Dharavi slum
Dharavi slum started over seventy years ago. Although Mumbai is one of the greatest cities in the world with an expensive and expansive building, it is also home to the largest slum in India-Dharavi. Driven by poverty and homeless, families have set up homes on a dumpsite. Dharavi is home to more than 1 million dwellers. Despite the deplorable conditions, their population is always growing as new people set up their structure. Even with a dense population, the slum is organized into numerous distinct neighborhoods. The different lanes are accessible through a maze of paths, which is only familiar to the dweller. There are no maps, road signs, and any direction. The lanes are extremely narrow and full of life. A mixture of aromas and stale smell makes navigating the slum as a strenuous affair. Most of the housing structures are temporary and irregular at the edges by becoming organized towards the middle. The inside consists of classified roads and solid buildings, which indicates that these were the original dwellers.
The population density of people and structure has made it difficult to get space for any social amenities like hospitals, temples, and recreational facilities. However, there are many businesses in different places in the slum. The density makes it challenging to build any popular place of worship that many dwellers transform the street spaces into temples, churches, and mosques. Because space is a limited resource in the slums, it has to become flexible. A house can become the living room in one instance and a bedroom in the next. The community treasures television as a source of entertains so much that in one community, entry is exchanged with a TV set. This kind of organization reveals the intrinsic nature of human socialization. There are self-appointed or community appointed leaders who keep order in the small villages. This structure ensures that there are accountability and harmony within the different neighborhoods in the slum.
Social Relations
Slums are densely populated informal settlements with little to no accommodation for privacy. The Dharavi slum reveals the social fabric of the poor of India. On the surface, there is a veneer of calm, and a semblance of happiness as children roam over the vast city pipes, and women go about their house chores. The idea of privacy is so foreign that it is familiar to children defecating into the sewage water. The families are tightly knit together with family members living in the mean structures. Extended families in India live together even after marriage. The society itself is aversive to foreigners. However, this is because very few people would want to be exposed to these deplorable conditions. Although most people are fascinated by the social meeting places in India, the slums’ collective ground where public washing happens is toxic and nasty. There is a lot of social interaction in this place, but of course, it is not optional.
There is a loosely structured form of community leadership in the slums. Most of the dwellers are suspicious of outsiders. There is a sense in which they can recognize individuals who do not belong. Some areas of the slum are more organized than others. In one area, there are Gujarat people who have specialized in pottery and have lived in the slums for over 70 years. These are slum industries that arise from their community craft that fits into the community lifestyle. The communal spaces also differ, with some being more open while others are congested. Some dwellers are also more accommodative than others. In some places, visitors are given the honor of sleeping in the most comfortable bed in the house.
Public Hygiene
Dharavi is built on top of the rubbish and the cesspits of waste. Their housing structure is built on top of the trash, and their water supply pipes run through toxic sewers. There is water rationing in the slums in the city, which houses 16 million residences. The day of the slum begins early because the residents need to get water for the whole day. There is rubbish and human waste everywhere. The sanitation status in these areas is non-existent outside of the individual structures. Although there are public latrines, upwards of 500 people share on the toilet. It seems there is little government intervention towards providing most of these public amenities. Most of the sewers are open and occasionally when water pipes crack the draw in raw waste. The contaminated water is the source of many public health ailments like diphtheria, tuberculosis, and typhoid. The physicians in the slums deal with up to 4,000 cases of these sicknesses. Poor public sanitization is one of the endemic signs of slums. Due to the limited space, most families in the slums prepare food on the ground, which is not sanitary. The air quality is poor because of the burning and poor aeration in the houses and lack of trees. The communal living poses a risk for the spreading of communicable diseases. In one instance, up to 21 people living and sleep in the same house. The slums factories are also susceptible to unhygienic processing practices, which increases cholera.