STREET WISE
Step this way for the slum tour
It looks like India can add another product to its multifaceted tourism portfolio. Tours roaming around the streets of Delhi to experience the life of the poor - especially underprivileged children.
The tours, aimed at helping people understand their plight and how they make ends meet, have been gaining in popularity over the last few months. This is according to eTurboNews, a Web-based tourism news agency. Some call it "slum tours", others "poorism". Whatever the term used, this new form of tourism is taking off. In Delhi, former street dwellers take tourists from the New Delhi Railway Station platform through makeshift homes under footbridges to explain how slum children live, what they do for a living and where they sleep. The tour is priced at US$4.50 (Bt173) a ticket and lasts more than two hours. The organisers claim that the tours are not undertaken to showcase poverty, but sensitise tourists and create awareness about the slum way of life. The project doesn't win support from everyone. Anti-poverty activists liken the tours to grandstanding celebrity trips that end with posing for photographs with poor children. Still, India should be lauded for its strength to expose something that is considered shameful to the tourism industry. The common wisdom is that to draw tourists, we need to promote only nice things like the beautiful beaches of Thailand or the mountains of Bhutan. While Thailand has promoted home-stay tourism - where tourists are drawn to experience community life by staying in a village - what they see is not always genuine. Some households that welcome tourists have demolished outhouses and installed sit-down toilets. Be that as it may, we should try promoting our slums as well, which we have always shied from admitting exist. Slum tours would take time to win praise from global travellers. At first, benefits might be nil. But soon after travellers bring their photos home, their friends would see slices of real life, which might inspire them to do something good for the poor part of the world. Meanwhile, the locals would acknowledge the slums they have always neglected. Two thumbs up for the Salam Balak Trust, a non-governmental organisation in Delhi, that came up with the brilliant idea that more than beauty can be used to draw tourists.
achara_d@nationgroup.com
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