Via Albert Krishna Ali at The Other India, a Guardian article about a new tourism phenomenon in India: slum tours. It’s apparently a common enough practice in places like Soweto and Rio, but new to India. For 200 Rupees, tourists get a guided tour of the areas around Delhi’s railway station, where a few thousand homeless children live:
The tour guide instructs visitors not to take pictures (although he makes an exception for the newspaper photographer). ‘Sometimes the children don’t like having cameras pointed at them, but mostly they are glad that people are interested in them,’ Javed claims, adding that the friendly smiles of the tourists are more welcome than the railway policemen’s wooden sticks and the revulsion of the train travellers. He hopes the trip will get a listing in the Lonely Planet guides. Nevertheless there is something a little uncomfortable about the experience — cheerful visitors in bright holiday T-shirts gazing at profound misery. (link)
Really, what could possibly be uncomfortable about well-fed tourists paying to gawk at desperately poor children? The author of the Guardian article is definitely skeptical about the whole thing too:
By the end of the walk, the group is beginning to feel overwhelmed by the smells of hot tar, urine and train oil. Have they found it interesting, Javed asks? One person admits to feeling a little disappointed that they weren’t able to see more children in action — picking up bottles, moving around in gangs. ‘It’s not like we want to peer at them in the zoo, like animals, but the point of the tour is to experience their lives,’ she says. Javed says he will take the suggestion on board for future tours. . . . Babloo, who thinks he is 10, has been living here for maybe three years. His hands are splashed white from the correction fluid that he’s breathing in through his clenched left fist, and he pulls a dirty bag filled with bottles with his other hand. His life is unrelentingly bleak and he recognises this.’I don’t know why people come and look at us,’ he says. (link)
The tours are run by Salaam Baalak Trust, which is a small charity organization focused on caring for homeless children in Delhi. They administer first aid as well as more serious health care help for children who have AIDS or serious drug addiction problems. They also give them basic education and vocational training, and help their families where possible. In short, SBT is in general a good organization narrowly focused on helping a group of children living in desperate straits. This program makes money for them, but clearly the money and publicity come at the potential cost of the children’s dignity.
According to Give World, Salaam Baalak Trust was founded by Mira Nair in 1988 to rehabilitate the slum children she used as actors in Salaam Bombay (hence the name, “Salaam Baalak”). I haven’t quite been able to figure out how the organization got from Bombay to Delhi, but as far as I can tell they are now based entirely in Delhi. [CORRECTION: They are based in Delhi as well as Bombay.]
The story of the group’s founding provides a second layer of irony: this is an organization that was founded using funds generated by western voyeurism of Indian poverty (Nair’s film), which is now pioneering the effort to reproduce that voyeurism in a brand new format.
I wouldn’t go on the tour in its present form, but perhaps I would try and volunteer to help out with this organization in some way instead. And if tourists want to do more than just take pictures of the Taj Mahal or dance on the beach at Goa, I don’t see why that should be frowned upon (especially if the money is put to good use). Is there a way to do it that doesn’t involve mere voyeurism?
Shabbash, so you too can smirk! Same old empowerers! What’s new?
Dude, why are you blathering at me? 🙂 Look what I wrote in the part of my paragraph you chose not to quote and tell me how it would contradict Prahalad:
I said:
Some, like Dharavi are remarkably productive and may have per capita GDPs higher than most of the rest of India. There is plenty of wealth and talent lurking in the favellas and shantytowns of the world. Perhaps white tourism isn’t necessarily what the subaltern wants, nor is it necessarily the best way forward. Let her speak.
It’s a bit inconsistent – it’s OK for tourists to turn a blind eye, but if they’re going to be interested in poverty then they have to live in the slums for weeks and work as a social worker? If it’s OK to turn a blind eye, then why isn’t it OK to pay an NGO for a tour? The money all goes back into the community, and the tourists are being educated.
The argument here depends on the quality of the NGO and what it does. You could find a tourist-fleecing poverty-pimping group masquerading as an NGO and you could find a for-profit group giving tours that might do more good than harm. I think the overall points are that you should a) be aware that where you’re going is not necessarily where you’re from and b) not egregiously exploit that for your own amusement and to the detriment of other people’s dignity any more than you would at home. There’s lots and lots of room in there for people to do what they want within those bounds.
But the more fundamental question boils is whether a tourism-centered economy as a whole is okay or not (it certainly seemed fairly destructive in North Goa beach towns for Europeans, Israelies, etc. when I was there) and whether you want to support the gross inequalities on a global and national scale that allow these kinds of situations to exist. Everything else is just nibbling around the edges but probably needs to go deeper if you’re really concerned with morality (vs. appearance or propriety).
a new tourism phenomenon in India: slum tours
This is curious to me too. Is it really new or is it just a different form of the same kind of exploitation that used to happen? I really do mean this as a question, not a point disguised as one 🙂
This is a lot of speaking for the subaltern (apparently you know their emotions and everything). You had it coming with Eddie calling you out for it. BB mentioned how he wanted to wait until he heard from more tourists before forming a concrete opinion, but nobody mentioned wanting to hear more from the people being put out on display.
Um, it took a lot of scholarship to formulate what you call “psycho/socio-babble.” Ask the blogger who wrote this post. Anyway Shiva, what century do you live in? Positivism went out years ago, daahling. You are quite behind if you didn’t realize that one of the main points of this post was to ponder if the numbers (if they were favorable) could come to a reconciliation with the moral ambiguity (see: psycho/socio-babble) of the situation. Accurate answers require more than just empirical data (no matter how much Razib might scoff).
I like shruti 🙂
We’ve had the stereotype of third world india propagated long enough
‘Impoverished India’ is not a stereotype. Its a sad reality. Poverty is a fact of life in India for the majority of its people.
Eddie – That’s why!
What you call scholarship is very underwhelming.
Not everything, but a lot.
I was the founder of the SBT tour and spent 6 months developing it as a volunteer. I was disappointed by the Guardian article because I didn’t feel it gave a true representation of what the tour is like at all. I appreciate the points raised in this blog and want to shed a bit more light on the discussion.
The fact that the program could potentially be exploitative towards the children living in and around the New Delhi Railway station was my most serious consideration from the beginning. Having done the walk over 50 times myself, it has only been once or twice that the group has come within close proximity of street children currently living in the New Delhi Railway station. When this happens the guides are trained to move on and not draw any attention to the child. The tour is given from the perspective of the guides and their previous experiences and does not focus on or involve any of the children presently living in the station. The guides have a good rapport with the children, and the tour group walking through the station has little impact on them considering there are half a million people passing through the station each day and the tour does not at any point enter a slum. No photos are allowed and we only allow the press to take pictures of children within the actual organisation. For these reasons tourists do not get to ‘gape’ at street children but they do learn how children end up on the streets, what their life is like and most importantly what can be done to help. All the money raised from the tour, which will be a significant amount for the organisation, goes directly to helping the children in the station by providing health care, education, counselling and most importantly a place to call their home and pursue their ambitions. Also, by going on walks such as this and really feeling what life is like for street children, people may then feel compelled to volunteer, or to donate. Within the first few months of running, the tour has been extremely successful in both of these areas.
Another issue which has not been mentioned is that we can learn so much from these children and none of positive aspects of the childrenÂ’s lives have been recognised. These are clear when you hear the former street children who guide the tour talking about how much they valued the freedom of their lifestyle and how difficult it was to give up. Yes they are glad they joined the trust but many of the children currently living on the streets are relatively happy there, or at least would rather be there looking after themselves than at school. Working and living with these children on a daily basis in Delhi and earlier in Brazil, I leant so much from them; their compassion, humility and spirit for life will stay with me forever. Their ability to express themselves without feeling self conscious and the guts it took to leave a life that had oppressed them and start anew is inspiring to say the least. Also the tour shows off the significant number of success stories of the former street children who have come through the trust and are now in careers such as a professional photographer in major national newspaper, a choreographer and various.
The contrast between people who spend 10 hour days working in jobs they gain very little satisfaction from in order to satisfy material needs that do not seem to make them happy and that the planet cannot sustain, compared with the former street children who are now pursuing their dreams and ambitions while living in extremely basic material circumstances is thought provoking. With this in mind, I feel the tour can go beyond mere western voyeurism where tourists with bright shiny t-shirts gape at street children, but it is a meaningful platform to engage with people from very different backgrounds, which might just make us question how important our bright shiny t-shirts are!
This does not mean for a second that we should not support the children; of course we should, and as much and as quickly as possible. There is no getting away from some of the horrific aspects of their lives. However, it is this difference between support and pity, that is crucial, and it is the former that shows a greater understanding of the situation and allows people to learn from each other. ItÂ’s one thing seeing poverty, but to understand it from the people who have lived in it is something different.
The walk also strongly benefits the children who have previously lived on the streets who are now living within Salaam Baalak shelter homes. A training program has been set up within the organisation to train these children to be guides, which will economically empower them while also developing their English and communication skills to prepare them well for their future. As people who go on the tour will feel, these guides are very passionate about raising awareness and telling their stories as well as showcasing the work that Salaam Baalak trust does.
One final point to clarify is that while tourists are welcome on the tour, the tour has been aimed very much at Indian people; school children, students and corporations etc. One of the nicest moments for me of the whole experience of the tour project was when we took a group of 10 children from a prestigious private school on the tour and they ended up singing songs and making good friends with the former street children in the shelter home. All these children went away feeling that they understood much better the issues that children on the street face, so the next time a kid is selling something at the window of the their parents car, they will be able to empathise with that child. Furthermore, they went away wanting to do something about the issues facing street children whilst hoping to have more freedom in their own lives like the children that they had met.
For me the tour does four important things, it gives a number of former street children much needed jobs which they thoroughly enjoy, it raises awareness about the lives of street children, it encourages us to think about the way we live ourselves and finally it helps to raise much needed funds for a fantastic organisation. I feel everything is in place to ensure that the dignity of the street children is respected and it will always be hugely important to me that this is maintained. I would very much welcome any suggestions as to how this can be improved or any other criticisms of the tour.
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