{"id":4219,"date":"2007-03-06T09:04:24","date_gmt":"2007-03-06T14:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com?p=4219"},"modified":"2007-03-06T06:31:40","modified_gmt":"2007-03-06T11:31:40","slug":"inside_dharavi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/06\/inside_dharavi\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Dharavi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year I did a post<\/a> on a poverty tourism experiment happening in Delhi. In both my own assessment and in the comments, opinion on the program was mixed: one the one hand, some people are offended by this concept, as it smacks of voyeurism. Others (like Bong Breaker<\/a>) pointed out that the people who run these tours put money back into charities that support the community, and perhaps the people who go on these tours could benefit by added awareness and sensitivity. And John Thompson, who founded Salaam Baalak Trust, actually chimed in<\/a> with his own defense of the program.<\/p>\n\n

Now the Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article<\/a> on another poverty tourism program happening in Dharavi, Mumbai. John Lancaster acknowledges the controvery over Reality Tours and Travel<\/a>, but also goes beyond it, to tell us what he learned from the tour itself. Some of what he has to say is surprising:<\/p>\n\n

Dharavi stretched before us like a vast junkyard, a hodgepodge of brick and concrete tenements roofed with corrugated metal sheets that gleamed dully in the sunshine. Poojari gave us a moment to take it all in. “We’ll show you the positive side of a slum,”<\/strong> he declared.

\n\nIn the face of such squalor, his words seemed jarring. But Dharavi’s industriousness is well documented. Its businesses manufacture a variety of products\u00e2\u20ac\u201dplastics, pottery, bluejeans, leather goods\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand generate an estimated $665 million in annual revenue. In other words, Dharavi is not just a slum, it is also a node on the global economy.

\n\nDharavi’s industries are arranged geographically, like medieval guilds, and the first alley we visited belonged to recyclers. In one small “godown” (as warehouses are known on the subcontinent), men were disassembling old computer keyboards. In another, men smeared from head to toe in blue ink stripped the casings from used ballpoint pens so they could be melted down and recycled. A few doors down, workers used heavy chains to knock the residue from steel drums that had once contained polyester resin. Poojari told us that some of Dharavi’s empty plastic bottles come from as far away as the United Kingdom. “People from a rich family, when they drink from a plastic bottle, they don’t know what happens to it afterwards,” he said. “Here, you see.” (link<\/a>)<\/blockquote>\n\n

And it continues in that vein: Dharavi as a hive of light industrial activity. He acknowledges the smell, the open sewage, and the crampedness, but he doesn’t dwell on those things so much. And he ends with a telling reflection:<\/p>\n\n

No one gave us a second glance, and I had to wonder about the motives of those in the Indian media and elsewhere who claimed on behalf of the Dharavi residents to be offended by the tours. Surely their ire could have been better targeted at the municipal authorities who had failed to provide the community with basic sanitation. I wondered whether the critics weren’t simply embarrassed by the slum’s glaring poverty\u00e2\u20ac\u201dan image at odds with the country’s efforts to rebrand itself as a big software park. In any case, it seemed to me that the purpose of the tour was not to generate pity, but understanding.<\/strong> That’s not to say that it made me an expert\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI was only there a few hours, after all. Were the people I saw in Dharavi the victims of globalization, or its beneficiaries? I still don’t know. But at least the question had been raised in my mind.(link<\/a>)<\/blockquote>\n\n

Does this article change your opinion of “poorism,” as poverty tourism is sometimes called? Or is Lancaster’s account of a few hours spent in Dharavi too “sanitized” to be of value? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year I did a post on a poverty tourism experiment happening in Delhi. In both my own assessment and in the comments, opinion on the program was mixed: one the one hand, some people are offended by this concept, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4219"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}