Tribune

Slumming It
Channel 4

Dispatches: The Slumdog Children of Mumbai
Channel 4

As part of Channel 4’s Indian winter season, Kevin McCloud in Slumming It cast an architect’s eye over the slums of Dharavi where more than one million people are crammed into a single square mile of open sewers, rats and hazardous chemicals. What McCloud discovered was an engine room of industry – from cobblers and potters to bakers and luggage makers, plus a conundrum common to many slum communities. One the one hand, there are housing and amenities desperately in need of improvements; on the other, there is a community rich in history, resourcefulness and social networks.

Most developing societies will recognise the dilemma, but few have come up with satisfactory solutions. The age-old answer has been to knock things down and re-house the inhabitants in new high-rise blocks. And that’s exactly what they plan to do to Dharavi, but McCloud rejects this as a solution. All it needs, he claims, is money spent on improvements, such as water, electricity and so forth. The residents, not surprisingly, have mixed views. Many want out, others wish to remain.

Most major cities have faced similar problems – London in the 19th century, Liverpool and Manchester in more recent years. As old industries have failed, those communities around the coalmines, shipyards and steelworks have been removed and rehoused, leaving dereliction and anonymity in its wake.

An age-old problem, maybe, but Dahravi can still surprise. In this warren of back alleys, McCloud found an astonishing industry where 85 per cent of goods are recycled. Hundreds scavenge the rubbish tips, desperate for anything remotely salvageable, – from plastic bags to batteries and coat hangers. You’d never see anything like this in Britain, claimed McCloud, as he surveyed the hundreds digging away with bare hands.

Well, that’s not altogether true. In the early 1980s, a famous World in Action followed similar scavengers in Birkenhead, foraging for anything that could be sold, as Tory policies took their toll. But that aside, McCloud’s journey was an education in how we repeat mistakes and how nations never learn from each other’s errors.

Dispatches painted a somewhat less affectionate picture of the Mumbai slums after spending three months tracking the desperate lives of four young children. I say young, but in truth, they were old before they had experienced any childhood. Every year, thousands are either thrown out onto the streets to fend for themselves or, like 11-year-old Salaam, simply run away from abusive parents. Every day, hundreds more pour into the city’s main line station from the countryside in search of some release from the daily struggle. What they find is even worse.

On the streets, these railway children are subjected to substance and sexual abuse as well as hunger, poverty, violence and rats – always rats. Seven-year-old Deepa has already lost toes to the rats that attack exposed parts during the night. Eleven-year-old Salaam has run away from home and fallen in with Asif, a 20-year-old he calls “brother”, who runs the railway gang. Asif, however, has darker sexual motives.

The children beg and steal. The more entrepreneurial Deepa dodges the traffic barefooted while pressing her flowers against car windows. Abandoned by her mother and with a father dead from alcohol, she lives with her grandmother, helping to bring up yet another unwanted and abandoned baby.

The cheeky 11-year-old twins, Hussain and Hussan, spend their days diving into the cholera-infested canal in search of any rubbish they can sell. Their childhoods have gone, indeed were never there, and the chances are that they will not live beyond 40. These are the real Slumdog children of Mumbai and it isn’t pretty.

Stephen Kelly