Nihal in India: A Trip to the Slums

When Americans imagine cheap labor, they might picture a teenager working for $7/hour at McDonald’s. But the Indian definition is a bit different, and much closer to the global average. Case in point: We paid Rs. 11/km (or $0.35/mile) for our rental car, but only Rs. 300 ($6) /day for the driver. In other words, twenty minutes of the car’s time on an Indian expressway is worth more than the driver’s time for the entire day.

Consider one unit of this vast pool of Indian labor. Suresh Patil would arrive at our flat daily to wipe down the floor, do our laundry, and wash our dishes. Suresh is his mid 30s, does thorough work, and always wears a smile. He was amused at my childish and accented Marathi, and stared at me in stunned disbelief when I told him that in America, my family did their own cleaning and driving. I was anxious to get an insider’s view into how he lived with his wife and three kids, so on Christmas eve he led my father and I over the Mahim suburban rail station’s pedestrian flyover toward his home.

During our crossing, we noticed a large group had gathered on the flyover, pointing and craning to see something on the track below. An everyday shortcut across the tracks had turned into a gruesome end for a pedestrian, (the literal translation of the Marathi was that “he had been cut” by a train). “It happens all the time,” said a nonchalant Suresh, and we moved on. To enter his slum, we had to climb through a break in a brick wall roughly three feet off the ground. Piece of cake for your cat-like correspondent.

A host of Western slum stereotypes would instantly die at that entrance. Late night comedian Jon Stewart was interviewing the star of Slumdog Millionaire last week, and he wondered about the real residents of Mumbai slums. “Are they angry? Are they pissed off?” he wondered. I’d probably wonder the same thing if I’d never been there. I was wearing a (relatively inexpensive) watch that represented a few months’ pay for the average resident (this was relatively well-to-do slum), but felt as safe as if I was walking through an affluent New Jersey suburb. Once inside, we found ourselves weaving through a passageway no more than 3 feet wide, surrounded by adults and kids that looked every bit as happy as the well-to-do morning commuters on Park Avenue look depressed. Each shack had electricity and cable, the alley had been recently swept, and sewage was nowhere to be seen (or smelt).

After a bit of winding and ducking, we arrived at Suresh’s home. Cold hard numbers can describe, but you can’t really understand the living conditions here unless you see them. Imagine a family of five living in a room 6 feet wide by 9 feet long. A good size walk-in closet by American standards, as long as you don’t factor in the 6 foot high ceiling. A combined bathroom and kitchen the size of an elevator was through a door in the back. But the shack was located in the heart of Mumbai, allowing the landlord to charge Rs. 2000 ($40)/month.

But Suresh had bigger plans for himself and his family. We were led a few doors down to a shack about twice the size of his current place, which he was under contract to buy. He’d saved up a down payment at a local bank, which was also providing the mortgage. After the move, plans were afoot to add a second floor. “More space for the kids,” I thought to myself. Not quite: Suresh planned to rent out the new rooms for a little extra coin. And though these shack settlements were originally illegal, property rights have been assigned to the tiny plots. And when a developer eventually decides to build a proper high-rise, the Patil family will have the right to purchase a flat at a reduced rate. A flat in India’s most prosperous city wouldn’t be bad for a man who came to town with little more than a canceled train ticket.

So if I was assembling cars in Michigan (or crunching spreadsheets in New York), I’d be frightened at the potential energy stored up in these slums. These residents are best characterized by their embrace and understanding of entrepreneurialism, in vivid contrast with a Chinese citizen’s reaction to the bursting of the Shanghai stock market bubble: “The government should ensure that stock prices don’t go down,” said a middle-class worker to a reporter. But by no means did I visit a utopia: Suresh’s kids devoured the chocolate I brought for them, demonstrating that the line between being well-fed and malnourished is a fine one. And India hasn’t prioritized education, and the country is in love with the IT sector, as if hundreds of millions could be employed in call centers and back offices.

But all that’s for another blog post. As I dodged taxis on my way back to our flat, I thought about the neighbors that I don’t know and the silence in the hallways of my building in New York. The sidewalks devoid of people at home in New Jersey.

All of this would make you think that “Slumdog Millionaire” isn’t just the title of a good movie.