Surviving in India’s Manufacturing Slums – An Unfiltered Documentary

[Music] tari one of the world's largest slums an entire city within a city over 1 million Souls packed into just 2 square km in the very heart of Mumbai so they're happy for this place to exist happy happy the Govern is happy in Metropolis boasting the third most billionaires on the planet here the ultra wealthy live alongside millions in slums just like this that Patchwork the city but I've been told that these places are more than just overcrowded Alleyways that they are productivity powerhouses generating over 1 billion in annual output and this something that I

just need to square about that is this a place of squal and inactivity or a hub of productivity innovation of food and culture I needed to find out nearly half of mumbai's population live in slum areas homes made of scrap metal and Tes standing right beside towering luxury skyscrapers this way of life is tough but drave is far from a pity party this place it's a godamn beehive of hustle this area is almost like this just giant manufacturing Hub in the middle of Mumbai just like a giant slum manufacturing station these main streets are where

workers are coming from other areas of India although many people obviously just live here as well and then in amongst the the Alleyways that's where all the action goes down the individual businesses that fuel what when you're out of the total is a pretty substantial industry I'm meeting up with Javy a young woman who spent her entire life in Davi and she's volunteered to help guide me through this insane world that most people just never see we start out visiting a metal casting shop straight out of the Middle Ages but with a Davi twist what

where are we going three guys slick with sweat clustered around a furnace in a tiny room the air it is thick enough to chew heavy with fumes there's one small fan that fuels the intake of air and one that is the exhaust this room is just tiny these guys are sitting in here all day melting down their stuff to make these sort of aluminum decorations I can taste it in my mouth now we've been in here for a good 30 minutes just trying to get these shots but uh man what a sort of mini Factory

incredible little place just just one little blower in the corner there powering this furnace is that the word behind us charcoal as the fuel and scrap aluminium turned into these [Music] decorations today we're making aluminium grates we start with the mold a layer of fine black sand is pounded around an object that we're looking to duplicate more sand is piled on it's pounded tight until a fine imprint Remains the initial item is then carefully lifted out we check for any imperfections and seal the mold [Music] shut next molten aluminium glowing red is scooped from the

furnace and poured with Precision into the mold after cooling for a second the top is lifted off and we extract our freshly cast [Music] grade next a worker breaks away any excess from the finished piece and one by one they're racked [Music] up everything here is coated in a layer of soot an almost post-apocalyptic Vibe but holy hell are these guys fast they're cranking out aluminum grates belt buckles hard hardware for the leather industry and it's rough dirty work but there's a rhythm to it a brutal efficiency that's almost hypnotic what an incredible little mini

Factory that is uh that's crazy hello guys this video has a paid partnership with better help that I really want to tell you about see I'm a pretty anxious guy I don't know if that comes across on camera or not but there have been times when pretty normal life stuff like changing jobs being in a bad relationship moving house stuff like that would just completely paralyze me and I never thought of myself as someone who needed therapy I kind of thought of that as maybe a little bit weak or that I needed to be going

through a fullblown crisis that I needed to have some kind of clinical conditions be on medication or something like that but in reality once I did try it what it ended up being was just a pretty useful tool for getting past something that was really holding back my development and it's no word of a lie to say that I wouldn't be able to do something like this channel without it and better help I think is the easiest way you could possibly imagine to try something like therapy to see if it is for you you just

fill out this quick questionnaire they're going to match you with a licensed therapist in a few days if that person's not a match you can swap it up just a few clicks and they're going to match you with someone else and so look if you're interested in checking it out you can click the link in the description or go to betterhelp.com Andrew Fraser for 10% off your first month maybe it works out for you like it did for me back to the video but man I can still taste it my throat my lungs I cannot

be healthy sucking down those aluminium fumes all day and from here we descend into the Alleyways to jav's neighborhood and we're surrounded by people collecting water from communal caps outside their homes [Music] most guys will shower outside but girls inside of course they sort of public bathroom you pay per use cuz again there's no running water most of the day inside and the water pipes just run Street side along the outside of the houses they're only on for a couple of hours a day anyway but yeah no real climbing here so residents must plan their

entire days around the time when they can fill up large containers you'll see large drums and buckets outside just about every home storing this limited Supply the lack of indoor plumbing means that many daily activities happen outside in public view in the morning ladies are often doing the dishes men are outside bathing in these parts privacy I guess it's kind of a luxury is it like that everywhere in RVE yes they always just have water 6:30 to 9:30 wow and it's always outside the road like this yes the main business we see is clearly the

Garment industry it's everywhere endless lines of workers carrying bundles of clothes and fabric up and down treacherously steep staircases it literally has a rope on it so that you're able to hold on to something as you ascend so coming down with um I don't know 20 kilos of fabric on your back not the easiest I imagine Japanese brother runs one of these operations a sewing gig out of what looks like a tin can but step inside and Bam there's a mini sweat shop pumping out large quantities of clothes how long has your brother had this

Factory 10 years 10 years 10 m there's not even an inch of space wasted in these locations this room these two rooms really are part of Jan's brother's [Music] Factory so it starts here Fabric and then they cut it into pieces and then they Stitch it all together yes and then the final step is the press and that's it close close and this shirt you're wearing this was made by your brother yes the room scw the back there is rented out to another Factory they're making iPad covers and it is hot as hell in this

shared building pretty incredible place to have small sheets of polyone insulation underneath asbestos Roofing a small bathroom in the corner it's just incredible just how much stuff getting manufactured made in these just every single building every inch of it is used to produce something and as we walk around this garment district I realize it's not just about sewing the entire manufacturing chain happens here in this slum let this guy come past he Alleyway is just I mean there's so much there's so much Manufacturing in here that it's just you got to dodge out of the

way they're moving raw materials in shipping finished goods out it's just an incredible Labyrinth of manufacturing just tiny little manufacturing Street eateries an endless seemingly endler suburb thread is woven into fabric it's embroidered spun into lace dyed in the very same Alleyways patterns are cut in crammed rooms sewn ironed and boxed for distribution so guys below is sort of like where all of the dying is done and so up top here is where the workers are sleeping and where they have have all of the already dyed lace that is getting dried out it's not all

lace I do see some other bits but you know it's sort of like a smaller Sub Factory smaller sub perhaps subcontracted Factory that is used to dye certain individual components for the larger manufacturing process of garments here the real power of drave is that nothing is getting outsourced good start out here in their rarest of material forms and they come out complete packaged [Music] products this is a toothbrush yeah a toothbrush actual natural toothbrush really and Americans are buying this now they are coming to this have you used this before no no all right guys

so this is like a traditional toothbrush maybe I'd like to try it how do I do it like this I do it I need a demonstration somebody help so you just kind of chew it and work your way along that is kind of strong really bitter insanely better actually so I think basically what happens you chew this end until you kind of get those almost bristle like things and then you can kind of work your I down the front I've got to admit I'm not very good at it mine one is still very Barky as

you would imagine from just trimming off a branch of a tree like this and uh yeah I think there's a reason we moved on to brushes but this is probably very functional interesting that it's still Sal here I'm told that it's very good for [Music] you really when they say City within a city it is true within the rahave there's absolutely everything it's sort of a self sustaining City with its own giant economy [Music] hello everything is here and we happen upon a leather tanning district one of the areas where they make leather essentially from

scratch just goat skins and within just ravve you get the entire finished product belts including the buckles which are made here bags leather jackets you name it it starts out with animal skins due to religious reasons the city of Mumbai consumes a monstrous amount of goat and the leather industry in drave is huge we step into a three story home and the moment we walk in the air is thick with humidity and it just cannot be good for you I can tell you right now just breathing these things in you just get that g visceral

reaction I do not think it's in my head you can taste it in the air in the corner a massive wooden drum spins filled with raw hides soaked in chemicals designed to remove hair and preserve the Leather So it starts out being loaded into this drum with a large amount of chemical the chemicals both help remove the fur and preserve the skin so that it does not go off it stays in here for hours and hours and then it's just left in the bottom of this Factory floor Factory is kind of a stretch but you

get what I mean to just soak in amongst God knows how toxic these chemicals are the entire floor is soaked with these substances piles of soaked goat hides are everywhere and they hang from the ceiling also it is an almost dystopian scene just two workers processed all these hides one man is continually running them through a large press squeezing out the water one by one while an old grandmother racks them up and collects them ready to drive we're heading back up I'm telling you it is a multi-level dystopian esque manufacturing City we head upstairs to

the third floor which gets a bit of air flow and I guess because of this is used to dye and color the height this is where it gets its color listen to music two workers paint them one by one the smell of leather paint hits hard and as you can see behind me everything is hung in this room to dry out row upon rows of painted hides dry in the cramped room above us pretty incredible this entire Factory right now seems to be run by just four people one guy doing the initial preservation hair removal

process with a grandma and these two gentlemen up here just doing the painting yeah the volume here is wild just thousands and thousands and thousands of brown goat skins I kind of feel bad for the goats in India they sort of didn't get the free religious pass that many of the animals do here you know it's like goats and chickens maybe sheep we get a kind of a raw deal if you ask me sorry buddy we're going to be making some belts out of you [Music] today we're on our way to one more somewhere I

have heard the entire economy revolves around recycling plastic it's where old goods are given a new life dumps near this area handle an unbelievable volume of waste [Music] but the real value lies in how they process it intensive disaggregation and segregation are key to squeezing out value from trash and here they are the masters of it and as you see there are a lot of people who are working here and they've been working with us for more than 10 years now so how many tons of of trash comes here our expected amount is 2.5 tons

per day per day day wow it starts at the dump where workers of various organizations sought through a mountain of Refuge cardboard plastic aluminum everything's got a place everything's got some kind of value once sorted into a rough category it heads off to the next stage of recycling another location within the slum here we have a sort of sub segregation there's large large bags of waste plastic these guys are both separating them out into their individual kinds and then breaking them down into smaller tunks that can be fed into recycling machines and once everything has

sort of been broken down into smaller multiple pieces of plastic we end up through a doorway like this a stack of unsorted plastic might have little use or value but once it's been broken down it can be resold and used for much more the more precise the Sorting the higher the price pretty cool right and so we follow the segregated plastic to a recycling Alleyway where it arrives by the truckload so back in these Alleyways on the inside of the dump we have sort of the all sorted processed large bags just huge bags of all

of the various types of waste that can be recycled and that's a business every bag is weighed and accounted for like it's solid gold it's carried through this Maze of recycling factories and storage rooms obviously you can't weigh that much cuz it's loose plastic the size is Giant and there's just one guy carrying the entire lot on his head back and forth through these Alleyways kind of nuts I don't even know how it doesn't get stuff and then the transformation begins slum businesses buy this trash in huge quantities color sorting starts next long assembly lines

of workers tirelessly organize the plastic by color at least roughly they feel crate after crate we got whites clears Reds greens pinks Blues I don't know where it goes there and once sorted it is once again packaged into a massive canvas bag and warehoused ready for the chipping the main event and final step [Music] they're turning chunks of plastic into tiny relatively uniform pieces ready to be melted down and remolded into whatever product the buyer wishes and it looks dangerous as hell I wish somebody would invest in a pusher for that guy cuz it's just

a matter of time till he loses that arm that was giving me the freak out it is loud hot but God damn it if it isn't relatively efficient [Music] it's kind of crazy it's almost like a two level Thum there's so much traffic going through this area that they have a raised walkway and then below us just a slum Community delving deeper into the endless Alleyways we come across what is clearly the pottery District it is just thick with smoke these huge kills just in amongst the Alleyways ladies carrying everything on their heads each household

seems to have their own family working on large large amounts of clay it is pretty incredible that you can sort of break up this slum into manufacturing sectors and there's nothing that they don't seem to be able to make here inside one family's home I watch Potters work like they're on autopilot turning out pieces at a lightning speed they build sort of like a giant pyramid of Clay on top of the wheel and they're able to make 15 20 glasses from that one block of clay they just level it down cut it off with a

piece of string Next Glass Next Glass next class before you know it your entire room is filled with these drying chai [Music] glasses I had enough watching this gentleman has been kind enough to volunteer to try and teach me how to make one of these small chai glasses there's no way I'm going to be able to do this but never going to get another opportunity to do this right let's try here we go guys I have a giant pyramid of clay in front of me it seems to be sectioned off although that could have just

been his fingers who knows all right a little bit of water and then push down here all right as you can see there's a little bit of a language barrier I'm pushing down I'm definitely going to screw this up I'm going wide all right now we're going to sort of like separate out the base he wants Hands On Top we're sort of just forming a wide wedge oh no I'm losing symmetry I can feel it oh no all right one failed time for number two turns out index finger inside not thumb like I was doing

and I'm going to be more careful with the base this time we're really getting a really wide flare on this thing oh and then we're going to break it off all right he's got got a piece of string all right I'm going to call that a win well I think I got fingerprints all over that thing all it looks nothing like the rest of the CH glasses that are around here but I'm calling that a w successfully made my first piece of pottery are we're going to try it oh my God I think I did

do that once in Kinder Garden but it's fun to try again all right thank you very much thank you let's just say I'll be sticking to making these kind of YouTube videos the pots are turned dried for a day or so then loaded into the large Square KS the ks have no chimney or stack on top instead the air is held in by thick layers of felt intakes are right at the bottom of these walls these these are the Kil that sit directly behind the shop this is where everything is fired so I think what

I've gathered from this guy is that the fuel is actually just sort of like a saw dust they just pack this entire thing with powder and allow it to smolder all day there's obviously not all that much oxygen that's way making its way in and it seems to me that these kils running endlessly continually envelop this entire District in a thick Haze or fog and the scent of wet Smoky clay guys this is first class very very different from the kind of first class I'm used to our final stop though is a whirlwind tour of

Dobby gats the laundry slum I literally forgot to do my laundry coming in here to Mumbai and luckily we found this entire community that survives on a sort of communal laundry business let's check it [Music] out here rows of concrete washing basins ly in the fronts of each home each is equipped with a beading Stone used to pound dirt from stubborn Fabrics so first scrubbing it through with the bleed the soap pounding the living hell out of it and then we move on to the fresh water to sort of wash it out doesn't look all

that fresh at this point to me but hey that's how it goes down it's a labor intensive process it speaks to the hard work and determination of these residents we pass by ironing stations where workers are not only pressing clothes but also live one small storage box below they then eat and sleep on the ironing boards when they're not at work so guys 4:00 a.m. start 1 hour break per day right now it's lunchtime so these guys are getting the rest that they get today nearby large boiling drums sterilize medical scrubs why do they want

their clothes hand washed like this yeah hand wash look better it's better better is a wash clothes okay washing clothes R cloes it's going to be cleaner Yeah clean machines are used here but only for processing freshly manufactured clothes during their first wash or softening cycle how does this work is it all one business or is each individual family one business one family one customer I see uniquely they use open top large spinning dryers to get a lot of the water out before they are hung to dry that's the majority of the work then hanging

it is just to get it that really really buttery dry buttery dry right you know what I mean right so one thing that is pretty interesting is just all of the hanging is done by Twisted rope there are no pegs or anything like that Twisted really tight they just thread in two corners of the clothes hang it nice and wide looks like it works perfectly how much money do you think each family makes per month every day wor 300 R 18,000 1 is a difference clo hi guys I've been told we can climb up to

the second level of this thing one strange thing is just how much of a maze this laundry slum is and so we're going to slide on up and see if we can get to the very very top level here it is kind of odd because these are like people's houses that you're just sort of walking right past people sleeping and this is like where you really capture the insane contrast of this place just this slum in among skyscrapers will this continue is the government going to shut down this place yeah the government is help they

help it help it's water supply so they're happy for this place to exist happy happy the government is happy they support it people support man the kind of like the odest thing about this place is just how weirdly beautiful it is it's such a crazy Community I've never seen anything quite like this that just this whole bunch of families can Network together build like a reputation for this District this little corner in between skyscrapers malls it's just like a living breathing Factory absolutely wild and as we navigate this Labyrinth of St staircases and clothes lines

and washing stations finally a thunderstorm breaks and in seconds the entire slum Springs into action whisks away the laundry and the entire Place packs up all right guys it is monsoon season here in Mumbai and the storm is rolling in so I think we are done with this laundry slum T you got to keep those clothes dry right let's get out of here guys that is it for Harvey but if you enjoyed this video you should check out my video on Happyland manila's biggest slum where they even recycle the food check it out