Thane: Kalwa’s 1.5 lakh slum residents fear hunger more than Covid-19

MUMBAI: The coronavirus hasn’t been the only killer in this lockdown. Another fallout of the pandemic has been starvation or the extreme lack of food, witnessed in distressful sights and reports of people in the teeming slums of Kalwa, a distant north central suburb situated between Thane and Mumbra, chafing in hunger and despair.
Overcrowding, poor sanitation, hygiene related illnesses — life was already a struggle in the labyrinthine shanties of Kalwa, long before the virus came.The slum may have escaped the brunt of any Covid-19 cases till date but more than the virus still looming large it is hunger that they fear. Without work since the lockdown, most of the residents who live a hand-to-mouth existence working in construction, cleaning and as domestic help and earn an average daily salary of Rs 140 are staring at an unsheltered future, their savings and food dwindling by the day.
Home to roughly 1,50,000 residents, old timers say that the Kalwa slum community was birthed one tiny shanty at a time over two decades across a contentious land parcel that belonged to the liquidated Mafatlal Industries. It’s boundaries grew briskly, with the illegal settlement of migrants from UP, Bihar, Bengal and Karnataka looking for work in the city, and the resettlement of slum dwellers from other parts of Mumbai, after their homes had been razed by demolition drives.
While around 40,000 travelled back to their hometown following the lockdown (number calculated by the Gabriel Project, an NGO that works with marginalised communities), two young children suffocated to death in the back of an unventilated lorry after their parents paid for them to leave Kalwa and join relatives in Uttar Pradesh. Many stayed back, too poor to afford the cost of travel and presently clinging to grassroots charities for essential food supplies as their savings ran dry and foodstock depleted.
A gaunt-looking Shivratan Gupta, 58, with a family of seven to feed including his three-year-old granddaughter, is at his wits’ end trying to navigate survival. Shivratan migrated to the city from a village in Uttar Pradesh last year to escape crippling poverty and managed to scavenge a living on local trains, selling chocolate and snacks is starving and facing eviction from his one-room shack in Kalwa. As the trains sit still, so does he. “There’s nothing worse than sitting around, unable to provide for your own family. I’m also desperate to take my family back to UP but I cannot afford the inflated fares,” he rues.
“These migrants came here to get out of extreme poverty in urban settings and now with the pandemic, they’re worse off than before they came here. Unlike Dharavi which is a hub for small scale industries, Kalwa has very little industry and production of its own. Almost every family is devastated by the reduced livelihood and many have no livelihood at all,” says Jacob Sztokman, co-founder of Gabriel Project that has been working in Kalwa for the past four years attending to health, nutritional and educational needs in the area. “Through public donations, the food packages we give are essential to prevent starvation, however, this is only a temporary solution. We are seeing families and children starving,” he adds.
Distress is not new to Jamila Bano Sheikh but the pandemic has left her miserable and struggling to make ends meet. The 30-year-old is a tough young widow and a mother of five, who has been fending the house rent, food and school fees for her children, since her husband died two years ago in an accident. Struggling with both hunger and coronavirus, Jamila says: “Everyone living in the slum still uses the same few toilets and water points. I’m unable to sleep at night, petrified of catching the virus and leaving my children orphaned on the street,” she says.
While there’s hardly any way that social distancing — crucial in the fight against the pandemic — can be a viable strategy in this dense settlement with 3x3 meter hutments, open sewage outside, and barely any sanitation and water facilities on encroached land, the Project has initiated what they call the Corona Virus Emergency Response program to educate the community on good hygiene practices, distribute soap and masks, and crowdfund resources that they need to survive.
“With the country opening up, many of Kalwa's residents are hopeful that their old jobs will be available again soon. This optimism has encouraged around 5000 to return from their hometowns, while leaving their families behind,” says a hopeful Sztokman.