International Dateline: Mumbai Slums
Mumbai Slums
Mumbai's Dharavi slum, covering 445 acres of what was once boggy marshland, is home to an estimated one million people. With open sewer drains and one toilet for every 1,500 residents, the slums are a health nightmare.
Despite the appalling conditions, Dharavi's residents are extremely hard working. They've managed to build thriving industries within the slums which now turnover about $700 million a year.
But now the government is planning a redevelopment which will flatten Dharavi and see hundreds of thousands made homeless.
"Only 57,000 families get the free housing of 225 sq. ft, but in Dharavi 200,000 families live here. All those people they have to leave from Dharavi they have to go out of Dharavi - so where will they go?" says Krishna Poojari.
According to the project's architect, Mukesh Mehta, the redevelopment plan is setting new standards.
"This is a shift in paradigm for all slum rehabilitation throughout the world. People are going to look at slum rehabilitation in a different way after Dharavi."
But for slum dwellers like Bibi Zabair, whose home is in the way of the bulldozers, the redevelopment is the stuff of nightmares.
"Worrying about this has affected my health. Three weeks ago I was so sick my family thought I would die. We will stay here until they demolish. Then were in the hands of God."
Getting Away with Murder
Video journalist Amos Roberts investigates the extraordinary case of the bloody Gujarat riots, and why the perpetrators are still free.
A few months ago, Indian news organisation Tehelka broke what should have been one of the biggest stories in the history of Indian journalism. A Tehelka journalist went undercover and secretly recorded mass murderers not just confessing, but also boasting of their crimes. Even more alarmingly, the recordings implicate high-level officials.
The crimes occurred during the 2002 riots in Gujarat, which pitted Hindu against Muslim. The riots began when 57 Hindus sitting on a train were burnt to death by a Muslim mob. Over the next three days, Hindus went on a killing spree, murdering Muslims as revenge.
“There was this pregnant woman, I slit her open, sisterf***er, showed them what’s what. What kind of revenge we can take if our people are killed.” - An example of one of the confessions to the Tehelka journalist.
Since the story aired in October last year, almost none of the perpetrators have faced trial. Victims and human rights groups claim that those who have faced trial have been given favourable treatment by police, prosecutors, even judges. In one example, an alleged perpetrator was given three judges, before he got one that allowed him to go free on bail.
“One would imagine that if one went on television and declared that one had murdered one's neighbour, that within two hours the police would be knocking on your door,” Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal tells Roberts.
“Here we're talking about mass murderers who are on camera on national television, probably for the first time in the history of the media, actually telling you how they killed, where they killed, why they killed and nothing happens,”
Now, human rights groups are demanding that the remaining trials be moved out of Gujarat, a state that leaves its Muslim population feeling persecuted and terrified.
Watch these segments online at SBS:
About International Dateline
SBS Dateline, which began in 1984, is Australia's longest-running international current affairs program. It has a well-earned reputation for authoritative and incisive reporting. Dateline has taken the traditional way of producing TV current affairs and turned it on its head. Reporters who used to travel with a cameraperson and sound recordist now travel alone and have the responsibility of both filming and reporting their stories. The reporters became video-journalists, gaining access to people and places that the conventional camera crews cannot.
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