Category: Uncategorized

By Dakshata Sharma
Bachelor of Liberal Arts & Science (majoring in Political Economy)

Having been in Mumbai for a few days now, there is no question that the glitz and glamour that we’ve heard about through the Bollywood industry and other forms of pop culture is prevalent in certain parts of this city. What isn’t so beautiful, glitzy or glamourous, is the inequality that is visible across this city.

Even on a bus, while travelling to a field trip, looking out of the window on the right, I see a business hub and high-rise buildings with men and women living their fast-paced life in the corporate and capital centric world. Glancing over to the left, the scenes of slums, self-built projects, temporary housing, mountains of waste and extreme poverty paint the horizon.

I think this stark contrast between the rich and the poor in Mumbai is an economically fascinating and unique place and for most visitors, they’ve never experienced this inequality before. There are diverse economic, social and political conditions within kilometres of each other. The social and geographical boundaries characterised by class, caste, gender and religion draw many lines and dissect this city.

Bearing witness to the spaces where inequality manifests as disadvantage is fascinating. But how ethical is it for tourists to go to slums?

Slum tourism is a commercial enterprise in Mumbai. A simple internet search or visit to a local tourism office will recommend slum tours as an attraction, but the question lies, should spaces where people live and work be commodified into a tourist attraction, where strangers come to (essentially) gawk at the residents of impoverished communities?

It seems wrong of tour companies to capitalise of someone’s poverty, and through constant advertising and promotion of slum visits and tours – poverty tourism has become normalised in Mumbai.

This is not to suggest that tourists visit slums with the malicious intent to disrespect residents; but if we try for a moment to think about poverty tourism from the point of view of the slum occupants, there are many questions we might raise about how the presence of tourists is experienced by slum residents.

Groups of people, mostly foreigners, with cameras, clean clothes, different languages, looking fascinated and pitiful at the same time may come across as being insensitive and intruding within their space. Although not trying to impose, and as I mentioned earlier, tourists generally visit these areas due to a sense of curiosity. But in visiting slums commercially, with a tour group, people do things like take photos without consent and post them on social media for public consumption. This may be experienced by slum residents as unwanted imposition.

On the other hand, it could be argued that poverty tourism contributes to the economic activity within the spaces of impoverished communities, and allows tourists a critical perspective to see a socially organised space which may sensitise them to the issue and help them to better understand the disparity within the Indian economy.

Debates about the ethical or non-ethical nature of slum tourism are ongoing. I think for these kinds of discussions to resolve, there needs the focus has to be on the impact that these visits have on the residents and how these interactions affect their daily lives.

By Laura Marsh-Clutton
Bachelor of Arts (Political Economy and Asian Studies)

On our first day in Mumbai we were thrown into the thick of it by experiencing Mumbai’s biggest landmark, the Gateway of India, on Republic Day. It is safe to say the crowds were in their thousands. However, The Gateway to India was not the only interesting thing I got to experience that day. Whereas I took photos of landmarks and buildings, many locals took photos of me and my group. Before departing for India my parents joked about how many people will want to take photos with me due to my light skin and blonde hair. At the time I laughed, thinking they were over reacting, but they were right. It was certainly a strange experience. I felt a bit like a celebrity and was more than happy to take a selfie with all the people who asked – there was many! I really enjoyed talking to everyone and they seemed very happy to be sharing a conversation with me.

 

India’s population has not been built through immigration, like has been the case for Australia. In Australia, we are used to seeing people of many ethnicities and races on a daily basis, as is the melting pot of our country. However in India, racial and ethnic differences are typically signifiers of foreignness. Hence, for locals at the Gateway of India, a person of white skin and pale hair is easily understood as a foreigner, and this goes a way to explaining the level of interest in us. This is all more the case during holiday periods, when Indians will often travel domestically from small villages such as Panipat in Haryana, where foreigners are never seen, to big cities like New Delhi and Mumbai. Considering this was Republic Day, it makes sense as to why so many people asked for a selfie!

Throughout our brief walk around the Gateway of India I found that the more I said “yes” to photos the more I was asked. It seems that word spreads quickly and that curiosity runs deep within the Indian people as many were drawn to the small crowd that had started to form. A most interesting occurrence was a man who asked me for photos on three separate occasions as he followed me around the Gateway. The continual over-stepping of what in Australia would be regarded as personal space boundaries, however, showed me that Indian people are very hospitable and welcoming in an effort to be friendly. Furthermore, it seemed that not only were the Indian people fascinated by us but having a photo with/of us was also a source of pride that was undoubtedly shared with their friends. Overall, this experience highlighted how in multicultural Australia, with its history of immigration, issues of race, ethnicity and foreignness are cast differently from that in India, representing a hand’s on first day experience of cultural learning.

By Stella Tang
Bachelor of Arts, Major in International Relations and Political Economy

On Monday the 27th of January, the Field School officially starts. Prof. Madhushree Sekher welcomed us and gave us a presentation introducing TISS, a university established in the year of 1936 in Mumbai, India. This presentation and my other experiences on campus made me reflect on what is special about TISS.

TISS has a motto “Re-imagining futures”. I found it impressive, especially when Prof. Madhushree talked about the professional social work the institution is engaged in. TISS is a place that aims to really change the future in a positive way and to improve the social outcomes (e.g. gender equality) and development of India. Indeed, the Institute makes a difference by contributing to policymaking, human resource development, health, environmental sustainability and urban development.

My other impressions of the campus relate to the everyday presence of wild animals such as monkeys and the street animals roaming on campus. During our walk from the Guest House to Greenroom every morning, a street dog (named Roger by Laura) was always there to accompany us.

The dogs have tags on their ears. The animals that inhabit the campus are taken care of by the TISS community. We encountered dogs away from campus too. During our walking tour to Colaba there was a significant number of free-roaming dogs. There are distinct features of the urban environment in Mumbai, such as exposed garbage and slums that sustain the population of street animals.

Most of the dogs we commonly see on the streets of Mumbai belong to the breed known as the Parish Dog. They live on garbage created by the city’s residents, providing an abundant source of food. The populations of street animals are also sustained by the garbage. In Mumbai, there is at least 500 tons of garbage are left uncollected every day. In fact, interestingly, most of the dogs and cats we see in public belong to the street and slum dwellers who keep them as pets.

By Nicholas Cramp
Bachelor of Commerce (Human Resource Management & Political Economy)

Having now spent two weeks studying and observing the complexity of Indian social and economic life it is safe to say that my appreciation for Australia’s industrial relations system has been renewed. Whereas “work” in Australia is founded upon principles of fairness and our livelihoods are safeguarded by legal instruments, the reality for the majority of Indian workers is strikingly different.
Only around 8% of India’s workforce are employed within the formal sector and have employment contracts that provide some social security and protection. The other 92% are engaged in the informal economy, vulnerable to externalities and often self-employed like the street-vendors we met in Mumbai. Throughout the Field School we have developed our understanding of the diverse challenges facing urban and rural workers and have, on many occasions, observed working conditions unfathomable in Australia. In Mumbai we witnessed labourers often working without safety equipment and, unlike Australia, if they were injured there would be no worker’s compensation to assist them. Similarly, in a seminar on informal employment, the vulnerability of domestic help workers struck me as there are no award wages or leave entitlements providing a ‘safety net’ for these workers and their families.
Whilst these examples provide a glimpse into the harsh reality of India’s unregulated employment relationships, our field school has also investigated how employment trends and policies are impacting India. Liberalisation policies to ‘open up’ India to the global economy have succeeded in promoting growth in the service sector, however they have also indirectly perpetuated inequalities. After observing this injustice of exorbitant wealth alongside destitute poverty, I am hopeful but perplexed as to how India can deliver improvements in employment conditions for its citizens. This challenge has also been complicated as Rural-Urban migration and increased educational attainment have heightened competition for decent work in India’s cities. Consequently, as the formal sector has not been able to create enough jobs for the 20 million Indians that reach working age each year, surplus labour is absorbed into the informal economy – where there is little to no state support to regulate their employment conditions.
By contrast, an example of successful employment policy that we have been lucky enough to witness first-hand is the MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). This scheme, which any rural person may apply for, guarantees (within 14 days) one hundred days work on public works projects. In this program, women and men are paid equally and this provides a valuable source of income to over 111 million rural workers. We spoke with a group of these workers constructing a pathway in Wayanad district, Kerala. This initiative is an investment that is effectively promoting more inclusive development and is ultimately providing a India’s rural communities a ‘fairer go’ at improving their livelihoods.

By Alexander Greenhalgh
Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Economics (Economics, Political Economy, History)

India is a country barrelling towards the future. It sounds like a commercial for an investment fund, but throughout the course of our travels in India we have never been far from some indicator of immense and rapid change. In Mumbai, cut-and-cover trenches divide arterial roads for installation of a modern metro system. Looking at the newspapers, special liftouts on proposals for ‘industrial corridors’ and loan waivers offered by the government as ‘heartfelt thanks’ to farmers are routine. The physical attributes of economic development are seen everywhere in India.
But this process comes into conflict with a complex contextual history. The traditions, social values and beliefs of the people of India are being overlayed with all the new jobs, forms of wealth and poverty of the new economy. The result is a world where old and new exist side-by-side. A case-in-point, was our visit to two fishing communities on the coast near Kozhikode. Our first stop was the busy and modern Puthiyappa Harbour, where local fishing crews described their way of living. An exploitative relationship was clear: they only rent their boats and sell their fish directly to commission agents, keeping less than a half of the value of their catch for themselves, pressing them to catch ever-larger hauls of fish. The question arises: have their attempts to integrate into the global market been beneficial? The harbour supports 1,500 families through jobs, but the lion’s share of the profits go to a wealthy boat-owner who does not share the same experiences or even live in the same village. There are amazing technical feats at work here: A haul of fish delivered in harbour at 6am in the morning can be sold in Abu Dhabi by 4 pm the same day. Yet the fishermen themselves are confined by this same globalised market – receiving only a small portion of the benefits. It’s a vicious cycle where their source of income becomes ever-more precarious.
Just down the road from the harbour, fishermen repair their nets by hand. This is a community which rejects the use of modern fishing techniques, instead relying on their traditional skills to locate the correct fish without destroying natural habitats. Rather than rent their boats, 20 to 40 families come together to purchase each boat for their shared benefit. Yet even the locals are having to deal with the developing world; overfishing has led them to travel further into the ocean, and their beachfront is littered with plastic rubbish. They say that they no longer need to catch as many high quality fish, because they are becoming so rare they bring a higher price at the market. They described this as simple “supply and demand economics”, but I have to question how pleased anyone can be with the prospect of a dwindling traditional food supply.
As India faces a national election this April/May, the Modi government promises greater liberalisation of the Indian economy, believing this to be the path to development. Yet with my experience seeing the vast inequalities in India, and hearing from the fishermen themselves the extent to which exploitation dictates their market position, I have my doubts about India’s trajectory.

By Mathew Friedman

“I’m not sure how you want to phrase this, but can you ask whether men feel threatened at all?”.
I can tell from Dr Chetan Choithani’s widening eyes that the challenge of asking something like this to the group of around a dozen women, with some men and children lurking in the doorway, is going to require more than a linguistic translation.
We’re sitting with one of the eight women’s self-help groups in Kanwarpura, a village of around 1,000 inhabitants. Our guide here is a representative of SRIJAN, the NGO that helped set this group up seven years ago, and continues to support it.
“I might… take another one whilst I figure out how to word that” says Chetan, before moving on to a question about SHG structure. Fair enough.
I am, however, curious. We have spent the first half of this field school hearing about the manifestations of a deeply patriarchal society, and yet here, in rural Rajasthan of all places, is a group of women who talk like they’ve never heard anyone tell them not to. It’s a total misnomer that women’s empowerment leads to the opposite for men (a message that the global North needs to learn as much as anyone), but I can’t help but think that this is all too amazing to be true.
Because it is truly amazing. This SHG of ten women has built up a savings stock of 60,000 rupees (around AUD$1,200), which they lend to one another to purchase livestock, repay outstanding loans, cover medical expenses, and build infrastructure like wells. The Agriculture and Development School, run by this and three other SHGs, claims responsibility for doubling crop yields in four years through training and soil testing. The local government school is now preferred to private alternatives because pressure from the Village Development Committee, a council of 16 women representing all the village SHGs, have made teachers attend their classes. Kanwarpura has 24/7 electricity, reliable clean drinking water, toilets in every inhabited house, relatively reliable government services, and a corruption trial against an official that clearly underestimated what he was up against.
I am aware that as a group of foreigners, the goal is to impress us, and that the SRIJON lens is necessarily limited. For example, we walked through a neighbourhood belonging to a group from a ‘scheduled tribe’ but didn’t speak to any of its inhabitants, nor to any woman excluded from the SHGs, or any officials. Nor, for that matter, to any men.
“Men don’t feel threatened,” comes the eventual translation, with a very logical explanation. “They encourage these women. It’s a good source of income and credit when the family needs live stock or something like that. Once they saw that the SHG worked, there’s a lot more respect”. The women nod along.
Even taking all of the successes mentioned above with a pinch of salt, it’s clear these women are respected, by men, none of whom tried to speak for them, both public and private banks, who have lent the Manrag SHG four times their savings stock, but most evidently by themselves. These women probably would have had less food and more work than their brothers, little education, and would have had to relocate to an entirely new village during their arranged marriages to become the lowest with the hierarchy in their new families, almost all of which would be in the lower social and economic echelons within their village. Yet these women sat in front of us with studiously kept account books, interrupting one another in their excitement to discuss financial, social, and agricultural strategies.
This model for development is not perfect, and hardly a drop in the ocean of India’s 863 million-strong rural population, but it does one thing brilliantly: it recognises the amazing resource that already exists in all communities. It’s well documented that women are the key to successful grass roots development, and with supportive institutional structures, room to grow, and just a little self-belief, these women seem to have grown like oaks.

By Laura Stewart

India has a population of 1.32 billion people. Homelessness, gender-based violence and malnutrition are part of the national story often not told. In the midst of such a large population many are forgotten, left to fade as if they had never existed.
In Mumbai it is a rarity for the smog to clear enough for you to see more than one layer of the city. Our gaze is always obstructed. As we begin to study the city, its institutions, and its history, it becomes apparent that this is a nation of invisible people, a nation of people we chose not to think about, chose to ignore.
As a western woman arriving in the Indian context I initially viewed invisibility as a problem. Visibility and recognition is necessary for social change. In India, however this must be rethought. Our guide in Dharavi moved to Mumbai because he wanted to disappear. Involved in a love marriage invisibility meant he and his wife could avoid being targeted by the police, dragged in for questioning, and, in more extreme cases of these love marriages, killed.
In Rajasthan as well I was faced with this invisibility-by-choice. Many women chose to cover their faces when in public. For a western woman such a practice is often interpreted as oppressive. In India, where violence against woman is prevalent, it is a more understandable choice. If you are a woman, too much negative attention from the opposite sex, or those in power, can have devastating consequences. Invisibility, in this context, provides a kind of independence, where no one knows who you are and your actions in public are less likely to lead to attract unwanted attention. Invisibility provides women protection, but it is also enforced by an oppressive system.
For many, however, invisibility is not a choice. Slum dwellers are ignored and relocated in never ending attempts to erase them from the landscape of the city. For those living below the poverty line, or on the streets, a unique identity number is crucial. Without formal documentation people are not able to access health services, social services, or rations. In Australia our passports, official papers and tax file numbers allow us to be seen in a thousand ways we never think about, but in India it is often those who need this visibility the most who don’t’ have it.
More concerning than those we are forced to ignore are those we choose to not to see. As a young child knocks on the window of our bus, attempting to sell us some form of plastic goods, we avert our eyes, finding it easier to ignore than deny. As a woman begs us for food we turn away. The truth is with so much poverty we cannot bare to see it all. To function we learn not to see.
One solution to the risk of individuals fading completely into to smog is to form groups. A collective that votes together is more likely to create change than an individual. However, sometimes, these groups become a vehicle for political exploitation. When you have a leader telling you how to vote your voice begins to disappear along with your identity. You are no longer an individual, but a member of a community – a Muslim, a Buddhist, a women, or BPL (living below the poverty line). You become a number in a voting bank. Or worse, you are ignored altogether. You are invisible because you remain only one in 1.3 billion, conceivable only as a statistic.

By Holly Fraser

One of the most striking features about Mumbai for an Australian visitor is the amount of people. With an estimated population of 22.5 million and growing, Mumbai is currently the most populous city in India. To put that into perspective, it is nearly equivalent to the entire population of Australia! An integral part of any major city such as Mumbai is the transport. Throughout our study tour of India so far we have experienced various modes of transport including buses, taxis, rickshaws and the train. Catching transport can be a mundane activity, but it reveals a lot of interesting things about a place.
Just when I thought I had left the train woes of Sydney behind, I was confronted by more chaos but on a whole new scale when I arrived at a suburban railway station in Mumbai. It was peak hour and there were streams of people walking, shouting and shoving in all different directions. As the trains pulled up to the station they were packed with people hanging out the open door carriages. There were even people jumping off the train and trying to board before it had come to a stop. It was not hard to see why the rail network of Mumbai is known as the lifeline of the city.
Every day over seven million people in Mumbai travel on the train and for many it is a necessary way to reach their place of employment. However, as we have been made aware through our lectures and course readings, it can often be a safety issue for women. Seeing train carriages reserved for women only, a relatively new initiative in Mumbai, really re-enforces this. Any change that enables women to access employment is a welcome change in my opinion, but at the same time, it may be a band aid solution to a much larger societal problem.
Despite having train carriages dedicated specifically to women, there appeared to be far more men than women waiting to board the train. This observation is perhaps not surprising given that in a lecture on employment we learnt that there were less women employed in urban areas than men. It also reflects our knowledge of the high number of women not in the labour force, which includes those engaged in unpaid housework and care duties.
The train was not only a method of getting to work, but for others it was an important means of employment. Inside the train there were people making their way through the carriages selling small goods. Outside the train, there were people collecting rubbish distributed across the tracks. As I learnt from a local, these people are known as rag pickers. Their survival depends on selling the plastic for just 4 rupees a kilogram to the local recycling industry. Both the sellers on the train and rag pickers on the train tracks are considered to be part of the informal economy, which as I recently learnt on this field study, comprises a massive ninety-four percent of India’s labour force.
Although a fairly short train ride, upon reflection, it speaks to the themes we have been learning about over the past week such as urban growth and development, women’s issues and employment.

By Jade Lisbin

Only 31 per cent of India’s population lives in an urban area. But this amounts to 400 million people. 23 million people live in Mumbai alone. With this exorbitant number of people, I wonder, how can technology be used effectively to improve the sustainability of a city, particularly a city like Mumbai?
In recent times, new cities in India have been built to replicate those in rich countries and incorporate technology. These are called ‘smart cities’. A smart city is generally described as optimising the use of Information and Communication Technology to monitor and maximise efficiency and increase the safety of all aspects of urban infrastructure whether that is schools, transport systems, shopping centres or waste management systems. The aim is to minimise resource consumption and costs in an attempt to make the city more eco-friendly and sustainable. In theory, this sounds like a great idea, right?
The problem with this model, as we learned from one of our Professors at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), is that rather than trying to improve an already existing city, private developers and consulting companies have started creating new cities on ‘uninhabited’ land. With this, comes environmental degradation, political corruption, further social exclusion and a whole realm of other issues. I can see similarities between this approach and the dominant consumer lifestyle in which it is now easier to buy a new product rather than fix an old one. This same approach is taken to the evolution of India’s ‘smart cities’. But it comes at a cost.
Lavasa is an Italian inspired, privately owned town built on the model of a smart city a few hours from Mumbai. It demonstrates many of the issues we have been learning about such as locking out the poor while creating new homes for the rich. Lavasa is an extreme example of the approach to urban planning. But perhaps there are alternatives. Rather than creating a whole new city, investment would be better focused on improving and rehabilitating local development plans within already existing cities.
From an ethical perspective, I find myself wondering why was it is okay for countries in the global North to use all the resources they like while putting pressure on countries in the global South, like India, to limit their resource use.
How do you envisage the future of India’s development? Do you see more ‘smart cities’ popping up around India?

By Ben Robinson

“The locals are used to it. The main benefit is for tourists who change their perceptions” claimed our tour guide, Daksh, as we walked through the winding alleys of Dharavi.
On Sunday, I went on a paid walking tour of Dharavi, along with members of our group. Dharavi is India’s biggest slum with one of the highest population density in the world. In the week leading up to the tour, and since, there has been lively debate about the ethics of slum tourism. On one hand, there was a desire to see what we had been learning about in class, while also potentially benefiting the local community by providing funds to tourist operators. On the other hand, there were concerns it could be voyeuristic, invasive, and an aestheticisation of poverty. This raised a number of questions about the appropriate role of travellers within developing countries, and where the line lies between seeing things ‘first-hand’, and being intrusive.
The tour itself was informative and engaging. We were first taken through a commercial area, surveying a number of leather, textile and pottery industries, before going to a residential area then a local school, where 80 per cent of the profits of the guided tours are sent. Apart from small children who ran up to us, our interactions with locals were passive and detached. As one of many wide-eyed tour groups going through that day, there was a feeling of indifference toward us. Daksh, our tour guide, was excellent, but I left the tour wondering: was that experience necessary to get a holistic, balanced picture of what life in Dharavi is like?
I think part of our preconceptions about informal communities is formed because of the language we use to describe them. The terms ‘slum’, ‘informal’ and ‘squatter’ are problematic and negative, defining urban life in terms of a terms of a deficit. In economics, the informal economy is that part of the economy not accounted for in national accounts. The discourse of informality is framed as the ‘other’ within the formal economics framework and formal urban planning processes. But there is no sense in which informality precedes formality. Cities are built from informal processes as much as ‘formal’ ones. In India, 93 per cent of the economy is ‘informal’ and Dharavi has an estimated annual turnover of $1 billion.
I think the popularity of slum tourism, both in India and around the world, is also linked to a trope within western culture about the ‘authentic’ traveller who visits ‘exotic’ places and ‘gets off the beaten track’. Tourists construct a humanitarian Self through their engagement with suffering in developing countries. I’ve often heard stories where tourists present their travels as essential for coveted experiential knowledge while depicting locals as the true beneficiaries of the tourists’ self-discovery. While this may not have been exactly the case for our group, as we are here on a study tour, I think these cultural narratives do affect us.
All travel involves an element of voyeurism. We enjoy seeing new places and we grow from experiences that broaden our understanding of the complexity of the world. But reflection is needed when there is power dynamics between foreigner and local, when an experience is passive and observing, rather than active and mutually engaged.
There may not be definitive answers for Dharavi, or slum tourism generally. I think this depends on a balance between the actions and intentions of tourists, the views of locals about foreigners coming into their homes, and how the tour company operates within the community that they are profiting from. But, as a foreigner, I think there is a responsibility to be cautious, reflect, and be aware of the spaces you occupy.