilty conscience isn't any better than going on a slum tour. I am much more likely now to pay attention to slum initiatives because I've been there, I've seen the people--I know how many hours they put in every day and how much money they earn per month (less than 3,000 rupees on average--about $75).

I think the reason the Dharavi tour in Mumbai get such negative reactions is because they come straight out and call it a "slum tour." Companies (non-profit and for-profit) have been doing tours in poor neighborhoods worldwide for 15 years in some cases--the favela tours in Rio de Janeiro are most famous, but there are also guided tours of "misery villages" in Argentina, townships in Joburg and Cape Town, and slums in Nairobi. Why is no one giving them so much crap? Partially because "favela tour" sounds more cultural and less harsh than "slum tour." But in India, there's no other name for them. They're slums. Get used to it.

There is no such thing as a perfectly ethical action while traveling in developing countries. Comparing my guided slum tours to my "independent" slum tours, I think that the latter were actually more intrusive and degrading to residents than the former. First, because I was not gaining education about the place itself--how many people are there? Is there access to water? What is the biggest challenge to development? Second, because I was not expected. On my guided walks in Delhi and Mumbai, the organizations come to agreements with the residents in advance. In Dharavi, people living there knew who we were when we did the tour--they smiled and waved. Our guide was born and raised in Dharavi and still lives there. He was quite passionate about raising awareness about the industriousness of people in Dharavi despite their poverty.

The goal of Reality Tours and Travel is not to show people how bad the poverty is in Dharavi (it's far better than slums elsewhere, no question)--the goal is to dispel some of the myths people have about slums. RT&T doesn't have the answers--but at least they are encouraging people to ask the questions.