A sero-surveillance study done in Mumbai has revealed that 57% of slum population and 16 per cent of non-slum residents in three civic wards had … To get there, you must first turn off one of the slum’s raucous commercial drags and into a lane of decrepit buildings covered in tarps and corrugated steel sheets, which opens after a little while into something of a public square. Mumbai washes its hands of lakhs, do’s & don’ts don’t matter here While Maharashtra has seen 45 cases of infections and a death from coronavirus, there has been no evidence of community transmission. But it’s a financial catastrophe for people like Ilaiyaraaja. “One explanation is they did an excellent job containing it,” Muliyil said. Only about two-thirds of the slum’s people are formal residents; the rest are rural migrants who traditionally slept on factory floors or shared rented rooms, returning to their hometowns a few times a year. Mumbai washes its hands of lakhs, do’s & don’ts don’t matter here. Contactless entry.”. It is also Mumbai… It’s also a remarkable contrast to the disaster unfolding in the rest of India. On a muggy summer day, seven anxious-looking people, all wearing masks, stepped off a minibus and into a large vinyl tent that had taken over a parking lot on Dharavi’s outskirts. In some countries their inhabitants account for 90% of the informal urban workforce—an army of construction laborers, small-time vendors, assembly-line helpers, and restaurant servers that developing world metropolises rely on to function. Meanwhile, Mumbai’s government had begun floating ideas for a redevelopment, one that would replace lopsided squatters’ homes with modern apartments and move factories and workshops into purpose-built quarters, probably elsewhere in the metropolis. Sitemap At the very least, people had to come out to use the toilet, to fill water bottles from public taps, and to collect food packets donated by charities. 116,963, This story has been shared 62,762 times. By the 1930s it was attracting other migrants: potters from Gujarat, crafters of gold and silver embroidery from north India, and leather workers from the Tamil-speaking south, among many others. Managers had cleared out some upstairs storage space to allow more distance between each employee, and all of them were wearing disposable smocks, masks, and plastic face shields, purchased at the company’s expense. The idea is to send them house to house, day after day, in continuous sweeps of every part of the slum, and to keep doing it until the end of the pandemic. 36,463, © 2021 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved While coronavirus spread in the U.S., an Indian slum with 1 million residents contained it Doctors conduct a free medical camp in Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai, India. Deprivation abounded, but Dharavi could also be a social accelerator, allowing the poorest to begin their long climb to greater prosperity—and to joining the consumer class that powers the $3 trillion Indian economy. The Jamblipada slum in the western suburbs of Mumbai was declared a “containment zone" after a resident tested positive for covid-19 on his return from Italy, where he was working on a cruise-liner. Bhoyar patiently explained that the man’s 9-year-old daughter was friends with one of the brothers’ children, and often visited their house to play. Those jobs are never easy, but they are often preferable to the monotony of rural poverty. Whether in Nairobi’s Kibera or Rio de Janeiro’s hilltop favelas, slum economies are inextricably linked to the cities around them. “I have to earn a living,” he said. Mumbai: Dharavi, which reported zero cases in the last two days, saw six persons testing positive for coronavirus on Thursday. It was likely the country’s largest forced migration since Partition, the violent 1947 division of India and Pakistan—and had the unintended result of spreading the coronavirus deep into rural areas. Dharavi’s first coronavirus case was posthumous. In early April, a 56-year-old resident tested positive after he’d already died. Mumbai reported 581 new COVID-19 cases on Sunday, taking the total case count to 2,95,241, according to a statement released by the state government. There were far too many of them to evict, or ignore, and in the 1970s, vote-seeking politicians began to make small improvements, such as public latrines. The irony is that Dharavi, which has a population of about 1 million and is probably the most densely packed human settlement on Earth, has largely contained the coronavirus. We've received your submission. More than half of residents living in Mumbai's crowded slums may have contracted coronavirus and are likely being infected at a much higher rate than those not living in slum … Qureshi, a stout, thick-fingered man of 43 whose father founded the operation, mostly ignored his feline workplace companions. Antibody surveys over the summer found that almost 60% of the population in certain Mumbai slums had coronavirus antibodies, indicating that a degree of herd immunity could be at work. Researchers concede that the slums do tend to have younger residents compared to the general population. Written by Kavitha Iyer | Mumbai | March 19, 2020 4:30:16 am. Regardless of their official status, “we are here to take care of them,” Dighavkar said. She was one of the group’s few professionals, a registered nurse assigned to guide the less-experienced workers. The country now has 1.5 million confirmed cases of the deadly bug, with more than 34,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. It also offered to cover the cost of transportation back to the city and is looking into securing more spacious housing—maybe even with the luxury of an attached toilet—for staff who return. That success has made Dharavi an unlikely role model, its methods copied by epidemiologists elsewhere and singled out for praise by the World Health Organization. That left the kittens plenty of space to gambol across the bare floor, nap on a comfortable cardboard box, or be amused by the neighborhood kids who came to visit. Photo: Reuters/Francis Mascarenhas/Files. They were contacts of positive cases and were supposed to have been taken to an isolation center, not the hospital. Mumbai, with a population of 12.4 million – half of whom live in slums where the population density can reach 270,000 people per sq km – was always going to be a coronavirus hotbed. “Now we have to live with this disease,” Dighavkar said in an interview at a temporary hospital, one of several he’d established to handle Covid-19 cases. COVID-19 Mumbai Case: A second coronavirus case has been reported from Mumbai's Dharavi, Asia's largest slum, in less than 24 hours, heightening worries of a … The thermal camera and Khan’s questioning had prevented that outcome—evidence, to Dighavkar, that the system was working. Worldwide, the virus has infected over 1.3 million people, and claimed more than 74,600 lives. 62,762, This story has been shared 42,052 times. With redevelopment plans in flux, Dighavkar’s superiors had little enthusiasm for putting significant money into Dharavi. “Dharavi is a hub of activity, and we cannot let it go.”, Watch: How India’s Biggest Slum Contained Covid. Soon, Bhoyar approached a neighbor, who was skeptical that he was at risk, claiming that he and his wife didn’t even know the people who’d been infected. In India's Dharavi slum, coronavirus fight has turned into struggle to survive - The Washington Post. Despite its absent workers and stepped-up protective measures, Dharavi could still provide an extremely hospitable environment for the virus—particularly if a rush of returning migrants reintroduces it at large scale. Mumbai’s slums, where an estimated 40 per cent of the city’s 20m population lives, are particularly susceptible to the spread of Covid-19. Since then, many Containment Zones have been created in the slums of Mumbai. We received instructions from the government of India and the government of Maharashtra that we have to plan out the organisational set up of how the coronavirus vaccine is going to be spread and catered right from the ward level to the corporate level. The future of Dharavi’s manufacturing sector may look like International Footsteps, a factory that makes sandals for Western mall brands such as Aldo. By IANS 11 July, 2020 TWC India. But successive consultations, proposals, tenders, and visioning exercises failed to settle on any plan. His father was born in the hinterland to a poor tenant farmer but moved to Dharavi to work in a textile factory, getting into the recycling business after he realized the value of the plastic packaging that new spools of thread arrived in. India’s economy is in an historic slump, and less economic activity means fewer things being thrown away—and also less demand to make new products from the old. Past the double doors the group entered a spacious holding area monitored by a thermal camera on a tripod. Despite the high exposure in slums, the survey found that fatalities had not been high. Nearly a million people who live in one square mile have been left without a … ▲ Health worker Sunanda Bhoyar in Dharavi. Their success or failure will be an important example for similar places around the world—areas that are home to as much as a sixth of the global population and which no government hoping for a durable recovery from the virus can afford to ignore. Case in a Mumbai slum: Officials hit tracking hurdle; Case in a Mumbai slum: Officials hit tracking hurdle The first case perhaps in India where a slum-dweller has contracted COVID-19 infection has thrown open the challenges of community tracing in a dense slum where over 23,000 people are huddled in less than a square kilometre of land. A young man stepped forward as the group’s unofficial spokesperson, and after some back and forth, Khan learned that none of them had even been tested for the virus. With more than 60,000 total cases, Mumbai is responsible for roughly a sixth of all of India's infections. Thanks for contacting us. Those who tested positive were sent to hospital wards that had been dedicated entirely to treating Covid-19, while contact tracers raced to locate people they’d spent time with. Many had little choice but to go home, a journey that had to be made on foot, because the government had suspended train and bus services to contain infections. Dharavi contained Covid-19 against all the odds. “Precaution will be our key focus going forward,” she said—“social distancing, awareness related to hygiene, fever screening, and sanitization.” Even with the massive slum slowly coming back to life, Bhoyar added, “I’m not really scared.”. Do Not Sell My Personal Information. “If people in Mumbai want a safe place to avoid infection, they should probably go there.”. By July the number of new cases had declined to an average of 10 a day, compared with 45 per day in May, although the figure has since ticked modestly upward. That was due in part to opposition from residents, who pointed out that even if renovations brought better housing, their jobs might be relocated to distant industrial parks. Outside the slum, more than 4,700 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in India, and 136 people have died. But Dighavkar’s workers gradually won their trust, thanks in part to residents returning from quarantine telling of a comfortable stay and competent care. “We are fed up with this virus,” Ilaiyaraaja said in her tiny tenement apartment, two of her daughters sitting shyly by her side, “and with waiting for this nightmare to be over.”. There were only about 2,000 confirmed infections in India at the time, mostly traceable to international travel, and the news seemed to indicate a serious problem. Beggars had returned to intersections, though usually wearing masks as they shuffled from car to car. One of the first cases of COVID-19 in a slum in Mumbai was identified on March 23 in Bainganwadi in the M-East Ward. This has resulted in some inconvenience for Mumbai’s middle and upper classes—one local company had to suspend sales of dishwashers because of an overwhelming volume of orders. WHO Acknowledges Successful Containment of COVID-19 in Mumbai's Dharavi Slum. By then, many of its tents and huts had been replaced by structures of brick, concrete, and tile, arrayed around communal wells and powered by electricity from the municipal grid—even though almost no residents had formal land title. Four family members of a 68-year-old female patient who worked as a domestic help in Mumbai have tested negative for the coronavirus disease, or Covid-19, … His department has assembled an army of almost 6,000 health workers and volunteers, mainly from Dharavi itself, who’ve been given thermometers, pulse oximeters, and basic training in how to spot Covid-19. Terms of Use Just behind, in a sealed-off observation booth, Dr. Asad Khan issued instructions through a microphone while observing the camera feed on a monitor. Mumbai's COVID-19 battle: Factors that the city is grappling with to overcome the pandemic. WHO lauds Dharavi's efforts. The coronavirus problem that India had feared is becoming reality in Mumbai. One morning in July, after one of the heaviest monsoon rainfalls Mumbai had seen in years, about a dozen of these women gathered at a public hospital to collect their addresses for the day and suit up in protective gear. Slums in Mumbai have a number of disadvantages built into their fabric, and are witnessing a high number of COVID-19 cases, which makes these … Normally, Khwaja Qureshi’s recycling facility in Dharavi, the slum in Mumbai, would be no place for three newborn tabby kittens. Many have had experiences like those of Valli Ilaiyaraaja, who used to work as a cleaner for three families in a neighborhood near the slum, and said none would allow her back even after the national lockdown ended in June. A woman who recovered from COVID-19 donates blood plasma in Dharavi, Mumbai's largest slum. In a pristine marble hallway, a multilingual sign asks visitors to apply some hand sanitizer from a dispenser on the wall. Before the pandemic, it generated more than $1 billion a year in activity, providing a base for industries from pottery and leather-tanning to recycling and the garment trade. Qureshi’s own family is a case in point. The neighbor’s family wouldn’t have to quarantine, she said, but would be visited again to see if anyone had developed symptoms. Mumbai sero-survey: 57 per cent respondents in slums, 16 per cent in residential societies exposed to coronavirus Mirror Online / Updated: Jul 29, 2020, 00:04 IST Facebook Coronavirus: how Mumbai’s sprawling slums threaten to become a Covid-19 breeding ground With one toilet per 1,200 people, not enough clean drinking water … Slums in India are bucking the coronavirus uptick thanks to “herd immunity,” according to a new study. Some scientists have suggested the impressive numbers aren’t entirely the result of public-health measures. Slums in India are bucking the coronavirus uptick thanks to “herd immunity,” according to a new study. Now its people need to survive an economic catastrophe. Dharavi’s modern history dates to the late 19th century, when Muslim tanners, looking for a place to practice their odoriferous trade outside the limits of British-run Bombay, built a rudimentary settlement nearby. Many people in Dharavi work in unlicensed businesses that are in perpetual danger of being closed, and have good reasons to avoid contact with the authorities. As Bhoyar spoke, a city sanitation worker stepped forward to spray the house with disinfectant. Sign up for our special edition newsletter to get a daily update on the coronavirus pandemic. This serosurvey was conducted between October 5 and 10 at five locations. “Mumbai’s slums may have reached herd immunity,” Jayaprakash Muliyil, chair of the Science Advisory Committee of Indian’s National Institute of Epidemiology told the outlet. The negative economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic will be disproportionately felt by residents of slums. By South Asia correspondent James Oaten, Som Patidar, and Nagesh Ohal in Mumbai ▲ Valli Ilaiyaraaja in her Dharavi home. It is India ’s most densely populated city, a scraggly peninsula framed by … Infections were soon spreading rapidly, prompting the Mumbai government to impose draconian containment measures. After drawing the hoods over their hair, they looked a little like snowmen. M East Ward, one of the poorest areas in the city, has reported 80 positive cases so far. It’s a substantial commitment of resources, but the human and economic toll of a renewed outbreak would be far larger. A few minutes later they climbed back into their vehicle and were driven away. Mumbai’s Dharavi, the world’s largest slum, contained Covid-19 against all odds. Contact tracing suggested otherwise. Mumbai: The 125,000 slum-dwellers living under a lockdown so strict that drones monitor their moves and alert police if they attempt to leave home are some of the measures to contain the coronavirus. So in his first months in his new role he focused on the middle-class neighborhoods at its edges, laying new sidewalks and making symbolic changes such as switching the figures on crosswalk signals from male to female. So the family is in limbo, waiting both for the economy to pick up and for the stigma attached to slum dwellers to fade. A general view of slums next to high-rise buildings in Mumbai, June 27, 2020. Covid-19 cases recorded in Mumbai's G/S ward where the Worli-Koliwada slum -- the first slum settlement to be hit by the virus in Mumbai -- is located, shot from one to 68 in less than a week. ▲ Bhoyar prepares to visit Dharavi residents. A large segment of the slum work force participates in … “The other is that herd immunity has been reached.”, “The virus does its work,” he said. With rare exceptions, no one could leave the area, not that there was anywhere to go: The rest of the city, and all of India, were locked down, too, though usually with much lighter enforcement. Whole streets were sealed off behind checkpoints, with officers on patrol and camera-equipped drones buzzing overhead. How a packed slum in Mumbai beat back the coronavirus, as India’s cases continue to soar People who have recovered from the coronavirus wait to … Led by an energetic municipal manager named Kiran Dighavkar, who was also in charge of the slum’s Covid-19 response, people in Dharavi are now trying to restart their economic lives without seeding new outbreaks. The trouble, though, was that all the boxes were green—not something a physician greeting confirmed coronavirus carriers would expect to see. Privacy Notice Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Covid-19: Crucial test in Mumbai slums brings focus on debate around herd immunity. He and his three brothers had four rooms, he said—plenty of space to isolate at home. Last year he was named assistant municipal commissioner for G Ward North, a swath of Mumbai that includes the slum. Known as the 'City of Dreams', Mumbai is home to the largest number of billionaires as well as Asia's largest slum Dharavi -- one of the coronavirus hotspots. Sunanda Bhoyar was more practically attired, in a block-print tunic over billowy pink trousers, and donned her suit with ease. 42,052, This story has been shared 36,463 times. MUMBAI: The Dharavi slum colony in Mumbai did not report a single Covid-19 case in the last 24 hours. Some undertook a tricky maneuver that involved pulling the hems of their saris up and back between their legs, tucking the fabric behind their waists, to step into the white coveralls they’d been issued. He was conscious, though, that a system sufficient to contain the virus with the economy halted could be severely tested by the resumption of more activity. The visible precautions in the factory made him feel safer, Ahmed said as he attached a finely worked leather strap to the top of a new sandal, his wiry beard peeking out from under his mask. Many slum residents in the Indian city of Mumbai have developed antibodies for the novel coronavirus, a new study showed. Contactless entry”. Do Not Sell My Personal Information, Your California Privacy Rights “Herd immunity” works under the theory that the spread of COVID-19 is neutralized faster if it is allowed to run through the population — in contrast to the social-distancing guidelines put in place over much of the world. By July some parts of Dharavi were coming slowly back to life. The apparent containment of the virus in Dharavi, or at least of its worst effects, didn’t spare its people economically. When the system detected a fever, the monitor was supposed to show a red box around a patient, while normal temperatures would prompt a green box. NEW DELHI — India crossed 1 million coronavirus cases on... Post was not sent - check your email addresses! But only 30% of its personnel have resumed their jobs, mostly Dharavi locals, leaving the company well short of the numbers it might need to fill large orders. The city is facing a stiff challenge in its fight against COVID-19 with the virus entering densely populated slums and chawls where social distancing is impractical. In July, World Health Organisation praised the efforts taken to contain the spread of the COVID-19 in Dharavi, one of the world's largest slums, underscoring the need for community engagement along with national unity and global solidarity to turn the pandemic around. In the Govandi slums of eastern Mumbai, 27-year-old Anjum Shaikh has heard enough about the … Link Copied. All added their own living quarters, building with whatever materials they could find, giving little notice to the fact they were, technically, squatting on government-owned land. Dighavkar, who is 37 and a civil engineer by training, came to Dharavi with modest ambitions. “This is our own invention,” he said of the camera-and-interview process. They commandeered wedding halls, sports centers, and schools as isolation facilities to separate suspected cases from the rest of the population. “The virus doesn’t worry about your quarantine and it is much more efficient than your efforts to contain it.”. The front line of Dighavkar’s plan will be made up of women. More than half the residents of slums in three areas in India's commercial capital, Mumbai, tested positive for antibodies to the coronavirus, a new survey has found. ▲ Bhoyar instructing residents on protective measures. A 56-year-old man who lived in Dharavi, India’s largest slum, where almost 1 million people are densely packed together in a 2 sq km area in Mumbai, had tested positive for coronavirus. Antibody surveys over the summer found that almost 60% of the population in certain Mumbai slums had coronavirus antibodies, indicating that a degree of herd immunity could be at work. But to Dighavkar, the impossibility of keeping slum residents in their homes quickly became evident. There, if you skip between a puddle of foul water and a dead rat, then duck beneath a tangle of electrical wires, you’ll come to a dark, damp tunnel leading to what feels like a different world. But the man, who said he worked as a sales manager at an insurance company, making him prosperous by local standards, was reluctant. Now its people need to survive an economic catastrophe. Five workers were there 12 hours a day, seven days a week, dumping crushed water bottles, broken television casings, and discarded lunchboxes into a roaring iron shredder, then loading the resulting mix of plastic into jute sacks for sale to manufacturers. About 57 percent of the nearly 7,000 people surveyed in the crowded slums of Mumbai were found to have antibodies in their blood — the highest immunity rate in the world, the study by local authorities and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research determined. Meghan Markle changes her name on Archie's birth certificate, Meghan Markle says Palace is behind decision to change Archie's birth certificate, Amateur treasure hunter finds $2.5M gold headpiece from Henry VIII's lost crown, Son found dead in luxury NYC pad with mother was an actor, Next pandemic could be a potentially deadly fungus. But in slums such as these, with population densities among the highest anywhere in the world, social distancing is an impossibility. He couldn’t afford to live in the room he’d been sharing with two co-workers, because neither had yet returned. A sero-survey conducted in Mumbai showed that more than half the people, or 57 per cent, tested in slums had been exposed to and developed antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 virus as compared to only 16 per cent of those tested in residential societies. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation will refocus its COVID-19 containment efforts on slums, where the spread of the infection has been brought under control.. Amid the fear of second wave post-Diwali, the BMC said that it is preparing to handle a surge of 40,000 active cases in the city. Dharavi’s economic calamity, however, may be just getting started. But in slums such as these, with population densities among the highest anywhere in the world, social distancing is an impossibility. Fabric wholesalers had rolled up their steel shutters, while corner stores were again places for groups of local women to meet and chat. The challenge in Dharavi is to reclaim this vitality safely. This kind of tedious work has none of the technological glitz of an innovative treatment or the silver-bullet promise of an effective vaccine. In front of his broad wooden desk, someone had set up neat rows of chairs to allow subordinates to gather before him like students at an assembly. Possible alternatives for Mumbai slums in a post-COVID-19 world. Health workers conduct temperature checks in Dharavi slums of Mumbai on July 8, … She ordered everyone’s hands marked with indelible ink—also used in India to prevent people from voting twice in elections—to ensure they’d be brought to quarantine. As many as 80 people may share a single public toilet in Dharavi, and it’s not uncommon for a family of eight to occupy a 100-square-foot home. A study commissioned by the city of Mumbai revealed on Tuesday that over half of the people living in its famously crowded slums have antibodies for the Wuhan coronavirus in their blood.

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