India: Mumbai – Dharavi Slum Tour

🚶 Walking Through Dharavi

During our stay in Mumbai, one place I had been absolutely desperate to visit ever since we started planning the India leg of the trip was Dharavi. I had read about it, seen it referenced in documentaries, and had a nagging feeling that no visit to Mumbai would be complete without it. Known the world over as one of the largest slums on the planet, Dharavi manages the rather extraordinary feat of packing approximately one million people into a patch of land measuring just 2.39 square kilometres. Let that sink in for a moment. That works out to more than 277,000 people per square kilometre, which puts it among the most densely populated places anywhere on Earth. To put that into some sort of London context, that is roughly eighteen times the population density of the Borough of Tower Hamlets, which itself is not exactly known for its wide open spaces. The sheer scale of human life compressed into such a tiny area is genuinely difficult to process without actually standing in the middle of it.

Newspapers and films have been telling the Dharavi story for decades, and most of the time they do not do it much justice. They either lean heavily on the poverty angle, which is real and cannot be ignored, or they swing the other way and present it as some sort of plucky underdog success story. What I wanted was to see it properly, without the filter of someone else’s agenda. A place that has been continuously inhabited and evolving since the late nineteenth century, and which now functions as a genuine economic engine generating an estimated one billion dollars a year in output, deserves to be seen with a bit more curiosity and a lot less sentimentality. So that is precisely what we set out to do.

📜 History and Growth of Dharavi

Dharavi’s origins go back to 1884, during the period of British colonial rule over what was then called Bombay. It began life as a modest collection of settlements on the northern edge of the city, built on land that was largely marshy and considered unsuitable for the more formal development taking place in the colonial centre. At the time, the area was home to fishing communities, predominantly the Koli people, who had been working those waters long before the British arrived. Then came the push from colonial authorities to relocate industries and workshops away from the smarter parts of the city, and with those industries came the workers and their families. Tanners, potters, textile workers, and craftsmen of every description found their way to this patch of reclaimed land, and Dharavi began to grow — not according to any plan, but simply because people needed somewhere to live and work.

Over the following decades, particularly through the early and mid-twentieth century, waves of migration from across rural India continued to swell the population. People came from Tamil Nadu, lured by the leather industry; from Gujarat, drawn by the trading opportunities; from Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, seeking whatever work the city could offer. By the time India gained independence in 1947, Dharavi was already a substantial settlement, though it continued to grow rapidly in the following decades as Mumbai’s own population exploded. The city now has more than 21 million residents, making it one of the largest urban centres on the planet, and it is estimated that over half of those residents live in slums of one form or another. Mumbai counts 2,583 recognised slum clusters, containing around 1.2 million structures, covering nearly a quarter of the city’s total land area. And that is only the officially recognised ones. Nearly half of all slum dwellers in Mumbai live in what are termed non-notified settlements, meaning residents cannot legally claim access to basics like piped water, electricity connections, or public transport links. Dharavi sits at the very heart of this reality.

Today, Dharavi is a mosaic of communities and faiths living in close proximity in a way that would surprise most outsiders. Hindus, Muslims, and Christians all live side by side, and the settlement’s narrow lanes contain temples, mosques, and churches dotted in amongst the workshops and homes. People from Tamil Nadu make up a significant proportion of the population, particularly in the leather-working districts. Migrants from Gujarat dominate the trading and recycling sectors. The Maharashtrian community, as the indigenous people of the state, also maintains a strong presence. This diversity is both Dharavi’s strength and, at times, a source of tension, though on the day we visited the overwhelming impression was of a community simply getting on with life.

🎬 Why Visit Dharavi?

Given all those statistics, people often ask what on earth would possess anyone to go and visit a slum. It is a fair question, and I want to answer it honestly rather than reach for the sort of high-minded justifications that sometimes get trotted out in these situations. Part of it was straightforward curiosity — I had been reading about Dharavi for years and wanted to see it for myself. Part of it was that I genuinely believe that if you are going to travel somewhere like India, you owe it to yourself and to the country to look at all of it, not just the bits that appear on postcards. The Taj Mahal is magnificent, obviously, but it tells you a very specific and carefully managed story about India. Dharavi tells you something rather different.

The film Slumdog Millionaire, which was released in 2008 and went on to win eight Academy Awards, brought international attention to the kind of existence that millions of people live in urban India. It was shot partly in Dharavi and used the settlement’s labyrinthine alleys as a backdrop for a story of poverty, survival, and against-all-odds success. It is a good film, but like all films it made choices about what to show and what to leave out. The Dharavi it depicted was the dramatic version — dark, chaotic, occasionally violent. The reality, as we found, was considerably more complex and, in many ways, considerably more impressive.

The other reason I chose to visit in the way that I did was the desire to do it properly, which meant booking a tour with a company that actually gives something back. After a bit of research, I settled on Reality Tours, who have been operating responsible tours of Dharavi since 2005 and are widely regarded as the gold standard for this kind of visit. What set them apart for me was their policy of dedicating 80% of their profits to their non-profit arm, Reality Gives, which funds educational and community development projects directly within Dharavi. They also have a strict no-photography policy inside the residential areas, which I thought showed genuine respect for the dignity of the people who live there. It felt like the right way to do it.

🚆 The Journey Begins

Our tour started at Churchgate Terminus, the second-largest railway station in South Mumbai and a proper Mumbai landmark in its own right. The building, which was completed in 1867 and designed in a Gothic Revival style by the British architect Frederick William Stevens — the same chap who gave us the magnificent Victoria Terminus, now known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus — is an imposing structure that sits at the southern end of the Western Railway line. It handles an almost incomprehensible volume of passengers every single day, with trains running from early morning until well past midnight, though the real madness happens during the rush hours when carriages are packed so tightly that people are literally hanging off the sides. The whole thing is simultaneously terrifying and magnificent.

Conveniently for us, the station was a short walk from our hotel, the Fort Regency, which meant we arrived with a few minutes to spare and could watch the organised chaos of the station concourse before our guide appeared. Our guide turned out to be a young woman named Shifa, who had recently completed her degree in tourism and was bright, knowledgeable, and quite brilliantly unflappable. She had clearly done this tour many hundreds of times but managed to make it feel fresh and personal, which is no small achievement.

We were not the only ones on the tour. Hanai, a solo traveller from Japan who had been making her way around India for several weeks, joined us at the station, and a bit later we were also joined by Amanda, who had come over from the UK. The four of us made a reasonably compact group, which turned out to be ideal for navigating the narrower sections of Dharavi without causing too much disruption. We boarded the local train heading north, and the ride to Mahim Junction took about twenty minutes. We had timed it well, missing the worst of the morning rush, so the journey was surprisingly comfortable — by Mumbai standards, anyway. Through the train windows, the city gradually changed character, the gleaming towers of the financial district giving way to more workaday streets and eventually the kind of dense, close-packed urban fabric that signals you are getting close to Dharavi. Shifa gathered us together as we stepped off the platform at Mahim and led us on foot to the entrance of the settlement.

🏭 Entering Dharavi

We entered through the commercial streets that border the settlement on its outer edge — busy, noisy thoroughfares lined with shops, stalls, and the constant background soundtrack of motorbike horns that seems to be permanently on in Mumbai regardless of the time of day. Then the character of the streets changed quite suddenly and we found ourselves in the alleys. These are narrow, twisting passages that feel like arteries in some enormous, living organism, and they run in every direction with an apparent logic that only becomes clear once you have spent some time in them. Within about thirty seconds of entering, I was completely certain that I would be entirely lost without Shifa.

One of the most important things to understand about Dharavi, and something that most outside accounts tend to underplay, is that it is not only a residential area. It is also one of Mumbai’s most significant industrial zones. An estimated 5,000 business entities operate here, along with somewhere in the region of 15,000 single-room factories, producing between them an annual economic output that is believed to reach around one billion US dollars. That is not a footnote — that is a serious chunk of Mumbai’s informal economy, and it means that Dharavi is not a place of pure hardship and dependency. It is a place of extraordinary productivity, albeit operating under conditions that would not pass muster in any formal economic zone.

Our first stop was the plastic recycling area, and good lord, it was something. Mountains — and I mean actual mountains — of discarded bottles, containers, packaging materials, and miscellaneous plastic items were piled high on every available surface, waiting to be processed. Workers moved methodically through the heaps, sorting materials by type and colour with a speed and accuracy that was genuinely impressive. Once sorted, the plastics were washed, ground down, and prepared for resale to manufacturers. What the rest of the city throws away, Dharavi turns back into a resource. The same principle applied to the cardboard collection operation nearby, where sheets were being cut, trimmed, and bundled for reuse. The recycling operations in Dharavi process an estimated 80% of Mumbai’s plastic waste — a fact that rather puts the city’s shiny new recycling initiatives into perspective. Close by, small food factories were frying and packaging sweets and snacks that would end up in shops across Mumbai. The people buying those biscuits in Colaba or Bandra would have absolutely no idea that they had been made here, in this extraordinary, chaotic, productive place.

We also walked through textile workshops where the rattle and whir of sewing machines created a constant background noise and workers sat at long rows of machines producing garments that would eventually make their way into the broader Indian market. The leather-working quarter, which is one of the oldest industries in Dharavi and dates back to the community’s Tamil Nadu roots in the early twentieth century, was particularly striking — small workshops turning out finished leather goods in conditions that were undeniably cramped but with a level of skill that was clearly the product of generations of accumulated knowledge.

🌆 Scenes from the Alleyways

The sections of Dharavi that appeared in Slumdog Millionaire came to mind as we moved deeper into the settlement, and I can tell you that the film did not exaggerate the tightness of the alleyways. In some places we had to turn sideways to squeeze through gaps between buildings, and in others the overhead structure of upper floors built out over the lane reduced the available light to a thin strip above our heads. It was genuinely claustrophobic at times, though the constant presence of people going about their daily business — children running past, women balancing loads on their heads, men chatting in doorways — meant that the overall atmosphere was busy rather than threatening.

These alleys were lined on both sides with homes where entire families lived in single rooms opening directly onto the lane. By single room, I mean single room — cooking, sleeping, living, and in many cases a degree of working all happening in a space that would not generously accommodate a garden shed in a decent part of South London. And yet there was nothing miserable about the way people occupied these spaces. The doorways were decorated, there were plants on the sills, children’s drawings were pinned up inside. People make their homes wherever they find themselves.

We paused at a leather goods shop that had an interesting backstory. The owner explained, through Shifa, that the business had previously produced counterfeit versions of high-end designer bags — your Guccis, your Louis Vuittons, that sort of thing. At some point, apparently prompted by a combination of legal pressure and personal pride, the family had made a decision to ditch the counterfeiting and start building their own brand, which they had simply and rather boldly named Dharavi. They were clearly very proud of this decision, and the quality of the work on display was genuinely good. None of us were feeling particularly like shoppers that afternoon, being rather distracted by the general sensory overload of the surroundings, but we were very grateful for the opportunity to step inside and enjoy the cool blast of air conditioning, which was rather welcome given that October in Mumbai is still thoroughly, emphatically hot.

🏘️ Residential Dharavi and Community Projects

From the leather shop, we moved into the residential sections of the settlement. The oldest parts of Dharavi tend to be predominantly Hindu and contain some of the most solidly built structures in the area — buildings that have been constructed and extended over several generations and have developed a kind of permanence that the newer, more makeshift sections lack. It was here, in this older core of the settlement, that Shifa brought us to the headquarters of Reality Tours itself, housed in a modest but well-organised space that also functions as a community resource.

Inside, members of the Reality Gives team explained more about the educational work they were doing. The focus is on supplementary classes for children whose schooling through the standard state system leaves them underprepared for the requirements of higher education and the formal job market. The challenge is significant — many of Dharavi’s children attend schools that are overcrowded and under-resourced, and without additional support many of them would struggle to meet the academic standards needed to progress. Reality Gives was working with several hundred children at the time of our visit, offering after-school sessions in maths, English, and computer literacy. Karen and I had an awful lot of questions, possibly more than the situation strictly called for — we were particularly interested in the long-term outcomes for the children who went through the programme — and eventually Shifa politely but firmly reminded us that there was rather more of Dharavi still to see.

Walking through the residential areas gave a real sense of how this community functions not just as a workplace but as a genuine neighbourhood. The energy was constant and intense — never quite settling into what you might call quiet — but it was also unmistakably human. Shrines appeared unexpectedly in corners and alcoves, elaborately decorated with flowers and offerings. Small courtyards that you would never know existed from the main alleys suddenly opened up, filled with children playing and women hanging out washing. The sense of a community that has organised itself according to its own needs and its own logic, quite independent of anything the formal city might have planned, was very strong.

🏺 Pottery and Redevelopment Plans

Towards the end of the tour, we reached the pottery quarter, and this was perhaps the section that moved me most. The area is known as Kumbharwada — the potter’s quarter — and it has been home to the Kumbhar community, traditionally pot-makers from Gujarat, since they arrived in Dharavi in the early twentieth century. The quarter has a quite different character from the rest of the settlement: slower, more spacious in its way, with rows of clay pots laid out to dry on rooftops and in open spaces, and the distinctive smell of the kilns in the background. Artisans were shaping vessels by hand on traditional wheels, smoothing and trimming with a focus and a confidence that spoke of years of practice. It was genuinely beautiful work, and watching it happen in these surroundings — this industrial, overcrowded, improvised city within a city — gave it an almost surreal quality.

Shifa used the relative quiet of the pottery quarter to talk in more detail about the redevelopment plans that have been hanging over Dharavi for the better part of two decades. The basic proposal, which has gone through various incarnations since it was first formally proposed in the early 2000s, is to demolish the existing settlement and replace it with a series of high-rise residential towers. The land freed up by the development — prime real estate sitting in what is now effectively the geographic heart of Mumbai — would be made available for commercial development, with residents given alternative accommodation in the new towers. In 2022, the Maharashtra state government awarded a major redevelopment contract to the Adani Group, one of India’s largest conglomerates, in a deal that attracted considerable controversy and protest from Dharavi’s residents and civil society groups.

The problems with the redevelopment plan are substantial, and Shifa laid them out clearly. Firstly, the proposed towers would not accommodate the industries that make Dharavi function — the recycling operations, the leather works, the pottery kilns, the food factories. There is simply no equivalent space in a residential high-rise for a tannery or a plastic-grinding operation, which means that thousands of livelihoods would be at serious risk. Secondly, the offer of replacement accommodation in high-rises does not work for families whose way of life depends on living and working in the same space, often over several generations. Moving a leatherworker from a ground-floor workshop with access to outdoor curing space into a flat on the fourteenth floor of a residential tower does not solve their housing problem — it creates a new one. And thirdly, and perhaps most fundamentally, the entire social fabric of Dharavi — the networks of mutual support, the community bonds, the shared identity that has been built up over more than a century — cannot simply be transplanted into a new development. Communities are not furniture. You cannot just move them around and expect them to reassemble.

📝 Final Thoughts

Visiting Dharavi was unlike anything else we did during our time in Mumbai, and I would go so far as to say it was unlike anything else we have done on any of our travels. It was not sightseeing in the conventional sense — there was no monument to stand in front of, no view to photograph, no particular moment of aesthetic pleasure. What it offered instead was something rather rarer: a chance to witness a living, working community going about its daily life in circumstances that most of us cannot begin to imagine, and to come away with some genuine understanding of what that life involves.

Dharavi is overcrowded, it faces serious problems with infrastructure and sanitation, and the uncertainty surrounding the redevelopment plans casts a long shadow over the future of a community that has done nothing to deserve that kind of anxiety. But it is also a place of remarkable productivity, creativity, and social resilience. The people who live and work there have built something genuinely extraordinary out of very little, and they have done it on their own terms and according to their own priorities. The recycling operations, the food factories, the leather workshops, the pottery — none of that happened because the government planned it or because a developer saw an opportunity. It happened because people needed to eat and needed to work, and they found ways to do both.

I came away from Dharavi with a complicated mixture of feelings, as I suspect most visitors do if they approach it with the right attitude. There was genuine admiration for the ingenuity and resilience of the residents. There was concern — real, nagging concern — about what the redevelopment plans might do to a community that has so much to lose. There was a certain amount of what I can only call respectful discomfort at the thought of what daily life there actually involves. And there was gratitude — for Shifa’s brilliant guidance, for the approach taken by Reality Tours, and for the simple fact that we had been allowed a glimpse into a world that most people, even those who live in Mumbai, never see. If you are going to Mumbai and you are wondering whether to do this, the answer is yes. Do it properly, do it respectfully, and go with Reality Tours.