Bombay to Mumbai: past, present and future

New Internationalist, May, 1997

Yet as well as having the highest proportion of slumdwellers, this is also the richest city in India. It provides a third of the tax revenue to the Indian Government. The ruins of the old mill buildings now occupy some of the most valuable real estate in the world.

The dark heart

Mumbai claims the largest slum in Asia -- Dharavi, the dark heart of a wealthy city and home to about 700,000 people. From this barren, treeless place, of ramshackle buildings, shadowless sunlight, without grace or amenity, come some of India's most beautiful artefacts -- silver and gold jari-work (embroidery), jewellery, pottery, cloth and leather goods. Those who make them are paid the merest fraction of the price they fetch in the international market.

The liberalization programme of the national government pursued since 1991 foresees the transformation of the area adjacent to Dharavi -- the Bandra-Kurla complex -- into another Singapore or Hong Kong. Mumbai's mythic juxtaposition of rich and poor looks set to continue into the twenty-first century.

(1) Gillian Tindall's City of Gold, The Biography of Bombay (Temple Smith 1982).