By Erich Follath
According to Godrej, India began its economic liberalization more than a decade after China -- which he calls the "most capitalist of all countries today" -- and it therefore comes as no surprise that the People's Republic is further along and that India must hustle to catch up.
Foreign business only makes up about one tenth of the Godrej Group's sales today. Godrej, who holds a degree from top US university MIT, wants to increase that number to 25 percent. He hopes to expand his business in Pakistan (where, owing to the political situation, his products are currently available only on the black market), and he sees China as a natural partner. "We complement one another ideally."
Like some of his fellow leading Indian businessmen, Godrej is a Parsi -- a group with a social conscience. He has built huge apartment complexes surrounded by parks for his employees, and he supports schools, hospitals and environmental projects. Nevertheless, they are little more than islands in Bombay's vast current. The Godrej Group employs all of 25,000 people in Bombay, a number that is declining. And the much-touted, extremely successful IT industry isn't creating enough new jobs. It represents only a tiny fraction of reality in India. Seventy-one percent of all Indians still live in rural areas, where they barely eke out a living. Thousands of farmers commit suicide every year out of sheer despair over their excessive debts. Those are the ones who haven't made it to Bombay.
The corporate leader with a consistently spotless desk and a tendency to be overly punctual is no team player when it comes to his personal life. Adi Godrej's hobbies include paragliding and trekking in the mountains. He has even completed the traditional Hindu pilgrimage around Mount Kailash in Tibet. His three children are already integrated into the company, and he regularly discusses business strategy with them. After work he likes to retire to his painting collection or visit one of the new galleries that are popping up everywhere.
His wife Parmeshwar, a former model, is in charge of social glitter and glamour. The parties she hosts at the family's opulent villa with a view of the ocean -- with not a disturbing slum in sight -- are considered legendary in Bombay.
Mukesh Mehta, 58, is either loved or hated, celebrated as a savior or cursed as a charlatan. There is nothing between these two extremes, because this man makes a strong impression on everyone. He will clean up the city, say his friends. He will ruin us while enriching himself, say his enemies. Mehta wants to transform Dharavi, Asia's largest slum, into a model neighborhood and eliminate the city's slums completely by 2020. Instead of relying on the concepts of the World Bank Mehta, an architect by profession and head of the consulting firm MM Consultants, wants to tap the resources of private business. He says that his incredible plan won't cost taxpayers a single rupee.
"I'll show you how this works," Mehta says in his office in the exclusive Bandra district, as his secretary brings in stacks of files. The documents include every conceivable detail about Dharavi ("the constantly flowing"), with maps highlighting the most important data. Mehta spends an entire hour speaking without pause. He seems obsessed, a man who -- like most visionaries -- has an air of the persuasive missionary about him.
The basic concept of the Mehta plan is breathtakingly simple. The slum, in which up to a million people live crowded together on less than two square kilometers, will be bulldozed down to every last hut. Then about half of the land will be sold to developers, who will be allowed to build a few high rise buildings and sell the luxury condominiums in the buildings -- under the condition that they also build low-income housing and offer it free to the poor.
"All 51,000 families who have lived in Dharavi since 1995 or earlier will receive a two-room apartment with kitchen and bath free of charge," says Mehta. The plan also provides for newer arrivals who, says Mehta, "would have to take out loans for 5 percent of the market value of their apartments for each year after 1995." Mehta had originally planned to build a golf course on the site of Asia's largest slum, but he has since changed his mind: "Perhaps too foolhardy."
The project could be attractive to private enterprise because Dharavi, originally settled on the outskirts of Bombay, is now in a central location thanks to land reclamation efforts. The sale of the land could raise as much as €1.3 billion ($1.7 billion). In addition to the luxury condominiums, the new development would include "world class hospitals, world class universities and world class concert halls," attracting professionals and tourists. The phrase "world class" is one of Mukesh Mehta's favorites. In fact, doing things in a big way is almost a family tradition, something Mehta learned early in life.
With only a few rupees in his pocket, his father left the family's village in Maharashtra to seek his fortune in Bombay, where he eventually became the head of a steel company, which Mukesh Mehta and his brother later turned into a model business. But architecture was his true passion. After obtaining his degree Mehta worked as a real estate agent in the New York suburbs, selling new luxury mansions to the rich.
When he had tired of the real estate business, Mehta returned to India, where he became what he calls an "international authority on slum issues." "I wanted to give something back to my home town of Bombay," he says. Dealing with corrupt Indian politicians and businessmen was difficult, says Mehta, who has presented his urban development plans before United Nations committees and as a guest professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Bombay's city elders have approved of his plans, at least "in principle," says Mehta, who hopes that the project can begin soon.
But how do the slum dwellers feel about Mehta's radical makeover for Dharavi? One reaches the slum by walking across wooden planks spanning stinking sewage canals and past garbage dumps. Dozens of narrow, unpaved alleys with open sewers and electrical wires dangling dangerously at eye level lead into an impenetrable urban jungle. The squalid huts -- with their tiny, interlocking rooms, where people sleep in shifts because a bed is far too valuable to be used by only one person -- seem almost identical at first glance. The furnishings are sparse -- a television, a propane bottle, a shelf, a folding chair -- and laundry hangs out to dry on rickety stands.
It takes a second glance to recognize that Dharavi is not nearly as homogeneous as it seems. Half-naked men bake bread at a fire pit fed with oil-soaked rags. Workers in tiny workshops, completely devoid of protective gear, are busy welding, tanning and making pottery. The big city slum is in fact a collection of regional villages. People from the southern Indian Tamil Nadu province specialize in leather goods, those from nearby Gujarat make flatware and the Muslims from Uttar Pradesh assemble toys. Dharavi is filled with survivors. They sell lottery tickets and leather embroidery, peacock feathers and plastic flowers. They give massages and clean ears, charm snakes, interpret dreams and train monkeys. They are demanding, humble or teary-eyed, depending on the circumstances of a given bargaining situation.
People say that life in Dharavi is horrific during the monsoon, with its weeks of constant downpours. Flooding is sometimes so severe that people are carried away. Dozens died here in 2005, when the floods forced people to climb onto power poles and remain there for up to 24 hours until help arrived. But otherwise, say local residents, life isn't too bad in Dharavi, especially now in February, with temperatures hovering around a cool 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit).
And what about the statistics on the more than 100 people who have already died this year in Bombay from malaria, dengue fever and leprosy, not to mention the scourge of AIDS in the slums?
"They are certainly true, but on the other hand," says Ramjibhai Patel, a potter, "nowhere in India is surviving as easy as it is in Bombay. It may not seem that way to you, but we do have something to lose." It is sentiments like these that lead Dharavi's residents to distrust any promises of panaceas. Many even plan to block the bulldozers, their babies on their arms, should it come to that. Dharavi is alive because it rejects hopelessness, and because it is never static.
Beauty parlors -- with optimistic names like "Sunita Beauty Parlor" and "Roza's Lovely Place" -- are the latest rage in the slum. Often jammed into spaces of only about 100 square feet and perched precariously on top of existing huts, they are reached by climbing rickety stair cases. In "Salon Anu," a flickering light bulb illuminates a homemade makeup table. Nail polish, shampoo and various brightly colored creams are spread out on the table in front of a cracked mirror. The rinse water from the last hair wash sloshes across the wooden floor, threatening to inundate a group of cockroaches in the corner. Everything is recycled, even cut hair, which Anu prepares for use as doll hair. The competition is so tough that the determined proprietor of the salon, who is about 25 ("I'm not exactly sure how old I am"), has just written a rock-bottom price of seven rupees (less than 15 euro cents) for a manicure on a sign she plans to hang outside to attract new customers. Sales are good, her beauty parlor is humming along and she works 18 hours a day. She works through the night if necessary, when there are weddings in the slum, for example. This self-made woman has hired two assistants, and she hopes to soon be able to take over the adjacent hut. "And then," says Anu, "I would like to take a real cosmetics course and move to where women can spend to make themselves beautiful."
A picture of her role model -- the beaming former Miss World and high-paid Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai -- hangs on the wall. The slum beautician from Dharavi has heard that movie star Rai plans to attend the grand finale of the "Lakme Fashion Week" today. She decides to do something she really can't afford: close her beauty parlor and go to the convention center along the city's fashionable waterside promenade. Anu is hoping to catch a close-up glimpse of her role model. She takes the 10 p.m. train to Bombay's more elegant section.
But the big city lights and the oversized billboards advertising luxury hotels, flights to vacation resorts and entertainment ("Get 125 cable channels for the price of 80") are not her world, although the flyers a young man is handing out bashfully are. They read: "Completely discreet: Abortions and early gender identification for babies." Anu hurries past the letter-writers, who write letters home for their illiterate customers in the dim glow of streetlights. The letters are usually filled with euphoric reports of life in Bombay -- to keep relatives at home from worrying. She passes the cages on Falkland Road, where Nepalese women offer cheap sex. Meanwhile, well-off parents take out ads in the papers proudly offering their daughters as "veg. virgins" (vegetarian virgins). She passes the booksellers with their latest pirated copies. Everything that makes India proud can be had here: from the novels of Booker Prize for Fiction winner Kiran Desai to the treatises of Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics.
The slum beauty finally reaches her goal: the front gate to the glamour venue. But everything in sight is locked. The Bollywood stars and their young billionaire sons enter the building through the rear entrance, where they pose in the flash of camera lights coming from the invited members of the press. Inside, India's top designers, Wendell Rodricks and Seema Khan, prance around their models, nervously applying the finishing touches to miniskirts and lacing up dangerously tight tops. At last year's event, an oversight resulted in a model suddenly standing bare-breasted on the runway. The event's organizers are keen not to allow the ensuing scandal to repeat itself this year -- otherwise the pedantic city fathers could enact an ordinance that would shut down the show for good. This, as the tabloids revealed, explains why police officers in civilian clothes are planted in the dressing rooms -- as if they weren't needed more urgently elsewhere.
Everyone is clapping, sitting down and cheering. The final event of the fashion week has been a triumph. Even Anu, the owner of a slum beauty shop, is very pleased with the evening. Although she never saw the former Miss World or, for that matter, any of the stars kept shielded from the common people, the show gave her new ideas.
An accommodating journalist brought her all kinds of fashion magazines and beauty product brochures from the entry hall to her spot behind the barrier.
She will take a closer look at the materials as she takes the train home. When she returns to her hut she will cut out anything she believes she can use. The magazines will help her put together new styles for her customers, the Dharavi avant-garde. If Mr. Mehta's urban renewal project materializes, says Anu, she will refuse to yield even a single square meter of her shop unless she receives a newer, more attractive space. Otherwise she will continue to struggle in her old shop, and expand her business. Anu is tough. She has a dream, and she knows that she will succeed.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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