Katharina Goetze says she faced an ethical dilemma about going on a guided slum tour in Mumbai.
“We had this discussion beforehand about whether it was poverty tourism,” said Ms. Goetze, 29, as she walked along the streets of Dharavi, regarded as India’s largest slum.
Our guide, Daya Sharma, from Reality Tours and Travel, says she shouldn’t worry.
“The people are here by choice not by chance,” Mr. Sharma said of the estimated 700,000 residents of the area’s makeshift houses.
His pre-tour briefing is loaded with statistics about the area to convince us that our response during this 600 rupee ($11) slum tour should not be pity, but awe.
There are 10,000 different businesses operating inside its corrugated iron walls with combined annual revenues of 30 billion rupees ($559million), he claims. Inhabitants include rupee millionaires with closed-circuit-television protected homes, Mr. Sharma adds.
“This is a five-star slum.”
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The impact of slum tourism upon residents of Dharavi will be studied later this year by Fabian Frenzel who has previously researched the issue in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. He says that slum dwellers can be regarded as the “attraction” of the tour.
“Some people regard slum tourism as exploitative because slum dwellers don’t get a share of the profits made by some tours, but such a view is problematic because it reduces slum tourism to an economic exchange,” said Mr. Frenzel, a lecturer in the political economy of organization at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.
Reality Tours say they give 80% of post-tax profits from the tours to their partner, non-governmental organization Reality Gives, which provides education and training for young women in the slum as well as other projects for slum dwellers.