Coronavirus in Asia’s biggest slum
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In one of the most densely populated areas in the world, the residents of Mumbai’s Dharavi slums have little recourse to practice the social distancing required to avoid coronavirus, as we hear from many residents of Dharavi in their own words, and from Vinod Shetty who runs Acord, a local aid agency. Meanwhile, many people around India are falling through the cracks in the government’s promised food scheme, as Radhika Kapoor from the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations explains. And India’s problems might be yours too. Stefan Vogel, international food strategist at Rabobank, describes how the coronavirus hit to India affects global agricultural supply chains. Producer: Frey Lindsay. (Picture: People carrying out food items in Dharavi slum in Mumbai, India. Photo credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, the biggest slum in Asia, |
| 0:08.4 | facing a double threat, coronavirus and hunger. Most people here are daily wage workers having |
| 0:15.4 | hand-to-mouth existence. For now, we will support staying in our houses, but we can't eat unless we earn. |
| 0:22.8 | If we die off starvation, what's the point? |
| 0:25.7 | The lockdown in India is the government keeping its promise to keep the nation fed. |
| 0:31.1 | There are a lot of people who are not covered by the national food scheme. |
| 0:35.0 | So what we need is a way of making sure that, you know, |
| 0:39.3 | no one goes hungry. |
| 0:42.0 | That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:01.8 | Huge. Huge food cues, gathering in Asia's largest slum. |
| 1:13.5 | This is Daravi, an extraordinary place at the best of times, |
| 1:18.1 | close to a million souls squashed into just two square kilometres. |
| 1:22.4 | Low-rise, flimsy tenements, they pile on top of each other. |
| 1:26.4 | Two weeks after the Indian government announced a 21-day lockdown, |
| 1:30.1 | thousands here are struggling to get enough food. |
| 1:44.9 | There is a lot of fear. I am tied up all the time checking people as I work as a watchman. I'm having a lot of problems getting supplies and food. That's Anil. He's a resident in his late 30s. Many inhabitants |
| 1:50.7 | like him actually have homes and families away in the countryside. They rent their dwellings |
| 1:56.6 | in this place, making repairs, pushing containers, sorting and selling trash. |
| 2:01.8 | They send what little they make back home. |
| 2:04.2 | But the lockdown now means that they're trapped with no form of income. |
| 2:08.4 | Lakshmi Kamlai is a casual worker. |
| 2:11.0 | She's finding it tough. |
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