While I personally think this may be an oversimplification of how to define a slum (and I do think slums vary based on the region, context, etc.) there’s a great article by Arjun Appadurai in which he discusses Mumbai and the “politics of shit.”

Manju, we clearly grew up around different projects. I guess it makes me wonder about how we think about “projects” and poverty. I know the term means any and all public housing, but I guess the connotation is different for me.

Incidentally Tamil Nadu had a Slum Clearance Board. They built muti storey apartments that often crashed in a few years. Is it any wonder that the slum dweller preferred to squat on vacant land. Also one had to carry water up 3 floors because water was delivered by tanker. This is exactly the type of response we, or at least I, was looking for. There was one that they built near Mylapore, and the folks who worked at …..’s house got an apartment allotment. I thought they were pretty happy with the deal overall.

Many slum dwellers detest know-it-all do-gooders. Wonder why ? It is not the politics of envy. It is the attitude. And this includes not just Ibankers but also development activists. Both are equally obnoxious.

To the commenters who have a good idea on how to improve slums but have never lived in one, try it for a few months. Will be a real eye opener.

For those who know Chennai – I am talking about Basin Bridge / Vyasarpadi.

Incidentally Tamil Nadu had a Slum Clearance Board. They built muti storey apartments that often crashed in a few years. Is it any wonder that the slum dweller preferred to squat on vacant land. Also one had to carry water up 3 floors because water was delivered by tanker.

The solution to “Dharavi’s dilemma” is not nescessarily complex. The important thing is to ensure a level playing field.

Rahul, I see articles about Dharavi, but not about the amazing productivity or wealth of the slums of Buenos Aires or Johannesburg. Is it purely a reporting push Some interesting questions. Dharavi has potential as real estate. Not sure about the other places.

Notwithstanding Francis “It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power” Fukuyama’s arguments, there is a need in this case for government to set the rules of the game to try and ensure that this turns out to be a win-win outcome. I suspect that in Dharavi, we might not be able to use the trusty Fukuyama Trust-O-meter (“very high-trust”, “low-trust”, “not very high-trust at all”).

It has quite a comprehensive and depressing account of what it means to be in a slum: The density (shacks packed so tightly that many are accessible only on foot); the dust (in the dry seasons) and the mud (when it rains); the squalor (you often have to pick your way through streams of black ooze); the hazards (low eaves of jagged corrugated iron); and the litter, especially the plastic (Kibera’s women, lacking sanitation and fearing robbery or rape if they risk the unlit pathways to the latrines, resort at night to the “flying toilet�, a polythene bag to be cast from their doorway, much as chamber pots were emptied into the street below in pre-plumbing Edinburgh). Most striking of all, to those inured to the sight of such places through photography, is the smell. With piles of human faeces littering the ground and sewage running freely, the stench is ever-present.

It seems like the absence of sewage and restrooms really defines life in a slum – Thanks for pointing it out, PG. I should have seen it.

The article I linked to has some pretty useful and damning statistics. 600,000 people. Let’s say 10% of 1 billion is the income, that’s 100 million (I have no idea whether this is a reasonable number, it might be too low if the cost of their “raw materials” is close to zero, due to recycling, but I don’t see any hints as to guess this fraction either). That’s roughly $166 per person as a back of the envelope, which is far below poverty line, so I assume an actual significant fraction of these people don’t have any choices, even despite some of the examples in the National Geographic article (linked to by Asha’s dad #6).

I now completely don’t see the meaning of these articles talking about “$1 billion turnover” and so on when there is such a high volume of people. I would assume that other slums across the world (some even larger than Dharavi) are forced to do similar things to survive, and I have to say I am confounded by all these articles over the years that specifically talk about the enterprise of Dharavi.

The closest I can see to an “explanation” is this excerpt from the Natl Geographic article: Yet Dharavi remains unique among slums. A neighborhood smack in the heart of Mumbai, it retains the emotional and historical pull of a subcontinental Harlem�a square-mile (three square kilometers) center of all things, geographically, psychologically, spiritually. That, and the real estate value. Well, then!

Prema, the economist article has some catnip for you too.

Also in the Natl Geographic article on Page 4, is this description:

Much of his critique is familiar. The government’s failure to create housing for middle-income people was responsible for the existence of the slums, Mobin contends. Many people in Dharavi make enough money to live elsewhere, “a house like you see on TV.” But since no such housing exists, they are doomed to the slum. Mobin doubts Mukesh Mehta’s private developers will help. All over Dharavi are reminders of developmental disasters. Near Dharavi Cross Road, members of the L.P.T. Housing Society, their houses torn down in preparation for their promised apartments, have spent the past eight years living in a half-finished building without steady electricity or water, at the mercy of the goons and the malarial Mumbai heat.

But when it comes down to it, Mobin says, Dharavi’s dilemma is at once much simpler and infinitely more complex: “This is our home.” This is what people such as Chief Minister Deshmukh and Mukesh Mehta will never understand, Mobin says. “Mukesh Mehta says I am his hero, but what does he know of my life? He is engaged in shaikhchilli, which is dreaming, dreaming in the day. Does it occur to him that we do not wish to be part of his dream?”

Are there examples of successful slum relocation projects in other countries?

By that yardstick most of India is a slum. Which is what many horrified visitors to India actually do conclude.

http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/nov/chi-hazards.htm

“The impacts of a dysfunctional state of public sanitation in India are widely known, though change has not come. Nearly 70% of the Indian population does not have access to toilets. Nearly 70,000 tonnes of human waste lies in the open every day. It is the biggest contaminant of water. 600,000 die of diarrhea in India every year, most of them are children. Toilets cannot be built without political will.”

http://swopnet.com/engr/sanitation/India_sewers.html

“Fewer than 30 percent of India’s 950 million people have bathrooms in their homes or easy access to public toilets. The rest routinely relieve themselves in the open — along roadsides, on farmland or in municipal parks.

No more than 250 of the country’s 4,000 cities and towns have sewer systems, and many of those systems do not have treatment plants. The bulk of municipal sewage — even from such major cities as Bombay and Calcutta — flows untreated into rivers, lakes or the sea.”

“In rural areas, where more than 70 percent of Indians live, fewer than 10 percent of homes have toilets. Government officials and aid workers say they have experienced difficulty persuading uneducated villagers to abandon ancient customs and use an enclosed bathroom.”

“Besides overpopulation, religious beliefs of Hindus, who account for 80 percent of the population, have compounded India’s sanitation problems. The cities of an early civilization in the Indus River valley had sophisticated sewer systems and among the oldest known toilets — brick models that date back 4,500 years. But the development of Hinduism and its caste system in later centuries changed attitudes and practices concerning the disposal of human waste.

Bindeshwar Pathak, whose private organization, Sulabh International, has built 700,000 toilets in 25 years, said an ancient Hindu text gave “firm religious sanction” to unsanitary behavior by forbidding defecation near dwellings. “It’s very difficult to bring it into the homes,” Pathak said. “It’s a cultural problem in India.”

“Traditionally, efforts to improve sanitation in India have not had public health as their main motivation. Instead, it has been liberation of low-caste workers formerly called “untouchables” from the degrading occupation of cleaning waterless toilets and carrying away woven baskets of human waste on their heads. Hinduism teaches that contact with human feces defiles members of the upper castes.

These religious beliefs frustrated a crusade launched a century ago by Mohandas K. Gandhi, who led India to independence in 1947. Gandhi defied tradition by cleaning his own toilet and urging other members of upper castes to do the same. He also criticized Indians for casually relieving themselves in the open.

“It filled me with agony to see people performing natural functions on the thoroughfares and river banks, when they could easily have gone a little farther away from public haunts,” Gandhi wrote in his autobiography of a 1915 visit to the Ganges River.

Little has changed in the intervening decades.”

What you wrote sure gave that impression. Make yourself clear if you are going to do calculations.

So you are not a complete idiot; but your reasoning is still deeply flawed. The article estimates the population of Dharavi at around 1 million. Thats a heck of a lot more than the 57000 families that you used to make your calculation of per capita income. You also ignorantly assumed that every family has an equal share of the turnover. And ignored the likelihood that many residents of that slum must have outside jobs as well. Stick to what you are good at: making jokes about rape, child slave labor, untouchability….