In Dharavi, cramped quarters and squalor make Covid fight difficult
nMUMBAI : Mumbai’s overworked public health workers have a new, daunting challenge on their hands--dharavi.
After a 56-year-old garment shop owner died of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in India’s largest slum on April 1, two teams of 50 officers and volunteers arrived in Dharavi to spread awareness of Sars-cov-2, the virus that causes the disease, and to quarantine 70 high-risk residents of the eight-building Slum Rehabilitation Authority complex in which the man stayed.
The neighbourhoods also has 91 shops, all of which have been ordered shut. The next day an additional 2,500 people were home-quarantined, and will probably be tested for the virus.
On Thursday morning, just as the two teams plus 800 more community health volunteers were getting ready for another busy day in Dharavi, a second case emerged – a municipal conservancy worker from south Mumbai who was assigned to the area tested positive for Sars-cov-2. Twenty of his friends and co-workers were quarantined.
Neither the garment shop owner nor the conservancy worker has a recent travel history, according to information released by the city’s health department.
“It is going to be an uphill task identifying asymptomatic patients in an area that has more than 850,000 people,” said Kiran Dighavkar, assistant commissioner of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation and the officer in charge of the city’s G ward, where Dharavi is situated.
It is not just about Dharavi’s population. Its inhabitants live in some of the most cramped spaces in the country.
In an area measuring 2.1 sq km, the slum has over 57,000 shanties, huts and small flats, almost all of them illegal.
Its estimated population density – 66,000 people per square kilometre – is more than double that of Mumbai (32,303 people per square kilometre), the fifth mostdensely populated city in the world, according to a United Nations Population Prospects study released in July 2019.
Mumbai is also the city worst hit by Covid-19 in India, with at least 235 people having teste positive and 17 deaths.
With private laboratories also testing for Covid-19, this number will only rise, health officials said.
Mumbai’s – and Dharavi’s – population numbers make social distancing – one of the key preventive measures recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) – almost impossible to implement.
“It is almost certain that the cases will spike in Dharavi due to overpopulation,” said Baburao Mane, a former state legislator from Dharavi. “There are, on average, 10-12 people living in thousands of 250 sq ft huts. As summer approaches and the temperature soars, it will be almost impossible to prevent homequarantined people from coming out of their cramped spaces.”
For Dharavi, BMC has put a special plan in place. It has created two teams of 25 people each that work round the clock in two shifts. These teams include a sanitary inspector, medical officers, police personnel jand community volunteers. In addition, the ward officer has on board 800 community health volunteers whose primary responsibility will be to trace vulnerable residents such as senior citizens, patients with respiratory ailments and pregnant women.
“I have sought permission to convert the Rajiv Gandhi District Sports club into a quarantine facility with 300 beds,” said Dighavkar. “Once approved, we will shift high-risk people {to the facility}.”
The primary concern of health officers is the people’s cooperation. “People in slums don’t cooperate. The family can’t confirm his activity, and we don’t know how many people he may have infected.”