Once emblematic of Mumbai’s incredible enterprise, the slum is now a Covid-19 hotspot, witness to distress and disease. The Indian Express visits the 2.4-km sprawl to find its residents grappling with issues that have always hobbled their lives — sanitation, health and poverty.


AFURTIVENESS cloaks Dharavi now, its departing inhabitants wary about stating their local address. This is a far cry from last decade’s celebration of Dharavi’s industry and enterprise, the slum’s casting as the beating, clanging, whirring heart of Mumbai’s famed pursuit of overcoming the odds.

At 1,715 Covid-19 cases until Friday afternoon, the 2.4-sq-km slum sprawl accounts for nearly 3% of Maharashtra’s patients, more than 4.5% of Mumbai’s cases, and more positive cases than in all of Odisha or Kerala.

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The poverty clock has begun to tick backward in Dharavi.

Figuratively speaking, the slum is back now where it was in the year 1896, when an outbreak of the bubonic plague ravaged Bombay, on the periphery of the big city.

The plague in Bombay was central to the drafting and enacting of the Epidemic Diseases Act that is now in force, but for Dharavi, that is not the only vestige of the plague. It took eight years, but the eventual outcome of that epidemic and the exodus of workers in that period was the formation of the Bombay City Improvement Trust in 1898 and the reimagining of how Bombayites, including the ‘natives’, would live in the future.

Around the 1920s, the Trust planned to convert the area occupied by Dharavi’s tanneries into a “salubrious” suburb, the tanning units themselves proposed to be moved to Trombay, now another sprawling slum area alongside industrial units.

That dream for a new Dharavi remained unfulfilled. Well over a century later, another crisis brings with it an opportunity. This is the time to reimagine Dharavi and resolve its fundamental questions — of housing, sanitation, healthcare and education.