T N Ninan: Boo's 'under-city'

What do we learn from Annawadi, the Mumbai slum, about the face of the Indian state that the poor see, and how the poor try to game a corrupt system?

Katherine Boo is careful not to draw general conclusions from the realities of Annawadi, the Mumbai slum about which she has written a riveting book (Behind the Beautiful Forevers). As she says in her thoughtful Author’s Note, “I don’t try to fool myself that the stories of individuals are themselves arguments. I just believe that better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives.”

Keeping that in mind, what do we learn from Annawadi about the face of the Indian state that the poor see, and how the poor try to game a corrupt system? For starters, there’s Asha, who used political influence to get herself a temp job in a municipal school, though she is only seventh class pass, and spent her class time doing Shiv Sena work, and peddling her own influence to do favours in return for a commission.

Raja had a job cleaning public toilets; he also had to falsify the time-sheets of his benefactor and other sanitation workers, so that they could take other jobs while collecting municipal pay. And when he needed a new heart valve, the doctors at the free public hospitals wanted under-the-table money; the surgeon at Sion Hospital wanted Rs 60,000, one at Cooper Hospital more. So Raja was hoping to wangle a loan at subsidised rates from the government for starting a fictitious business; a government official and a Dena Bank official who would approve the loan would take their cuts.

Meanwhile Asha, who had migrated from an impoverished Vidarbha village, saw Mumbai as a “hive of hope and ambition”. She was hoping to organise a self-help group and get cheap loans which they would lend to poorer women kept out of the collective, at high rates of interest. As Boo notes, “For the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.”

Sunil came from an orphanage run by Sister Paulette, where they got ice cream only when newspaper photographers came to visit, and where “food and clothing donated for the children got furtively resold outside the orphanage gate”. Sonu did a deal with the security guards at an Air India compound, to get privileged access to trash which could be sold to Abdul the scavenger. And Kalu would be allowed to steal trash if he told the police about local drug dealers.

Abdul, who would be tortured for a crime he did not commit, knew that “most [policemen] would gladly blow their noses in your last piece of bread”. A policeman asked his mother for Rs 5,000 to take a look at a false charge-sheet; and the Marol Municipal School charged for a fake school record, to prove he was under-age and could not be sent to jail. In the Dongri detention centre, where children were reported to be drinking water from toilets, Abdul met two seven-year-olds who had been taken from their parents and lodged in Dongri, because they had been used as child labour. As Boo notes, to be poor in Annawadi was to be guilty of one thing or another. You bought stuff from scavengers that might be stolen, you ran a business without a licence, and in any case simply living in Annawadi (on land that belonged to the Airports Authority) was illegal.

So the reality is that free schools, public hospitals, missionary orphanages, policemen, the municipality, security guards, they all exploit the poor. The poor in turn use their wits to try and survive, while the not-so-poor try to game the system and its welfare schemes. As Asha told her children, “Corruption, it’s all corruption.” So, a question at Budget time: knowing all of this, how would you design better policies and programmes?