Before Christmas last year, Duan Xiaolei and Twenty students from Stanford Business School conducted a ten-day visit in Mumbai and Bangalore. India’s “Digital Revolution”. After a year, I finally wrote a pen to share with you the gains from my trip to India. This is the fourth in a series of Indian expeditions.
This article is from WeChat Public number: I Do not know wow , author: segment Xiaolei, thematic map And body images are provided by the author.
In Mumbai, the financial center of India, there are nearly 2,000 slums, large and small, and high-rise buildings with reinforced concrete glass curtain walls. There are shantytowns made of wooden boards, asbestos tiles and rainproof cloth.
My Indian classmate said that Mumbai was one of the earliest business centers in India. Many years ago, poor people from all over the country came here to discuss their lives. The warm climate in Mumbai makes it easy to find a homeless place and set up a tent to settle down. Relatives and fellow villagers drag their families to take care of their children, and the more people gather, the more slowly they become slums.
When the government has a sense of urban planning, for various reasons (land ownership, votes, employment, housing relocation, etc.), there is no way to relocate them, and a spectacle of luxury residential areas and slums in Mumbai is formed.
Thousands of men’s laundry in Mumbai, it is said that the sheets of hotels below three stars in Mumbai are delivered here for manual washing
Dharavi, the largest slum in Asia and the second largest in the world, is located in the heart of Mumbai. One million people live on less than 1.8 square kilometers of land.
Our tour guide in Dalavi is a group of college students born and raised here. They have co-founded a tour guide to take tourists to their proud home, Dalavi. They believe that instead of letting tourists take wild photos to satisfy their spies, it is better for them to personally take tourists to understand the miracle and spirit of Dharavi.
Dharavi is divided into two areas, commercial and residential.
More than 10,000 small and micro enterprises are gathered in a commercial area of more than one square kilometer, with an annual output value of up to 1 billion US dollars. The main industries are leather industry, clothing industry, garbage recycling and processing industry.
After decades of development, a highly efficient industrial system has been formed, with mature chains, detailed division of labor, and seamless connection. However, according to my observations, the industry is still very primitive. The small and micro enterprises here are actually a small workshop of more than ten square meters, which basically rely on manpower and simple tools for production.
Street view of Dharavi Business District
Many engaged in the garment industry. Every few rooms, you can see small workshops for weaving, dyeing or making garments. In the cloth-dying workshop, a pool is built in the corner, with colorful buckets of paint next to it, and the cloth is soaked in colorful water. After soaking, it is hung on a rope pulled up on the other side of the room to dry. Next door may be a dimly-made system crowded with four or five sewing machines.You proudly tell us that law and order in Dharavi is very good! Neighbourhoods are harmonious, mutual help and assistance, few thefts and robberies, and low crime rates. (I have no more sources of information on Dharavi’s crime rate.) The Dharavians believe that they created everything in Dharavi. They are the masters of Dharavi and are responsible for maintaining Dharavi’s order.
Dharavi people have a strong sense of belonging here. Some families have lived here for four generations and were born, schooled, worked, and aged in Dharavi. Some young people left Dharavi for college, and returned with their newly formed family after graduation. Some people have been doing business here for many years and have long been out of poverty, but are reluctant to leave Dharavi for a more comfortable and upscale community.
House prices in Dharavi are not cheap.
When I heard from my guide that the house price in Dalavi was about 25,000 yuan per square meter, I couldn’t believe my ears. Are you kidding? In 2015, the average price of new real estate in Tongzhou, Beijing was only in the early 20,000 yuan. Little white-collar workers with LV commutes on the Guomao CBD had to buy loans in Tongzhou. How can people in the slums in Mumbai afford such an expensive house? In addition, the Paner Building in Tongzhou has perfect north-south transparency. How can it be worth the price of the slum house in the slums? I deliberately sought proof from my Indian classmates, and I got a similar number.
I was even more surprised when I learned that the unit price of a square meter of clean and bright commercial house several hundred meters away is cheaper than that of Dharavi. Why do n’t Dharavi people live there? Dalavi has no water supply throughout the day, and often loses power. Thousands of people share a toilet. Everyone is packed in a small space of more than ten square meters, and some rooms do not even have windows. Why are house prices so high and there is an active and mature real estate market? I’m baffled.
The tour guide explained that there are three main reasons:
First, the area of the house here is small, the unit price is high but the total price is low. The poor can spend 250,000 yuan for a family to buy a 10-square-meter den in Dharavi; while the commercial residential building next to it, although the unit price per square meter is slightly lower, the total price of a two-bedroom apartment is 2 million yuan, most Man is beyond reach.
Second, although Dharavi looks shabby, butIt is an economy with an annual output value of US $ 1 billion. There are many employment and business opportunities here, and the geographical location is in a prime location in the center of Mumbai. It is adjacent to the railway and convenient transportation. Its commercial value determines that house prices will not be low.
Third, Dharavi has a high population density and strong housing demand. Not only are there a steady stream of new migrant workers from all over the country, the native Dalawians are reluctant to move away even if they have the ability to leave the slums, and even bought multiple houses or shops here as leased public rental tenants.
Darawi people do wonders. Relying on such barren resources, it has supported millions of people and paid considerable taxes to the government (the US $ 1 billion economy may have extrapolated to the government ’s tax payments, and the actual output value may be greater).
Dharavi appears to be chaotic, but it is a well-organized community. More than 10,000 businesses, millions of people, and complex backgrounds can coexist in harmony. The ability to self-organize and govern is amazing.
According to the guide, the Dalawi people love this place and are proud to be Dalawi people. They work hard, live hard, live in harmony with their neighbors, and are full of humanity.
The slum Dharavi seems to have formed a self-consistent and harmonious ecology, but it hides the deep problems of India’s economic and social development.
1. India has a low level of industrialization
Dharavi’s small workshop is representative of India’s light industry and manufacturing. There are tens of thousands of small workshops, each of which has only a few hired laborers working manually, without mechanization and scale, the production level is primary, and the production efficiency is low; but the total annual output value of Dalawi can reach 1 billion US dollars, and the products are sold nationwide. This shows that such productivity levels are competitive in India. A glimpse into the panther shows that India’s overall level of light industry and manufacturing is still lagging.
I checked the relevant data. In 2018, the added value of India’s manufacturing industry was one-tenth of China’s, accounting for only 14.9% of India’s GDP, while the tertiary industry accounted for 62%. From the experience of economic development in the world, the tertiary industry in developed countries has begun to flourish on the basis of agriculture and industrial modernization, otherwise it will easily fall into the middle income trap. India’s primary and secondary industries are weak, and both food and industrial goods are heavily dependent on imports. 50% of the employed population are in the service industry and have not been able to show demographic dividends in labor-intensive manufacturing. This economic structure is extremely disproportionate to the status of India’s economic power and has buried a crisis.
After Modi came to power, he saw it.