Slum Tours in Mumbai

I read about this in Time Magazine. Has anybody done this? Kinda sounds freaky, but they say they donate 80% profits to NGOs. In the past, I've done my own, limited touring of the poor areas off the beaten track and was pretty scared, although most folks were too busy doing their own thing to even notice me...

Anybody had experiences like these?

if you want to donate money, find a NGO working with slum dwellers, and just give them the money...why do you need to join a specific tour?
if the slum dwellers are running the tour, perhaps then you should consider taking one but what are the chances of that?

happy travelling

pallav

http://purnea.ee.princeton.edu/~pgupa

Dear SacredCow,
I dont see anything wrong in having a tour in slums, and I must say that the houses of poors are the most vibrant and full of life. You see, they dont have much to lose :-) But you need to make sure that you understand the sensitivity as well. It would be good, if you know somebody who lives in that slum and you can believe him.

I believe the tours the OP is talking about are actually led by children or teenagers who live in the slums and have been trained by NGO volunteers to give these tours and to speak some English so they can explain their lives to travelers. If this is the case, I can't see how it's a bad thing, since it gives the young people something to do besides beg, and gives them a chance to improve their English - and the little I've heard about it makes it sound like the kids are pretty thrilled to be acting as guides and having contact with foreigners. I'd imagine you'd want to give them a small tip, in addition to whatever you pay for the tour.

you can get details of these tours in the Mumbai time out guide

http://www.realitytoursandtravel.com</a>
80% of profits after tax from these slum tours are donated to local NGOs (charities).

This is one of the only outfits in mumbai which do slum tours and they have a no camera policy which is good .

after reading through their website, i think reality tours sounds like a pretty amazing organization.

I have spokent o Chris Way on the phone from abroad as well asiwhile in India. I recommend him and their tour highly. I am glad to see that some people in india have charitable hearts. Mumbai was described to be as the Biggest Slum in the world, by an Indian..Good Luck

You want to visit someone's home for the sole reason that they're poor? If you want to go look at a bunch of noble scrubbers, fine; they're allover the place, y'know, just don't do so under the pretext of philanthropy. Visiting the world's biggest slum must carry some serious kudos, I guess.

The http://www.realitytoursandtravel.com</a> hasn't paid a single penny to charity so far. They lost over Rs.100000 in the first year. Even if they'd made Rs.100000 profit, still none of it would have gone to charity. The owners take a monthly wage, pay their staff, cover their expenses & end up helping no one but themselves. "What a load of crap" slums... sorry sums it up.

Above should read: "The company mentioned hasn't paid..."

Palexurdy, if I may ask, why so skeptical? They explicitly say their net loss, the reasons for it, and an independent audit verifying it. If you have proof, then please share.

Proof of what? All I’m saying is based on that website. Good on the owners for sharing the facts, which are only things that any thoughtful customer would want to know. I don’t doubt the owners’ sincerity, but their business just seems a pointless opportunity for them & a few rich tourists get a nice feeling, while the intended beneficiaries get nothing & won’t, it seems, for the foreseeable future. An unrealistic, if well-intentioned, scheme.

"rich tourists to get a nice feeling?"

given that their tours only cost 600-300 rupees and you are advised to wear closed toe shoes for health reasons, i don't exactly think that "rich" tourists --- ie, people who are staying in 5 star hotels and driving around in private cars --- are going to be their prime customers. (in the sense that all tourists are rich, well ---- that's just the way it is.)

i don't think the idea behind the tours is to look at poor people --- you don't have to go on a tour in india to look at poor people! ---- but rather to try to understand and demystify to some extent "poor" people. as the tour group mentions in the website, the slums of bombay are more then just "slums". a wide variety of people live there --- from the very poor to the almost middle class --- and a major portion of bombay's economy emanates from there. though the NGOs might not get any money yet, i hope that a benefit of the tour would be to validate the lives of the people living in the slums to the outside world. and i hope the people living in the slums would get satisfaction from having outsiders see the jobs they do and the communities that they live in.

i think it's interesting that as soon as the poor are urban, they are somehow more poor. if the people living in the slums of bombay were living in a village with a backdrop of gorgeous mountains rather than in a village surrounded by a major urban area, no one would find it surprising that a tourist might be interested in how and where they live. that's a main reason to travel, right? --- to try to gain understanding of other human beings. but while the rural poor (all over the world) are usually more poor than the urban poor, they are also just much more atmospheric.

By all means go there, like I said, & if you want to give to charity, do so. I still think visiting the slums (with a knowledgable guide) independently would be favourable, in most regards, to going through an agent. Why only Dharavi, anyway? There are shacks strung out along Mumbai's roads, any other large town or city will have slums. Every documentary (& I'm talking about the travellogue-style) that I've seen on India recently though have taken in the slums. Are these journalists & tourists really trying to understand their fellow man, or are they just following the latest fad?

it might be a bit faddish --- there are always these documentary fads going on.... sudan's "lost boys" is one of the past couple of years --- but i hope that even within a "fad", people's intentions aren't exploitative. in terms of visiting independently --- well, that's great if you know a knowledgable guide. but how many visitors to any city know a knowledgable guide? most don't, so they hire one... and that usually involves some sort of tourist-oriented organization.

did you actually look at the website for reality tours? didn't strike me as much of a money-making scheme.

i think your perspective ---- that people who live in someplace like dhavari are necessarily embarassed at where they live --- is patronizing. ever think that the people who live in dhavari might like the chance to show outsiders that they are respectable, industrious, community-minded folks? the whole point of touring a neighborhood like dharvari is to show people that there's more to a "slum" than complete and hopeless abject poverty. you can gawk at plenty of that by just looking down at the sidewalks of bombay. or out of a train window.

as for "poking around their less fortunate lives from a guided tour" --- well, just about every tourist in a developing country pokes around the lives of people less fortunate. like i said above, it's just easier to justify or ignore the poverty when it is connected more directly to a beautiful mountain or a historic monument. however, i have generally found that these "less fortunate" people are often eager to meet and interact with people from abroad, especially since being "less fortunate" they don't have the same opportunities to meet foreigners.

when in the little rann of kutch years ago, i went on a tour organized by a local environmental activist and photographer. he took a small group of us into the rann, where we saw how the salt-workers there make a torturous living. our guide had come from a family of salt-workers, and was trusted by the workers. it was painful to see the conditions in which they lived, and at first it felt a bit voyeuristic, but the salt worker was glad to show us how he did his work, and i think he appreciated us recognizing what hard (but also incredible) work it is.

his wife made us tea and our presence certainly broke up the monotony of her life. we gave shared our biscuits with the family. the guide gave the youngest child some money --- a tip funneled in such a way that it seemed like a gift. perhaps i'm being rosy about this and the family didn't want us
there. but since our guide was a sensitive man, linked into the community, i don't think he would have done anything that would have caused resentment or offense.

hopefully, the dhavari tours work along those lines. i know the trip to the rann is one of the most memorable experiences i have had in india. i still think of that family often. i can't say what practical impact it has had on my life --- i haven't become an activist for salt workers! --- but it had an emotional and sociological impact that has stayed with me for years.

It's a sick nasty idea drummed up by a sick nasty person, the slums aren't zoo's for the inquisitive traveller/tourist, if you really want to help the less fortunate there are many ways in which you can, guided tours are not the answer. Try doing it in the slum areas of the US or Britain and see what the reaction would be, it may be a nice way to spend an afternoon, share a few biscuits and talk about the memory for years to come, but get real! they need more than a brief encounter and the odd tip. I doubt anyone in the right mind would think that because they live in slums they're not hardworking community minded folk, but if it's just to share biscuits and tea and break the monotony of everyday life, why stop at the slums? you'll find lots of families sleeping six to a room in a crumbling corporation blocks. It's real help and support that they need, not an excursion on a travellers itinerary.

actually, i have organized tours in "challenged communities" (ie, slums) in the city where i live, as part of my job at a citywide public art program. though --- naturally --- poor people need money --- it also can be a very powerful thing to let "rich people" actually see those communities. in at least some of the minds of the people on the tours i organized, the "badlands" (yes, the neighborhood is nicknamed the badlands) now is not just a place to get mugged, get shot, or buy drugs, but also a place where people live in neat and clean houses, plant gardens in their communities, participate in public art projects, and fight to make where they live a better place.

these people did not take these tours thinking they were doing it to help the less fortunate. if they wanted to help the less fortunate, they would volunteer or write a check. (and probably many of them already volunteer or write checks because the people who take these sort of tours are already pretty civic minded.) they took these tours because they wanted to see the murals in these neighbourhoods and because they were curious about these neighborhoods. but hopefully, having been to the source, they now have a different relationship to those neighbourhoods. my parents took one of the tours, and for them it definately put some faces on a place that is usually only a headline on the local news because of yet another shooting.

i hope the "slum" tours in bombay do the same.

in anycase if its dharavi that the company is focusing on right now, the business will last for 3-4 yrs of 5 tops.

Dharavi is on its way to be converted into residential complexes under the Slum Rehabilitation scheme and we should see the so called largest slum of asia disappear within the next few years.

But Dharavi is not even a real slum in the true sense anymore. The residents of dharavi have definitely moved up a couple of notches and you'd be surprised the amount of industries that are functioning there.

yeah, IR - i think that's the focus of the tour company. they don't take people to residential areas --- it is focused on all the small industries.

i like the phrase "Slum Rehabilitation scheme". i actually went and googled it to see if it was an actual name of a project or just the way you were phrasing it. i don't know too much about it, but i'd assume that "scheme" really is the proper way to describe it... along the lines of chicago's "cabrini green housing project rehabilitation scheme": tear down housing on extremely valuable land, move the inhabitants to outlying areas, and build million dollar condos and shopping complexes (with a bit of subsidized housing thrown in for good karma).

ahh, here's a FAQs.

okay, the main page of the slum rehabilitation authority has blinking text so that you can't actually read what it says. the website --- once you get past the blinking text --- is impressive, but i'd like to know what the figures are on how many people are not going to qualify for "pukka" housing and be displaced.

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.

thanks, hello. well said.