When I was in Mumbai I visited Dharavi. Seeing and remembering the place puts in to perspective things like the current economic issues in the developed world. We’re lucky to have houses to be foreclosed on (or many of us are since I rent) and clean water to drink.
Dharavi, the teeming slum of one million souls, where as many as 18,000 people crowd into a single acre (0.4 hectares). national geographic story
Dharavi is a mega slum and administrative ward, over parts of Sion, Bandra(E), Kurla and Kalina suburbs of Mumbai, India. Sandwiched between Mahim in the west and Sion in the east, is Dharavi — Asia’s second largest slum after the Orangi Township in Karachi, Pakistan. Spread over an area of 175 hectares, Dharavi has a population of more than 1 million people. wikipedia
Dharavi is becoming the green lung stopping Mumbai choking to death on its own waste. All along Apna St hundreds of barefoot street children, human recycling machines, scurry back and forward, hauling bundles of waste – plastic, cardboard or glass – retrieved from Mumbai’s vast municipal dumps. From every alley comes the sounds of hammering, drilling and soldering. In every shack, dark figures sit waist-deep in piles of car batteries, computer parts, fluorescent lights, ballpoint pens, plastic bags, paper and cardboard boxes and wire hangers, sorting each item for recycling. Workshops reveal everything from aluminium smelters recycling drink cans to perspiring bare-chested men stirring huge vats of waste soap retrieved from rubbish tips and local hotels. Walking through Dharavi, home to an estimated 15,000 single-room factories, it becomes difficult to conceive of anything that is not made or recycled here. guardian.co.uk story
