Enterprising street children are conducting tours of their home slums in New Delhi, to let visitors see how India’s poor really live
The Guardian recently published an article about slum tours in New Delhi, questioning whether it was “a worthy initiative or just an example of voyeuristic ‘poorism’”. The article, written by Amelia Gentleman, provides a detailed account of what visitors see during one of these tours and what happens to the money they generate:
For anyone weary of Mughal tombs and Lutyens architecture, a new tourist attraction is on offer for visitors to the Indian capital: a tour of the living conditions endured by the 2,000 or so street children who live in and around Delhi’s main railway stations. For two hours, tour guides, themselves former street children, show visitors what life is like for the city’s most deprived inhabitants.
The money raised (200 rupees a ticket – £2.50) goes to a well-respected local charity which tries to rehabilitate these children. The trip is designed as an awareness-raising venture and organisers deny that this is the latest manifestation of ‘poorism’ – voyeuristic tourism, where rich foreigners come and gape at the lives of impoverished inhabitants of developing countries. Bus tours of the shanty towns of Soweto or guided walks through the slums of Rio have attracted curious tourists for many years; the visit to Delhi’s railway underworld has been running for just a few months but has already proved popular with Western and Indian visitors.
There’s obviously a lot to be discussed here, but I think that tours that are organised with this educational aspect in mind and where the money made goes back into helping those affected can be a good thing. Questions of taste are secondary to people seeing for themselves how very poor people live – because I think most of us simply have no idea. It’s the sort of tour that could well cause people to be quite shaken in their own assumptions about the world and also perhaps inspire them to help more, whether contributing to a charity, doing volunteer work, writing about what they seen, or whatever. None of us can solve the world’s problems on our own, but to have a little bit of first hand insight into how people live and why they have to live like they do, seems to me a valuable experience. A slum tour probably is a bit voyeuristic, but that doesn’t negate the value of what people see during the tour to my mind. Much better that they see it than simply ignore it and remain unaware the problem even exists.
What isn’t so good is disaster tourism, like the coach loads of people being driven round the decimated suburbs of New Orleans after Katrina – I wonder how much of the money generated by that went to help the local people who lost their houses and everything else? Such tours are designed purely with a profit motive in mind. But again, it’s a question of perspective – I think it’s important people do see the damage Katrina caused for themselves, because it’s important to really bring home what happened, and to create some empathy too. The issue is the motives behind those who organise such tours.
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