Original article from the Observer, 2007.
A 175-hectare maze of impenetrable dark alleys and corrugated shacks, Dharavi swarms with more than a million residents... If you have the patience to look closer, you will find here one of the most inspiring economic models in Asia. Dharavi may be one of the world's largest slums, but it is by far its most prosperous - a thriving business centre propelled by thousands of micro-entrepreneurs who have created an invaluable industry – turning around the discarded waste of Mumbai's 19 million citizens. A new estimate by economists of the output of the slum is as impressive as it seems improbable: £700m a year...
Workshops reveal everything from aluminium smelters recycling drink cans to perspiring bare-chested men stirring huge vats of waste soap retrieved from rubbish tips and local hotels. Walking through Dharavi, home to an estimated 15,000 single-room factories, it becomes difficult to conceive of anything that is not made or recycled here...
'You in the West so easily see the slum as a negative concept,' said Sonu Badal, a spokesman for Chirag, a campaign to secure Dharavi from demolition. 'Yes, it is beset by deep poverty and neglect, but Dharavi has also been mirroring India's economic revival and it has done so largely by rejecting a local government that has long ignored it and by recycling its own resources.'
He continues: 'These slum dwellers use their imagination and work hard to make something out of the day-to-day objects others leave behind, yet have been abandoned by the government; Dharavi is an extraordinary success story, its recycling industry employs over 250,000 people, yet thanks to its prime location it is on borrowed time.'
Reported by Dan McDougall and photographed by Adrian Fisk