Dharavi

Topic: Geographical Issues: Pollution, Urban Waste, Slums and Land Degradation · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 9 "Geographical Perspective on Selected Issues and Problems"

Meaning

Dharavi is a very large slum in central Mumbai, Maharashtra, built on land taken back from an arm of the sea and filled in with waste and garbage. It covers about 2.4 sq km and is often called one of Asia's largest slums. It matters because NCERT uses it as its main case study of an Indian slum. It also shows that a slum can be a busy place of work that helps create a city's wealth, even though the people who live there are poor.

Explanation

How Dharavi formed (cause → process → result)

• Cause: people come to the city for work
• Rural people move to Mumbai to find jobs.

• Rents and land prices are too high for them.

• Process: they settle on leftover, unsafe land

• They build homes on any empty land they can find.
• Dharavi's land was reclaimed from an arm of the sea (sea water pushed back and the area filled in), and it was filled with waste and garbage.

• Land like this is environmentally incompatible (unsafe or unsuitable for homes) and degraded (damaged and of poor quality).

• Result: a crowded settlement without basic services

• Dharavi is a residential area of "least choice". People live there because they cannot afford anywhere else.

Living conditions

• Layout: there is one main "ninety-foot road", which has now narrowed to less than half that width. Many side lanes are too narrow even for a bicycle.
• Crowding: a family of up to twelve people may live in one room.
• Dirt and disease: piles of garbage and rats are common. Like other slums, it suffers from:
• dilapidated (old and broken-down) houses with poor ventilation (little fresh air)
• no safe drinking water, electricity or toilets, which leads to open defecation (people relieving themselves in the open)
• unplanned drains, with dirty water standing in the lanes
• narrow lanes, which raise the risk of fire and disease

Dharavi as a production hub

• Dharavi is a place of work, not just a place to live. It makes:
• ceramics and pottery
• embroidery and zari (gold and silver thread work)
• leather goods. Leather is tanned (treated to make it last) in buildings made of corrugated metal sheets.
• garments, metalwork and jewellery settings

• furniture for rich homes

• The contradiction: Dharavi helps create Mumbai's wealth, but its own people stay poor.

• Most work is in the unorganised sector (work with no contract, no fixed wage and no social security).
• The slum supplies cheap labour and goods to the formal city.

Source and redevelopment

• NCERT's description comes from an extract of Jeremy Seabrook's book, In the Cities of the South (1996).
• Redevelopment: a project to rebuild Dharavi was awarded in 2022 and is now under way. There are disputes about who qualifies for a new home and where people will be rehoused.

Where it occurs

• Location: central Mumbai, Maharashtra, on India's west coast beside the Arabian Sea, at about 19°N.
• State context: Maharashtra had the most slum dwellers of any state in Census 2011. Greater Mumbai, where Dharavi lies, has a high share of its people living in slums.
• Other Indian cities with high slum shares: Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) and Kolkata (West Bengal).
• National picture (Census 2011): about 6.5 crore people lived in slums in 2,613 towns. That was about one in six urban residents of those towns.
• World context: it is often counted among Asia's largest slums. Seabrook's book uses it as an example of the crowded cities of the developing world, which he calls the "South".

Don't confuse with

• Slum vs production hub: Dharavi is not just a place where people live. NCERT stresses that it is a busy centre making leather, zari, pottery and garments. An option saying "a purely residential slum with no economic role" is wrong.
• Jhuggi-jhopri cluster: these are groups of huts built from mud, tin, plastic and scrap. Dharavi has these kinds of homes, but it is a whole large slum area, and NCERT names it as a slum case study.
• Chawl: an old block of one-room flats built for rent, common in Mumbai. A chawl is planned, built housing. Dharavi grew without a plan on reclaimed land.
• Notified / recognised / identified slum: these are the three Census 2011 categories for slums. They are ways of classifying a slum, not names of places. "Declared" and "registered" are not Census categories.

Prelims Hooks

• Dharavi → Mumbai → Maharashtra, on the west coast beside the Arabian Sea, at about 19°N. Trap: it is not in Kolkata or Chennai.
• Site: land reclaimed from an arm of the sea, filled in with waste and garbage. It covers about 2.4 sq km.
• NCERT source: Jeremy Seabrook, In the Cities of the South (1996).
• Crafts of Dharavi: pottery, embroidery, zari (gold and silver thread work), leather tanning, garments, metalwork, jewellery settings and furniture.
• Main road: the "ninety-foot road", now narrowed to less than half that width. Up to twelve people may share one room.
• Census 2011: Maharashtra had the most slum dwellers of any state. Slum categories are notified, recognised and identified.

Mains Points

• Causes (GS-I, urbanisation): people move from villages to cities, land and rents are high, and there is too little cheap housing. So people settle on unsafe land, such as Dharavi's reclaimed sea marsh. This makes slums a planning failure, not only a poverty problem.
• Effects and contradiction: crowding, open defecation and garbage spread diseases such as diarrhoea, TB and malaria. Unorganised, risky work and children leaving school keep families poor from one generation to the next. Yet Dharavi's workshops add to Mumbai's wealth. This shows that slums are tied to the formal economy, so the answer is to improve them, not remove them.
• Policy response and limits: PMAY-U (2015) included in-situ slum redevelopment (rebuilding homes on the same land so people are not moved away). PMAY-U 2.0 (2024) names slum and chawl residents as priority groups and adds Affordable Rental Housing for migrants [2]. The Swachh Bharat Mission (2 October 2014) targets sanitation. Dharavi's redevelopment, awarded in 2022, shows the limits: disputes over who qualifies and where people will be rehoused. The way forward is to upgrade slums where they stand, give secure land rights (pattas [2]), and count slums afresh in the next Census.

Related concepts

• Slum
• Census 2011 slum data
• Swachh Bharat Mission
• Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen) Phase II
• Swachh Survekshan

Read more

• Slums, Dharavi and the sanitation missions