[Urbanstudy] Fwd: 'Review of Dharavi'

[sadan]

Dear all, 
forwarding a review by Harini Narayan. Hope you would enjoy the review.
thanks
sadan.

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: 'Review of Dharavi'
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 23:15:27 +0530
From: Gautam Mody and Harini Narayanan <gmhn at bom2.vsnl.net.in>
To: sadan <sadan at sarai.net>

Dear Sadan,
Here is the review of the book on Dharavi that I wrote for Himal magazine.
Best wishes,
Harini
Book Review
Harini Narayanan

Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia's Largest Slum
by Kalpana Sharma;
Penguin Books India, 2000, New Delhi, paperback, pp xiii + 209, INR 200. 

In the Introduction to her book, Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia's 
Largest Slum, Kalpana Sharma makes a brave admission: "Like many others in 
Mumbai, I too did not know precisely what and where was this 'slum' called 
Dharavi. I discovered it, so to speak, during the 1992-93 communal riots... 
As a journalist, I had to visit Dharavi frequently to report on the 
riots...". The rest of the book is a testament to just how precisely and 
thoroughly she then set about discovering what and where Dharavi is, and more 
importantly - if one may be permitted a little grammatical licence - why it 
is.

The 'where' of Dharavi can be established easily enough.  Newcomers to Mumbai 
will probably have the place - 'Asia's largest slum' - pointed out to them 
with a nudge and an uncomfortable chuckle as they drive out from the airport 
to the commercial centres of the 'island city', or make their first trip 
south on a 'local'  (a commuter train). The 'what' and the 'why' are harder 
to locate and understand, and Sharma devotes the bulk of her work to these 
questions.
One of the strongest features of the book is its clarity about the many whys 
of Dharavi: why does such a place exist? Why does it exist in the precise 
location that it does (sandwiched between Mumbai's two major north-south 
railway lines, more or less in the centre of Greater Mumbai as the city is 
now developing)? Why does Mumbai's middle-class - which unfortunately 
includes the metro's planning and supervisory authorities -  view Dharavi 
with a strange and almost schizophrenic mixture of interest, exasperation, 
fear, revulsion and curiosity, but almost never understanding? And most of 
all, why does and must Dharavi matter to us all? Sharma responds to all these 
questions with answers that are informed by painstaking research, passion, 
warmth and a stern reminder that while enterprise in the midst of deprivation 
is to be admired, there is absolutely "nothing to celebrate about living in a 
cramped 150 sq. ft. house with no natural light or ventilation, without 
running water or sanitation".
Ultimately, as Sharma lucidly argues, the growth of places like Dharavi is the 
direct and simple result of the state's refusal to acknowledge, firstly, that 
urban centres like Mumbai are, and in the foreseeable future will continue to 
be, magnets for those seeking employment, and secondly, that it is the 
responsibility of the state to ensure that decent and affordable housing is 
made available to these job-seekers.  And at several points, especially in 
the early post-Independence years, such housing could easily have been built 
or motivated by the government in the large tracts of vacant land that were 
then readily available.At least during the early boom years, industrial 
houses could have been legally required to provide housing for permanent 
employees. The government as well as a few industrial units did indeed build 
some workers' housing (there was even a feeble effort to get textile-mill 
owners to contribute towards a fund that the government would then use to 
build chawls for their workers), but in the absence of any clear piece of 
policy or legislation that made such housing a requirement, these initiatives 
soon petered out.
  In sum, there is no doubt that in Mumbai, the state has comprehensively 
abrogated its responsibilities in the area of shelter provision, especially 
for the poor. Worse, as Sharma points out, urban planning and plan 
implementation occur in Mumbai mainly by default and negligence, and the 
"history and growth" of places like Dharavi, which packs a million people in 
a 175-hectare triangle of swampy, ill-serviced urban wasteland, illustrate 
the resultant problems graphically.
After many decades spent systematically ignoring the simple fact that if there 
is even the slightest possibility of urban employment, people will keep 
showing up to seek it, especially if they are propelled forward by 
unrelenting rural poverty, the government in Mumbai (then Bombay) started to 
take cognisance of the outcome of this in-migration when it set about making 
its earliest development plans. In these plans, it explained what it would do 
with the city's burgeoning slums: remove them.Accordingly, the period between 
the late 1960s and the early 1980s was devoted to the tragic and wasteful act 
of tearing down 'illegal' housing and ordering the occupants to simply leave. 
No thinking middle-class citizen of Bombay who lived there in the 1970s or 
1980s can recall, without squirming at least slightly in his or her 
comfortable seat, the demolitions of the Emergency years or those miserable 
monsoon days in mid-1981 when an entire settlement was destroyed, the 
occupants packed into buses and deposited on the outskirts of the city with 
the admonition to 'go home', wherever or whatever that was.As Sharma says, 
demolition and eviction are still the most visible tools that the city 
government has whenever it needs to demonstrate that it can actually run the 
show.  But at least at the policy-making level, the futility of demolitions 
has been recognised and replaced, serially, by programmes for slum 
'improvement', 'upgradation' and most recently, 'redevelopment'.  All these 
programmes follow a bizarre and semantically loaded ritual that is called 
'recognition', i.e., the government 'recognises' that a particular slum and 
its inhabitants have been around so long that they are unlikely to vanish 
altogether, and so they might as well be offered rudimentary forms of civic 
services like sanitation and water provision. 'Recognition' is granted on the 
basis of a 'cut-off' date, which is a powerful political tool that is always 
available for negotiation and accommodation. Over the years, I have watched 
this 'cut-off' date lurch steadily forward, from 1976, to 1980, then 1985 and 
finally (for now), to 1995.
But, as Sharma knows,  'recognition' does not mean legality of tenure, and the 
state is free to demolish slums that it has itself set up whenever it feels 
it can make 'better' use of the land, typically by offering it to private 
builders. Thus, Dharavi and other Mumbai slums are full of groups that have 
been evicted and relocated several times in the course of one lifetime. And 
each time after the very first one, they have been summarily uprooted from 
locations where the government itself had initially placed them. The 
landscape of Mumbai bears witness to these successive evictions in its 
informal place-names. There are several 'Kumbharwadas' (potters' colonies) in 
Mumbai, though the most identifiable settlement of traditional Kumbhars in 
Mumbai is today to be found only in Dharavi. Most of the other so-called 
'Kumbharwadas' simply identify the locations where migrants potters from 
Gujarat were once allowed to exist.
This fundamental illegality of residence that slum-dwellers in Mumbai have to 
live with, even in old and apparently well-settled slums like Dharavi, cloaks 
their entire beings - their very existence - with a mask of illegality as far 
as the city's better-off residents are concerned.  To some extent, it is true 
that illegality of residential tenure breeds further illegality, for every 
time someone wants a piece of land to build a shack, get a water connection 
or a job in Dharavi, he or she has to use means that are often necessarily 
extra-legal. And as Sharma points out, it is easier for crimes like murder 
and theft to be committed in isolated middle-class living areas than it is in 
a densely packed settlement like Dharavi, where up to 90 per cent of the 
residents often work close to where they live.
This brings us to the parts of the book that display its impressive field-work 
base. Sharma has clearly spent many hours and months walking through 
Dharavi's bewildering (to the outsider) network of roads, lanes and alleys, 
separating out each distinct group of residents, putting together complex 
oral histories about their places of origin, their arrivals in Mumbai, their 
dreams about the city of gold and their efforts to get a piece of that gold. 
Migrants from all over the country jostle with each other for their own 
little inches of space in Dharavi, and many of them continue to pursue in 
Dharavi those professions for which they gained prominence in their places of 
origin. And as Sharma points out, their main preoccupation is to find 
employment and improve their lives, and so they are not easily provoked into 
clashes with each other, contrary to anything that the uninformed outsider 
might believe.
"If you want to eat the best gulab jamuns in town, buy the best chiki, acquire 
an export quality leather handbag, order World Health Organization (WHO) 
certified sutures for surgery, see the latest design in ready-made garments 
being manufactured for export, get a new suitcase or an old one repaired, 
taste food from the north and the south, see traditional south Indian gold 
jewellery - there are few better places in all of Mumbai than Dharavi," she 
says. She then explains in painstaking detail just how and where each of 
these occupations are pursued in Dharavi's dark lofts and crowded workshops 
that are, quite literally, 'sweatshops'. She traces the courses of several 
fascinating rags-to-riches stories - the kind that constantly inspire Hindi 
cinema plotlines and filter back to barren hinterlands, enticing fresh waves 
of migrants to Mumbai's teeming slums.
The figures are not to be taken lightly. After explaining that "estimates of 
the daily turnover of Dharavi can only be wild guesses as... much of the 
production here is illegal", she puts forward a "rough back-of-the-envelope 
calculation by Dharavi residents" that adds up to between Rs 1,500 crore and 
Rs 2,000 crore a year, or around Rs 11 crore per hectare per year.  Even 
allowing for some exaggeration by Dharavi's residents, these figures - as 
well as the fact that Dharavi has one of the highest 
individuals-to-employment ratios in the city - are something that the city 
government must bear in mind when it next decides to tell these migrants to 
"go home" (never mind that many of Dharavi's younger residents have never 
seen a part of the world other than Greater Mumbai).
These details about Dharavi's residents, their caste and regional profiles, 
their jobs, failures and success stories, provide fascinating reading. But 
this is also the one section of the book where, perhaps, the editors have not 
served the writer well enough. The mass of material was clearly so 
overwhelming that it was difficult to avoid making repetitive statements and 
offer sustained cross-referencing. Thus, for instance, the presence and 
activities of Dharavi's 25 bakeries are discussed in at least four different 
places in the book, and the information is often repetitive. And each time, 
the information is presented as if for the first time. Similarly, the 
regional compositions of Dharavi's residents are explained repeatedly, 
without the usual "as mentioned earlier..." kind of reference. This drags 
some sections of the book down somewhat, but in no way affects its overall 
richness of detail or the fundamentally rigorous nature of the analysis.
This is a book that professionals who grapple with the problems of 
fast-growing Third World metros certainly need to take seriously. But more 
importantly, it is a work that everyone who has ever driven past Dharavi and 
looked at it with a mixture of interest, revulsion and incomprehension needs 
to read and think about.
  

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