The high point of my recent trip to India had to be my visit to the slums. From the moment I saw the destination on our extensive itinerary to the point of entry into the slum, I knew this living environment was bound to have a huge impact on me and it has.
My first visit to the Indian slums was in Mumbai, The Port Trust slum. This slum is unique in that the government doesn't own the land, the port does, and they obviously want to move the slum dwellers on but are unable to. This stalemate is apparent everywhere. Here we were hosted by Magic Bus, an NGO that has a goal of educating one million slum kids over the next three years, with the objective of creating employability.
It doesn’t matter how many movies you see or television programs that you watch that depict these living conditions, it will never yield the effect of actually being there.
After a briefing in a small hut inside the slum, we were taken on a walkabout. The ground underfoot was muddy given the recent rains and at times difficult to navigate. I hate to think what it looks like after the monsoon. The pathways where littered with goats that were to become the sacrifice the next day for the Muslim festival of EID. It was difficult to look at them going about their business knowing they where hours away from having their throats cut.
We wound our way around a tiny slice of a city of one million people (almost the size of Auckland). I was surprised at how clean the living quarters of each dweller were, some with a TV taking pride of place, and definitely noticed no smell. The rubbish however was another matter as the ownership issues of the land mean that they are not eligible for a rubbish collection. Rubbish is then thrown into the sea to be carried away by the tide each day. The problem is that the tide simply can’t manage the daily rubbish of one million slum dwellers and the resultant effect is a massive tip-landscape on the side of the water’s edge. Rubbish of this scale being dumped into the ocean goes far beyond a slum and Mumbai’s problem but truly becomes a world issue.
We were introduced to some of the kids that Magic Bus works with and saw some of the slum business activity. Enquiring as always, the questions flowed from us all. It would appear that the life expectancy here is 50, the ablutions are part of a big block that we never saw and no one really clarified, power has been siphoned off illegally although I'm sure someone’s clipping the ticket in the process. This slum is unique in that others have been able to add to the crude infrastructure that they have, given the state ownership of the lands they occupy. Examples of this can be seen in the Asha slum that we visited in Delhi where the women in committee format had made changes to the infrastructure to stop the flow of water into huts amongst other things.
Asha also has managed to get banks to look at assisting slum dwellers with small loans for their businesses and enabled deposits of their savings. Money traditionally hidden in the dwelling is prone to the threat of either being eaten by mice or washed away in monsoon floods.
The biggest problem in these environments that house so many in a relatively efficient and extremely community focused way is the traditional mindset as to education and employment. It is extremely hard to convince a race steeped in an ancient culture that girls should be schooled and even boys past a certain level, as departure and re-settlement is not high on the priority list.
There’s a safety in this slum that is presided over by a slum lord and even though there are the problems of drugs and alcohol as with any community, wealthy or poor, it just all seems to work in a chaotic way, not unlike the retail space in Old Delhi itself.
The proximity to work and schools is important and the government has made a commitment to make sure that all school aged children have a school within a two kilometre radius. If not, they will provide a bicycle to enable the transit. Work is close for the adults. Many of the men in the Mumbai slum are working on scrapping the ships that have been placed in this part of the harbour to signify the end of their useful life.
Magic Bus is all about employability, getting kids into schools and eventually into work, changing the mindsets of the parents and ensuring kids are thinking differently around their future opportunities. Magic Bus has 700 employees and many of these have come from their slums projects.
Our visit to an Asha slum in Delhi was very different. The slum dwellers were expecting us and excited to have us there. A guard of honour on our arrival saw us showered in rose petals, a stark contrast to the wonderful bath that had been run that night for each of us in our hotel rooms; this too had been scattered with rose petals.
We were allowed to take photos, not so in Mumbai, and the afternoon was spent in the main office where we heard stories of the different generations, from the women to the university students and finally the school aged children. The walkabout was inclusive where we were even invited into one of the homes. It was unbelievably small and slept six people. I wondered if they would have to take turns sleeping but I doubt it given it has such a very necessary function during the day. Everything happens in this tiny space which is not a lot bigger than our average bathroom: cooking, homework, sleeping, washing and every other household moment.
Obviously it is not ideal for these people to be living this way, yet there is however a strong sense of family community and support for each other that comes from these slums. There is a sharing of what they do have, albeit not much. There are many NGOs that work with these areas, but our group’s consensus was that this really is a government problem. As with so many slums in other countries, it will be up to the government to improve the standard of living by introducing a more, however rudimentary, but basic housing block. Ones that have been established in the past on the city perimeters have had little success. Once relocated, they simply gravitate back to be near their work and the people and locations they know.
The slums represent humanity at its simplest. Theirs are basic needs, food, water and love. The children are happy yet they have seen such hardship. The state’s commitment to education has got to see an improvement; all that remains is the re-education of the previous generation so they let their young live the new life that is being offered. These slum visits certainly were a high point in my trip, providing perspective to so many of the women in the delegation. Yes, they are a problem and a very big one at that, but if India can tackle issues of this scale maybe there’s hope for the NZ economy as well.
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