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Slumdog Millionaire Puts Slum Tourism in the Spotlight

“A crime against poverty and an affront to the dignity of slum dwellers”

Photo by AFP

The week before Slumdog Millionaire scooped the Oscars on 22 February, I found myself navigating the fetid drains and precarious lofts of Mumbai’s Dharavi slum. With an estimated 1 million inhabitants, it is Asia’s largest slum—and the setting for parts of the film.

Replete with a mixture of First-World guilt, curiosity, and apprehension, I joined Reality Tours and Travel on its slum tour at the urging of friends in Mumbai. They said I would be surprised.

Since the film was released internationally, participation in the tours has picked up by 25%, the tour operators say, despite the impact of both the global recession and the Mumbai bombings.

Englishman Chris Way, 34, got the idea to start the slum tours after working as a volunteer teaching English to children in Mumbai’s slums in 2002. He said he had taken a tour of the favelas in Brazil and been impressed; he thought a similar tour might work here and started the tours in early 2006, with his Indian partner, 29-year-old Krishna Pujari.

Slum dwellers offered little resistance to the tours from the beginning, Way says. They objected only to having their pictures taken. As a result, no photography is allowed. To offset any lingering resistance, the company operates a community center in the slum, providing English and computer lessons at a nominal fee.

The tourism enterprise has received much more criticism from outside the slum. Jockin Arputham, the Mumbai-based president of Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a grassroots organization representing urban poor and homeless in 20 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and has received a $10 million development grant from the Gates Foundation, lashed out at the operators, describing such tours as a “crime against poverty” and an affront to the dignity of slum dwellers.

Mr. Arputham, who received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Peace and Understanding in 2000, himself lives in a slum. He said he had seen the advertising billboards and the vehicles picking up the foreign tourists near the Taj Hotel and felt strongly that it was exploitative:

“People are angry about this,” he said. “The people are living in very, very bad conditions with children running around naked, and foreigners are photographing this and trying to expose the poverty.”

Way disputes this, saying his company runs the slum tours sensitively, for “social purposes.” At 400 rupees ($8), the half-day tours present an aspect of slum life which few are aware of—the sense of industry, community, and purpose.

“We want as many people as possible to experience the area,” he said. “We want to show the positive side of the spirit of enterprise and hard work. The poverty and the conditions serve to enhance this spirit of survival.”

David Smith, founder and president of the Boston-based nonprofit Affordable Housing Institute (AHI), which advises international organizations such as SDI on financing and has also received funding from the Gates Foundation, notes that taking a slum tour is a powerful experience for tourists.

Mr. Smith said his 20-year career has seen him in many slums and describes the experience as “life changing,” especially his visit to Kibera, Kenya’s largest slum, in 2005. “It took me weeks to internalize. I learn something each time I visit a slum.”

Depending on the season, 8–15 tourists join the Dharavi tours each day in groups restricted to 6. Many recent tour participants have said that the Slumdog Millionaire film was what piqued their interest, Way said.

Our tour guide, Rakesh Das, began with an introduction that focused on the sense of community, the lack of crime compared with the city in general, and the cooperation of different religious and communal groups, as well as the enterprise and vitality evident everywhere.

We were also given a pep talk and warned that under no circumstances were we to show any form of disgust at what we might encounter, not to flinch from being touched, and at no time should we cover our mouths or noses.

The last caveat—not to cover your mouth or nose—was definitely the most difficult. I found myself trapped in a sooty shack where aluminum cans were being smelted and toxic smoke was belching forth, waiting for streams of humanity and their cargo to pass through the narrow ane. I had to remind myself I was only exposed to the poisonous fumes for a few minutes, unlike the workers who toiled there year after year.

From the hand slaps and greetings that Rakesh received in every quarter, he was clearly a familiar and well-liked figure. The shopkeeper whose scrupulously neat shop was no bigger than a small bathroom and whose entire family lived behind the counter was happy and proud to show us what he had.

The potters, leather workers, plastic recyclers, goldsmiths, piece-rate garment workers—shoulder to shoulder in their dark room piled high with cheap children’s shirts—are all distinct communities with their own histories and stories, some heartening, some heartbreaking.

The common thread is that all these people have migrated here—often generations ago—from every corner of the subcontinent because there is work here, right here where they can live.

Land in Mumbai is among the world’s most expensive. As a result, more than 50% of Mumbaikars live in slums. Dharavi, a chaotic collection of settlements spread over 175 hectares (1.8 square kilometers) of swampy land, is literally sandwiched between Mumbai’s two main suburban railway lines, Western and Central Railway, the virtual lifelines of Mumbai, transporting thousands of workers from one end of the city to the other.

The location in the heart of Mumbai is valuable and has been the object of many stalled redevelopment plans.

IS THAT YOUR FINAL ANSWER? While millions line up to see the movie, some residents of Dharavi—Asia’s biggest slum—protest against Slumdog Millionaire during a rally.
Photo by AFP

According to The Economist magazine in December 2007, the land the settlement occupies represents $10 billion in “dead capital.” But there is a thriving black market in real estate, and the shanties are traded, without title, at 500,000 rupees.

In industries that are both legal and illegal, people toil in horrific conditions. Many bring their entire families to Dharavi, start their own businesses and even pay taxes. Some have become successful, even rich enough to buy condominiums in some of the few residential high-rises erected within the slum.

Most residents do their level best to ensure their children are educated in one of the several nongovernment organization– sponsored schools in the slum or the government schools outside. Everywhere you go you see children, who have no running water in their huts and who have to share a communal toilet with hundreds of others, scrubbed and neatly dressed in their school uniforms.

There are no saggy socks here, and their hair is combed or tied up in ribbons. They are eager to shake our hands and ask, “Hi, what is your name? Where do you come from?”

But schools are not enough, and all over the slum one can see groups of children huddled in “tutor groups” around a female adult in a tiny front room. Others have to do almost a full day’s work—making poppadoms or serving in the family chai shop—before their school shift starts in the afternoon.

As Reality Tour’s sales pitch promises, the degree of industriousness evident in Dharavi does indeed challenge the common notion of a slum. Dharavi presents an entirely different reality: rather than just a shambolic collection of structures linked together under conditions that defy belief is a dynamism and energy that offer surprises.

And the sense of community is also evident everywhere. The clay oven burns 24 hours a day at one small bakery—nothing more than a blackened shanty—where the five staff on duty prepare meals for the next shift. They comprise Tamils, Muslims, and Maharashtran Hindus, showing that old animosities have waned since communal riots in 1992–1993 spread to the slums.

Anand Giridharadas, a columnist for the International Herald Tribune and the author of a forthcoming book about modern India, says the taboo against slum tours and what has been called “poorism” is misguided and dangerous.

“One of the main reasons that poverty endures is a failure of empathy,” he said. “Those with the means to make a difference are far away, geographically and mentally; they have no idea what it would be like to be poor; they cannot imagine themselves in a poor person’s sandals.”

“If there are ways to increase the number of people who feel, ‘my gosh, that could have been me,’ then I am all for it,” he continued. “We are simple creatures, and that epiphany often comes from staring someone in the face, in a dank gully, not from reading an economic report.”

Mr. Giridharadas, who has twice toured Dharavi with Reality Tours, says the slum tour “is the furthest thing from exploitative. It opens a window into a world from which many of us have been carefully sheltered. If it changes the way we see things, it may do as much good for the slums as for us.” •