Behind the Scenes With 'GMA' in Mumbai

MUMBAI, India, March 10, 2009 — -- After a few weeks of plotting, planning, wheeling and dealing, "Good Morning America's" Mumbai special has finally gone on the air.

As a proud onetime resident of Mumbai (born and raised there back when it was still called Bombay), I was very excited to get the chance to showcase my city in all its vibrancy. And I learned a lot about Mumbai along the way. It's impossible to sum up such a complex city in a few hundred words, so, keeping in mind the interest generated in Mumbai's slums after the Oscar success of "Slumdog Millionaire," I thought I would begin there.

The largest slum in Asia, Dharavi, is located in Mumbai, and it seems to be constantly buzzing with activity. These illegal settlements are home to a massive recycling industry, and those who don't work in that sector make clay pots by hand, pappads (an Indian crisp eaten with rice and curry), and sell a range of goods from flowers to clothing to DVDs.

The government calls the settlements illegal because many of those who live there don't pay for water or electricity, often filching it from existing power lines and water supply pipes.

Dharavi's economy generates nearly $700 million annually for the half-million residents who are crammed into one square mile of space.

Despite the fact that so many of Dharavi's residents work as chauffeurs, dishwashers and maids to the city's well-heeled, Mumbai's prohibitively expensive real estate makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the slum-dwellers to conceive of living outside Dharavi.

At one apartment building in Dharavi, the head of the building, S. Packiaraj, said that few people were willing or able to trade their shantytown housing for an apartment. It's not the rent alone but the cost of water, electricity and taxes that makes the prospect of a move from an illegal settlement to a legally accepted building so daunting.

But many of Dharavi's residents do want to move out. Take 50-year-old Pushpa Parlat Lokhande, widowed at 37, and mother to three sons. Lokhande washes dishes in two houses in nearby Mumbai suburbs but said she didn't get enough work to pay to have the roof of her one-room house repaired. During every monsoon, she says, water drips into the house from above, because the roof has too many holes. The more it rains, the more water comes into the house from under the front door, making it impossible for her family to sleep on the floor. "All night, we sit on chairs and try to sleep."