A new kind of tour has emerged in India, one that allows the curious traveler to explore the slums of Mumbai or spend a night in a village with a rural family.
Known as slum tours or reality tours, these expeditions offer a chance to experience a side of India you won’t get from staying in five-star hotels and visiting sites like the Taj Mahal. It’s also a chance to see how three-quarters of India’s population lives on less than $2 a day despite their country’s spectacular rise in the world.
Reality Tours is the first company to offer this type of tour in India.
Tourism or Exploitation?
Slum tours and the like are a growing phenomenon, as well as a growing controversy. From the slums of Rio De Janeiro to garbage dumps in Mexico, some see the tours’ focus on poverty as exploitive while others welcome it as a window into an unseen world.
In India, Krishna Poojari, co-owner and director of Reality Tours, regularly escorts Westerners into Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum.
“People want to say it’s like looking at animals in a zoo,” he said. “But this is not a zoo. In a zoo, animals lay around all day. Here people are working everyday to make a living.”
Indeed, most of the more than 1.1 million people who live in Mumbai’s Dharavi are employed in cottage industries such as leather tanning, plastic recycling and baking. Most survive on less than $1 a day and 75 percent live without sanitation.
Poojari’s company also takes tourists into rural villages for overnight stays. Their stay with a local family exposes them to the difficulties of subsistence farming, India’s water shortage and an exodus of young people from rural India to the cities.
Tips for Travelers
Tourists planning to take a slum or village tour should be sensitive to local customs and sensitivities when it comes to dress, meals and money.
Women should dress modestly as they would elsewhere in India by avoiding showing legs and shoulders. Men too should avoid wearing shorts.
When sharing a meal, always use your right hand to eat and avoid touching your food with your left hand.
Poojari recommends against bringing gifts or handing out money to residents of the slum, who might come to expect that of all visitors. Reality Tours, he said, puts a share of its income back into the slum to build schools and provide teachers. Rural families who host tourists are also compensated for the meals and lodging they provide.
Find more India travel tips here.
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