Mukul Devichand: We need a proper debate about India's slums

"What would Annapa think?" I wondered as the lights went up in a London cinema hall after Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire. Later as the gongs came in for Danny Boyle and the chatter about the film reached epic proportions, I couldn't stop thinking of Annapa Konchikor, the Mumbai slum resident I hung out with last year. Konchikor is older, fatter and significantly more balding than Jamal Malik, the film's 18-year-old protagonist. But he's one of Mumbai's real Slumdog Millionaires, born in a bamboo shack to a family of snake charmers. After careers as a sweeper, illegal taxi driver, digger of sewers and security guard, he is now the proud owner of a bangle and garment shop on an unpaved slum road. Last year, my BBC producer and I stayed in one of the concrete rooms he has built above the shop. We were making documentary about the redevelopment plan for Dharavi in Mumbai, where up to a million people crowd into the dense lanes of Asia's largest slum. We stayed up late, sipping on fake Scotch and trying to work out how India can somehow dismantle the slums that form 60% of Mumbai without excluding and banishing the urban poor. Yet Slumdog Milionaire doesn't actually address this urgent political question: what should we actually do about the slum problem now? That's no criticism: it is, after all, excellent cinema. But what is depressing is how the post-film discussion by the Indian elite has remained stalled. Rather than soul searching about the future of slums, we have irritation that a western film about India should win more international accolades than homegrown cinema. On top of that comes the accusation that the west's fascination with "poverty porn" is voyeuristic, that the west somehow fails to understand India. And sadly, western comment has been no less shallow. Even the film itself has overtones of a smug attack on the arrogance of India's rich, who are seen as responsible for India's poverty. The protagonist is arrested and tortured by wealthier Indians furious at a tea-boy's success. It is not good enough simply to blame India's new rich for the inequality, despite their many flaws. In fact, there are several schemes now in place to redevelop slums – the most influential being the private sector scheme to redevelop Dharavi that we examined for Radio 4. What is needed urgently is a proper debate about who will win and lose in the vast urban re-engineering of places like Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. What struck me most about Konchikor's story – and he is not unique in Dharavi – was that despite the political and economic extremes, the slum has allowed the poor to profit from their own industry. Indeed it was illegal settlers like Konchikor's family who built up the slum themselves from swampland. Almost every home doubles as a small factory, workshop or stall. Their owners are not Slumdog Millionaires but they are proof that you do not need to get on a TV quiz show to make it out of poverty. It is this function of slums, as a place of self-improvement for the poor, that Konchikor fears will be undermined by the current slum redevelopment strategy, under which private companies re-house slum residents in tower blocks and get to develop the remaining land as they please. It is no surprise that the west has developed a morbid fascination with the India's urban poor. They are, after all, a great story with as much darkness and hope as imaginable in the human condition. The danger is that films like Slumdog Millionaire put India's slums into the public imagination without a more sophisticated awareness that many of India's most extreme slums are now being demolished, and the fate of millions hangs in the balance. Mukul Devichand's report from the Dharavi slum will be repeated on Friday 20 February at 11:30pm on BBC Radio 4, and can also be heard here