SIXTY Foot is an odd name for a road, but not in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum. It was hastily slapped together to mark Rajiv Gandhi’s visit in 1985, and the width so impressed the locals that the new thoroughfare came to be known by its dimensions. No one has cared to baptise it otherwise.

For Mumbai, 60-Foot Road is just another slovenly street, flanked by a row of tinpot skyscrapers. But in the gullies of Dharavi, it is a fashionable address, the Mecca of aspiring millions.

It’s easy to see why. This is where the potters of Kumbharwada—Dharavi’s original settlers—came from Saurashtra in 1937 to set up shop in what was once a fetid bog populated by convicts, bootleggers and Koli fisherfolk. Crime flourished in the marshes, and those who escaped the law were felled by the anopheles mosquito.

That, however, did not stop others in search of a livelihood. During Mumbai’s migrant boom in the ‘50s, Dharavi became home to impoverished craftsmen from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. They were accommodated in the Dharavi Transit Camp, a row of “temporary” barracks that, five decades later, still house fourth-generation émigrés who won’t dream of moving out.

Around the camp, the slum continues to grow, 400,000 people squashed into an impossible 535 acres. Commerce hums over the chaos, a discordant orchestra of sewing machines, electric saws, hammers and industrial appliances that churn out goods worth Rs 2000 crore every year.

Nearly two-third of the 56,000 shanties are family-owned cottage industries, making an astonishing range of products, from glass bangles and bindis to plastic buckets, toys, surgical sutures, papads and sweetmeats. Others provide subsidiary services to Dharavi’s famous garment factories, scrap yards and tanneries. Meanwhile, the ethnic occupations still flourish. Gujarati immigrants continue to make pots, the Biharis excel at zardozi, and the Tamils own the ubiquitous Udipi on every street corner of this ‘Mini India’.

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