Slums turn healthcare nightmare

We barely get enough water to cook and bathe once a day. How can we wash our hands every few hours?” asks a woman from the Ganpat Patil Nagar slum in Mumbai’s suburb of Dahisar.

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Slum lords who control the illegal sprawl along the Gorai creek ration out water to the residents for an hour every night after puncturing the municipal water line catering to the buildings nearby. Residents of the slum, including children preparing for Board exams, huddle around the pipeline to fill a few buckets which must last the entire day.

More than 40 per cent of Mumbai’s population — nearly 10 million people — lives in slums which dot the city from the posh neighbourhoods in the southern tip to the middle-class enclaves towards the north.

The hovels which pass for rooms in the city’s slums are as tiny as 100 square feet in area. Several members of the household cram into these tiny spaces every night to sleep, with men sometimes crashing out in the corridors outside.

“There are fewer people defecating outside as the government has deployed mobile toilets here,” says Akshay Shukla, an activist from the Ganpat Patil Nagar slum. “However, there are long queues of men and women every day and even if one person is afflicted by the coronavirus, it will spread quickly here,” says Shukla.

The slum clusters lack qualified doctors. People with degrees in ayurvedic medicine and work experience as intensivists in local hospitals manage clinics. In case patients require specialised care, they are referred to the already stretched public hospitals or to trust-run charitable hospitals where doctors show up on specified dates.

While the middle-class and upper-classes of the country’s financial capital smugly dip their fingers in expensive sanitisers, there is a lurking fear that they stand to be infected from street vendors, maids, drivers, sweepers, and other support staff from these slums who flit in and out of building complexes. —TNS

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