Even the squatters, who live in wretched, waste-strewn hovels, don’t mind waiting. Alishamma Suthar, 65, came with her husband and two children from a small village in Andhra Pradesh and spent her life as a construction worker; building homes for others while living in makeshift huts before squatting in Dharavi.
Fifteen years ago, she bought this house for Rs3,000: a cramped room where her daughter and three-month-old granddaughter now sleep. A little door brings in little light but many smells from the street. Like most other homes, it has no bathroom.
So every morning, under the cover of nothing but a fading night, she hikes to the open ground 10 minutes away. “These days, they padlock that too. So if I have to go, we have to go to one toilet that everyone shares. You should see the lines, oh God,” she said. “You go at seven, your turn will come by 10. In between you will see fighting over who came first—women, tearing each other’s hair.”
She says a home fit for human habitation cannot come soon enough. But even so, if there is a chance that her grandchildren can have a bigger house, say 400 sq. ft, she is willing to wait a few more years. “After all, families only expand,” she explained, admiring the baby next to her.
Residents’ bigger concern is the fate of the small businesses that have mushroomed in the back alleys of Dharavi. Local entrepreneurs have converted it into a hub: one million idlis leave here each day to be eaten by people across the city; and these entrepreneurs ply the city with “homemade” papads, chaklis and other savoury snacks made in the open by the sewers, or in 10-by-10 rooms where the air hangs still with the stench of oil and haze of flour.
On mezzanine floors of tiny hutments, where the ceiling is so low that one can only sit, tailors hunch over intricate zari work, stitching glittering laces on fine chiffon that look regal and oddly out of place in their hands.
And while these businesses tell a story of grit in the face of hardship, a tale of entrepreneurship and success, very few businesses pay taxes and certainly don’t offer their employees humane working conditions. Reports of deaths and child labour have hounded Dharavi for a long time and last November, the Mumbai police rescued 50 children from small zari and leather sweatshops here.
Spoiling for a fight
“This is our whole life,” defends Raju Korde, a political worker and member of the Communist Party of India, who started the Dharavi Bachao Andolan, or the Save Dharavi Movement.
Korde, who owns a mobile shop, a printing business, and has a stake in a local bank, insists that livelihoods have to be protected: “We have set upour lives here. People have made a living here. They have nothing else.”
When he began running the Dharavi Times newspaper, he did not realize it would make him the leader of a movement and bring journalists from all over the world to his door trying to understand Dharavi. The exposure has helped raise his status in the party from a worker to leader. Last month brought coverage in The Economist magazine. “I interviewed Mukesh Mehta. I studied his plans, and realized it was anti-people. So I decided to mobilize people against it,” he says.