How India’s largest slum tackled pandemic
MUMBAI:
When Covid-19 claimed its first victim in India’s largest slum in April, many feared the disease would turn its narrow, congested streets into a graveyard, with social distancing or contact tracing all but impossible.
But three months on, Mumbai’s Dharavi offers a rare glimmer of hope with new infections shrinking, thanks to an aggressive strategy focused on “chasing the virus, instead of waiting for disaster”, said city official Kiran Dighavkar.
The slum has long been a byword for the financial capital’s bitter income disparities, with Dharavi’s estimated one million people scraping a living as factory workers or maids and chauffeurs.
With a dozen people sleeping in a single room and hundreds using the same public toilet, authorities realised early that standard practices would be of little use.
“Social distancing was never a possibility, home isolation was never an option and contact tracing was a huge problem with so many people using the same toilet,” Dighavkar said.
A plan for door-to-door screenings was abandoned after Mumbai’s heat left workers feeling suffocated under protective gear.
But with infections rising fast and fewer than 50,000 people checked for symptoms, officials needed to be quick and creative.
What they came up with was coined “Mission Dharavi”.
Each day, medical workers set up a “fever camp” in a different part of the slum, so residents could be screened for symptoms and tested for Covid-19 if needed.
Schools, wedding halls and sports complexes were repurposed as quarantine facilities.
Strict containment measures were deployed in virus hotspots home to 125,000 people, including drones to monitor movement.
Bollywood stars and tycoons paid for medical equipment as construction workers built a 200bed field hospital at breakneck speed in a park inside Dharavi.
By late June, more than half the slum’s population had been screened for symptoms and about 12,000 tested for coronavirus.
So far, Dharavi has reported just 82 deaths, a fraction of Mumbai’s more than 4,500 fatalities.
“Right now, we feel like we are on top of the situation,” Dighavkar said. “The challenge will be when factories reopen,” he said, referring to the billion-dollar leather and recycling industries run out of Dharavi’s cramped tenements.