Mumbai, June 21, 2020: The federal Health Ministry on June 21 said the Maharashtra government and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) have succeeded in bringing down the Covid-19 spread in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slums.

“They have actively ‘chased the virus’ and aggressively conducted targeted tracing of suspects,” the ministry said.

In a release, the Ministry said being densely populated (227,136 persons/sq. km), Dharavi had 491 cases in April 2020 with a 12 percent growth rate and a case doubling period of 18 days.

“The proactive measures adopted by the BMC have reduced the growth rate to 4.3 percent in May and further to 1.02 percent in June. These measures also ensured an improved case doubling time to 43 days in May and 78 days in June.”

It said several challenges presented themselves to the BMC where 80 percent population depends on community toilets and about 8-10 people live in households/hutments which measure about 10ft x 10ft coupled with narrow lanes with 2-3 storied houses where often the ground floor is a house and the other floors are used as factories.

Hence, there are severe limitations of physical distancing with no possibility of effective ‘Home Quarantine’.

“The BMC adopted a model of actively following four T’s – Tracing, Tracking, Testing and Treating. A salient feature of its response strategy is strict enforcement of containment measures with three primary components — an effective containment strategy, conducting comprehensive testing and ensuring uninterrupted supply of goods and essential supplies to the community.

Also only critical patients were moved outside Dharavi for admission to hospitals; 90 percent of the patients were treated inside Dharavi itself, said the Ministry.

Dharavi slums area spread over 2.1 square kilometers with 1 million people. Dharavi is one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

The Dharavi slum was founded in 1884 during the British colonial era, and grew in part because of an expulsion of factories and residents from the peninsular city center by the colonial government and from the migration of poor rural Indians into urban Mumbai.

Dharavi is currently a highly diverse settlement religiously and ethnically.

Dharavi has an active informal economy in which numerous household enterprises employ many of the slum residents—leather, textiles and pottery products are among the goods made inside Dharavi. The total annual turnover has been estimated at over US$1 billion.[6]

It has suffered from many epidemics and other disasters, including a widespread plague in 1896 which killed over half of the population of Mumbai. Although large sums of money have been borrowed by the Indian government in the guise of improving sanitation in Dharavi, none of these have materialized into any development on the ground.

Source: The Hindu