Our new friend, James Subudhi, came to visit our Shelter a few weeks back and spent the Sunday volunteering with us. He spent a memorable day with the children and learnt a lot about richness of Dharavi. What James mentioned the most about his visit was about the happiness of the children and the strong sense of community that he saw in this place. He has written an extract which I have posted below which he calls Of Magnets and Development.
All of us—kids, mothers, teenagers, strangers, and volunteers—huddled in a circle looking down into the sewer drain just outside the door to the shelter. “Paul is going to kill us,” Dipti said. The gravity of tiredness pulled on my face as I looked through the metal grate into the stagnant sewer. I thought about what might be in there to give the liquid a greenish, purple and black grey thin goo consistency: shit, paint, spit, pan, dirt, the piss of everyman in Mumbai, motor oil, rusted scrap metal, water, diphtheria, typhoid, polio, cholera, and more piss. A Dharavi sewer drain was as far away from the chilled bottled of water and masala dosa I wanted than Christmas is from July. The wheels in my head quickly turned toward a destructive and money driven solution… breaking the lock and just buying a new one. Simple.
Out of the corner of my left eye I saw a kid running towards us. He perched, knees bent, butt hovering above the ground, his arms out stretched over the drain. One of shelter participants pulled and held the gate open, the boy on the ground dropped a magnet on a string in, and another guided it around the drain by pulling the string in different directions. A minute later my jaw dropped.
“Those keys need to be washed. They are very dirty” a little girl said.
The moral of the story? The kid’s local solution was more efficient than mine. We didn’t have to break the lock. We didn’t have to spend money on a new lock. We didn’t have to wait in line at shop to purchase a new lock. We didn’t have to feel Paul’s wrath. And I probably got my lunch quicker this way than through my solution.
Contrast this event with how development occurs and how land-use decisions are made in Mumbai. The government and market solution to the locked door with a lost key down the drain would have been to demolish the building for a use that would squeeze the most profit from the property, like finding the right size hand to squeeze all the water out of a sponge. In the process they definitely would not have listened to anyone in Dharavi, especially youth.
Yet this event is exactly how decisions about development, land-use, and community problems can be made in Dharavi, with youth and residents generating and implementing solutions to problems and a vision for the future they see with some guidance and resources from ngos, government, labor, and business.
Whatever it is that Dharavi needs or wants, and how those needs/want can be met, what it’s future can and should be, what it is, what its problems are, and how they can be solved, should decided by and led by its residents, yet within at least one limit. That limit is of allowing no one, not the government, ngos, businesses, land owners, a resident, or community to have a monopoly on the truth, morality, and what is right and wrong, because we can all be right and wrong.
On the one hand ngos believe the community and its residents have knowledge that is superior to their own and that of the government, to create an argument that the community deserves a seat at the table when decisions are made or least have those making decisions listen to their voices. While community residents often know things about their neighborhoods better than someone who doesn’t live there, they can be wrong. I’ll mention now that some of the kids from the shelter wanted fish the keys out of the sewer with their hands. Yet it is hard for ngos and activists to accept the fallibility of the community’s knowledge when the government and businesses are so much more powerful than they are, through their monopoly of the truth, law, and implementation of the law. Yet without recognizing their fallibility and that government, business, and other stakeholders besides community residents can be right, the community will be unable to form alliances with stakeholders besides ngos to get the resources and policies they need and want to create the changes they want and expect.
On the other hand, government and business are so corrupt that they believe they and they alone hold the truth and morality in their minds and hands that they refuse to engage community residents in the land-use and development decisions that impact them. This believe is based on using cost benefit and analysis and the logic that what makes the most profit and costs the least within their standards is right.
Government, business, labor, and ngos often go as far as to think that they are so right that they are objective because they use mathematics to support their arguments. While mathematics is an objective tool (a squared plus b squared equals c squared wherever you are on Earth), its use as a tool in deciding what to measure, how, when, and why is subjective because they are based on the desires, wants, and beliefs of the people making decisions. The government could believe that drinking water with ecoli in it is healthy, and contract out the distribution of water to a company with the requirement that ecoli be in it. This would save money because the company would not have to treat the water for ecoli. And it might even be profitable if people assume the water is safe to drink. But it’s not in the interest of health.
What I believe Dharavi needs to create a healthy and sustainable future are methods of participatory development and land-use decisions that involve a variety of stakeholders, a commitment from NGOS to secure resources to implement the ideas that come out of those processes, and residents who are trained to organize and advocate for resources and policies to implement their shared vision and solutions to problems.
James is raising money for our Shelter by playing a show on February 19th in New York. Do drop by if you are around. I am sure it will be a great show!
Click on the poster to enlarge
