One sunny morning this past December, I met Christopher Way at Leopold's Café, a popular backpackers' hangout in Mumbai's bustling Colaba district. At 31, he is boyish and bespectacled, with a thatch of tousled brown hair and a thoughtful, unassuming manner. Over glasses of freshly squeezed mango juice, he told me that he grew up near Birmingham, England, and after graduation from Birmingham University, set off on a path to become a chartered accountant. But Way was afflicted with chronic wanderlust. In 2002, he visited Mumbai and liked the city so much that he stayed five months, volunteering as an English teacher and cricket coach in a local elementary school. He subsequently took an extended holiday in Rio, where he signed up for one of the favela tours. Although frustrated by the guide's lack of knowledge about the shantytown, Way says he found the experience fascinating. It occurred to him that he might be able to do something similar in Mumbai.
As many as half of that city's 18 million or so residents live in squatter settlements, so there was no shortage of potential venues. But Dharavi, as the largest and most established of Mumbai's slums, was the obvious choice. Way's idea was to showcase the settlement's economic underpinnings in a way that would challenge stereotypes about the poor. "We're trying to dispel the myth that people there sit around doing nothing, that they're criminals," he said after we had walked across the street to his office, a grubby, windowless space barely big enough for his desk and laptop computer. "We show it for what it is—a place where people are working hard, struggling to make a living and doing it in an honest way."
To smooth things out with local bureaucrats and Dharavi residents, Way needed an Indian partner, and he found one in Poojari, now 26, a farmer's son who had migrated to Mumbai as an unaccompanied 12 year old and put himself through night school by working in an office cafeteria. The two men formed a company, Reality Tours & Travel, and bought a pair of air-conditioned SUVs. Way bankrolled the venture with income from rental properties he owns in England. Besides the Dharavi tours—which can be combined with visits to Mumbai's red-light district and Dhobi Ghat, a vast open-air laundry—the company offers sightseeing of a more conventional nature, along with hotel bookings and airport transportation. Way has pledged that once the company starts making a profit, it will donate 80 percent of its slum-tour earnings to a charitable group that works in Dharavi. "I didn't want to make money from the slum tours," he says. "It wouldn't have felt right."
Except on its Web site (realitytoursandtravel.com) and a sign on a lamppost near Leopold's Café—"See Dharavi (the biggest slum in Asia)"—the company does not advertise the slum excursions. But as word has spread over the Internet and by other means, business has grown steadily, drawing visitors from around the world.
