Meet The 31-YO Student & Community Activist Helping The Needy In Asia's Largest Slum, Dharavi

Mumbai's Dharavi is known to the world as the setting of the 2008 Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire.” Set between busy train tracks and the heavily polluted Mithi River, which separates the slum from Mumbai’s modern skyscrapers, the neighbourhood is a maze of tiny alleys, each one full of scores of people, many living in tin shacks. Families or groups of migrant workers often pile into a single room. Hardly anyone has a private bathroom.

Each day the slum’s poorest — often migrant workers originally from elsewhere in the country — line the main street waiting for food handouts from Dharavi Diary and other volunteers, groups and government agencies.

For Kanase, the pandemic has highlighted how even in hardship this tightly knit community can come together to aid each other.?“I live in Dharavi and I am proud of it,” he said.