The first half of BBC’s ‘Rick’s Stein’s India’ second episode is all about Mumbai and you can travel there yourself, without leaving home.
Visit Sassoon Dock fish market, eat Berry Pulao at Brittania & Co and meet Mr Kohinoor, go with Krishna from Reality Tours & Travel as he takes Rick to his favourite fish curry restaurant and on a tour of Dharavi slum, and play cricket on Oval Maiden.
Reality Tours & Travel offers really great, good value tours around Mumbai that include the famous Mumbai street food, the dabbawallahs that deliver thousands of home cooked lunches to workers, without ever writing anything down, and a socially responsible, sensitive Dharavi slum tour.
It’s a best way to see and try lots of the best of Mumbai, in a short time. It’s hard to pick a favourite tour, but it might have been the Public Transport Tour – the dabbawallahs and Dadar flower market were hard to top.
Reality Tours and Travel has the most amazing local guides to show you around and uses 80% of its profits to fund community development projects in Mumbai’s slums.
And Evelyn at the end of the phone and email, is lovely, endlessly patient, always available, and genuinely trying to organise you the best experience.
Dharavi Slum Mumbai is surprising!
Its easy to see the things that aren’t so great about Mumbai’s 2,000 slums. And there’s definitely plenty of opportunities to improve workplace safety, sanitation and water supplies. However, these isssues are not unique to slums, they are shared by communities and countries throughout the world.
But if instead you go looking for all the good things in Dharavi, you might well be very surprised. The community shows great creativity and innovation, collaboration and co-operation, to make the most of a small space and enable many people to migrate to Mumbai from villages for work and opportunities, and to live together on land they don’t own.
And once you understand a bit more about Mumbai’s ‘slums’, it can look very different from first impressions.
Mumbai is the worlds most densely populated city. Dharavi has 1.5 million people per square kilometre. In Mumbai, the government owns more than half the land. Dwellings built on government land are legally owned, and have some services like electricity and some water, but are technically called ‘slums’ . In Mumbai, you are more likely than not be living on government land, and as such, living in a ‘slum’. That’s why people working in a wide range of jobs, including professional people, often live in slums in Mumbai and why Mumbai has so many slums.
But houses are very small, really just one tiny room, with maybe just washing facilities for women. 1,500 people share each toilet, that is only cleaned about four times a month.
However, in Dharavi there are schools, hospitals, markets, banks , a cinema ( of sorts) and plenty of creative industry. And no begging or signs of poverty.
Clearly there are many challenges, but also many things to admire.
It reminded me of a mixture of an Australian beach camping ground with minimal shared facilities, crowded with families in January, with tents packed tightly together and everyone working in with each other to make a small space and basic facilities work for everyone. But it also reminded me of the retirement communities that are popular, where people buy a house, but don’t own the land, live in community and start up all sorts of clubs and co-operative groups in their ‘closed’ community to make life better for everyone.
The best way to see Dharavi for yourself is with Reality Tours & Travel. Not only is this their signature tour that started them off, but 80% of their profits support a Dharavi based NGO ‘Reality Gives‘.
(Photos provided by Reality Tours & Travel, as photography is not permitted on tours, for community privacy).
Fine Eating 