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The row of leather goods stores along the meandering 90-foot highway in Dharavi in central Mumbai has been closed for more than a month. Behind and perpendicular to the road is an unfathomable maze of alleys and hallways wide enough for only two adults to pass through, housing a puzzle of semi-permanent earth structures plus one that are leather goods workshops and double as homes. of workers
In the bowels of one of those dimly lit workshops, two young men stop, share a phone to watch a TikTok video, barely managing to smile. Two other men sleep inches from each other in the loft amidst a series of pieces of leather of different sizes.
“These are four of the five men who work for me but are now wasting time. The younger one has gone looking for a few servings, “said Mohammed Zahid, a shop owner who prides himself on being a trained designer.” We were just about to send a large order for wallets last month to a five-star hotel in Ooty and Kerala when we had to close. Packages are taking up my space, my money is jammed, and maybe those guys don’t even want these wallets now. “
The shutters of its stores at 90-Feet Road, Leather Touch and Zaraa, have not been opened since mid-March when the Maharashtra government imposed a shutdown in Mumbai almost 10 days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the national shutdown.
Across the countless lanes and markets of Dharavi, the nerve center of the informal economy in Mumbai worth an estimated $ 1 billion, it is the same story.
The clothing market (workshops and small retail stores) has also closed. Some owner-merchants are unwilling to acknowledge that the first Dharavi victim of covid-19 was a clothing merchant. Kumbharwada, the pottery and market units at the intersection of the 90-foot and 60-foot highways, are desolate. The jingle, the low hum, the hubbub of the cast aluminum units, the soap and plastic recycling workshops have all gone silent.
Only the sullenness hangs here, interrupted by occasional shocks of fear as news of the growing covid-19 cases and deaths leaks out. Within 10 days of the clothing merchant’s death on April 6, Dharavi recorded eight deaths and 86 positive cases.
Dateline Dharavi
Covering more than 240 hectares and housing more than 700,000 people, including large groups of migrants across the country, Dharavi is familiar with the disease, from asthma and malaria to typhoid fever and syphilis. Residents, however, have never seen anything like covid-19. Fear of this strange unknown disease is exacerbated by his fear of the destruction it will bring to his businesses.
It is not known when the covid-19 curve here will flatten, but the economic curve has already. In Asia’s largest informal settlement or informal settlement, which is essentially an economic hub, the dilemma of policymakers pressured to choose between saving lives and livelihoods takes on a painful urgency. Here, lives and livelihoods are inextricably intertwined.
In Dharavi, the practice of working from home did not come with the covid-19; it was always there, just as life and work have been organized in the fringe of small and narrow places. There are a few predominantly residential bastis and nagars, especially the rebuilt buildings that rise above the informal settlement on its edges, but the rest of Dharavi is a flexible mixed-use space.
The definitive data on the number of workshops and factory units is elusive since some of them operate under the radar. However, Dharavi is estimated to have 20,000-25,000 workshops and units in all economic activity.
In the plastic recycling area, Abdul Malik, the owner of a unit, echoes all of Dharavi’s thoughts. “We have always done your work from home, or rather we call it living in the workplace. We work, cook, eat, play and sleep in more or less the same space at a distance from each other. Now the government and the doctors and sahebs of the BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) come to say that we must keep our distance. Where’s the space here? he said.
Malik’s 25-year-old unit, like others in this area, employs young boys, often brought in by their male relatives from Bihar and West Bengal, to spray cans and plastic bottles used in plastic granules that are sorted and sold to factories. Small-Scale Through Agents Pellet bags take up more than half the space in the 150-square-foot room, the machinery is in the back of this unit, and its employees sleep in the loft.
I used to pay everyone approximately ₹200 per day, in addition to stocking basic rations and providing a gas stove for cooking. “When we haven’t worked for the past month, why will we get any pay?” Asks a worker who identifies as Bablu, in his early 20s and a fan of Salman Khan.
His concern is the family at home (refusing to reveal where in Bihar because he believes the police will go there) he will be hungry if he cannot send regular remittances. He has a few thousand hidden in his closed suitcase, he says, and could return home once the railroads resume long-distance trains. “My cash inflow has stopped. Where will I pay my staff from? Malik asked.
The day after
Malik and others in the plastic recycling business have no idea what they will do until May 3 until the shutdown is in effect and, more importantly, because business agents do not answer phone calls and managers at Factory Says They Are Empty of Unused Stocks of Pellets “This coronavirus will one day arrive, but we will have nowhere to go but the kabrastan (cemetery),” despairs Mohd Abdullah, another unit owner.
Despair comes from the realization here that businesses in Dharavi, from leather and aluminum to plastics, clothing, gold and ceramics, essential as they are to the formal economy, would not be eligible for aid packages and economic stimuli that governments will launch. outside.
This is a thriving and prosperous manufacturing center, built by large doses of business and risk, with intricate networks of cash and credit, that survive without formal subsidies, protection or handouts from governments, parts of which conflict with the law. , other parties fall between legal and illegal if not the latter.
The poor neighborhood, its misery and its factories of exploitation, its inhospitable living conditions and its open filth, its unhealthy and exploitative working conditions, its attraction to multimillion-dollar films such as Slumdog Millionaire and Gully Boy, its attraction as a tourist destination in the poverty, everything masks the fact that it is, essentially, a large multisectoral industrial estate.
This took root and expanded organically, without formal design or planning, despite, not by, disinterested or hostile governments and the powerful property lobby that looks to it for the monetary value of the land. Dharavi will have to rely on his wits to recover.
In many sectors, this uncertainty and apprehensions outweigh fears about the pandemic. The dozens of containment zones that BMC has marked since early April have deepened these fears. The BMC team is busy testing thousands of residents here, forcing them into some form of quarantine and mapping containment zones.
This, in Dharavi full of guts, is easier to plan than to do. In closed neighborhoods and buildings, this is relatively easy; in open slums and workplaces, it’s challenging. In the last fortnight, the BMC discovered that it faced two barriers. One, the residents were not communicative about their movements, which negatively affected the tracking of contacts of patients with covid-19.
The family of the first victim, for example, did not share any information, except that he did not have a passport and only went to the local mosque. Precious days passed before the BMC health team discovered that it had also owned another small apartment nearby that had been used by five men who reportedly had returned from the Tablighi Jamaat in New Delhi.
“People here are afraid to tell us something and it is also not clear about the specific micro details necessary for our contact search exercise,” says a team official. BMC Medical Director Virendra Mohite, who heads the team, says the civic team innovates its approach and methods to do its job. He and his team members have hardly been home.
Two, BMC teams have found it almost impossible to quarantine or isolate suspicious cases. There is simply not enough room anywhere in Dharavi. Social distancing, regular handwashing and self-isolation, all the preventive measures suggested by the World Health Organization and repeatedly recommended by governments and health workers, are privileges that Dharavi residents cannot afford.
Social distancing
Social distancing, in particular, is a joke here. Nearly half of India’s urban population lives in houses where per capita space is less than one room, Mumbai-based economics professors Mohd Imran Khan and Anu Abraham analyzed in a recent article in Economic And Political Weekly. . In Dharavi, this space is often a room or a sixth of a single room.
This pushed the BMC to look for alternatives. Within days of the first cases, the BMC converted a nearby sports complex into a quarantine facility, now well used, and recruited beds at the government-run Sion Hospital, a stone’s throw away, to be used exclusively for patients of 19 years. Dharavi “We cannot isolate people in their homes here,” said Kiran Dighavkar, assistant municipal commissioner in charge of the G-North neighborhood in which Dharavi falls. As the number of positive cases hovered around 90, the civic corps established “fever camps” in Dharavi in an attempt to detect as many as possible while negotiating local resistance.
“This is where we live, this is where we work. This is our whole life, our universe. Now there is no job and we have nowhere to go, “said Kesarben in Kumbharwada, dominated by the migrant Gujaratis. There is a marginally more open space here between houses that double as warehouses for finished ceramic products, large potter’s wheels that they occupy the open spaces. “We can send a virus patient to the rooftop (to be isolated),” he said wryly. In good times, the roofs of uneven but colorfully decorated houses contain extra raw material or fragile products neatly stacked away from human trafficking.
The summer months are when potters produce items and ship them to large herds and wholesalers because they only have a small window between the end of the monsoon and the growing demand for ceramic products during festivals. “This virus has killed our business,” says Ram Narayan, “if we can’t even go out looking for milk and vegetables, how are we going to get out of business?”
Within Dharavi, there is a clamor for the relatively small sector of gold fusion units and shops to do business behind closed doors. When people bring their small valuables to obtain subsistence loans, the goldsmiths know that times are good and really bad. One month after closing, this trickle has started. It will take Dharavi’s business months to get back to normal and years to grow again, says a gold fusion unit owner who saw the 2008 recession.
In conclusion
Dharavi’s tremors will be felt everywhere. In an unusual installation at an arts exhibition three years ago, the URBZ urban planning and research group drew these connections. On perpendicular walls, he placed maps of Mumbai with Dharavi prominently displayed and a map of India, and invited people to tie colored strings or ribbons of Dharavi to their home cities, towns, or places of commercial interest. Ropes and ribbons made a dense tapestry throughout India, with the exception of Kashmir and parts of the northeast.
With Dharavi closed, the fumes and fires are undoubtedly less. But a large segment of Mumbai’s economy, and hundreds of thousands of lives, are overturned. Between lives and livelihoods, there is literally no other option here.
* Smruti Koppikar is a journalist and urban reporter from Mumbai.
