Yo, are these those eco-jobs I keep hearin' 'bout?

Child labor, no safety standards, handling hazardous material, picking through garbage, cholera .... sounds t-ight:

But for a growing number of environmental campaigners Dharavi is becoming the green lung stopping Mumbai choking to death on its own waste.

All along Apna St hundreds of barefoot street children, human recycling machines, scurry back and forward, hauling bundles of waste - plastic, cardboard or glass - retrieved from Mumbai's vast municipal dumps. From every alley comes the sounds of hammering, drilling and soldering. In every shack, dark figures sit waist-deep in piles of car batteries, computer parts, fluorescent lights, ballpoint pens, plastic bags, paper and cardboard boxes and wire hangers, sorting each item for recycling.

Workshops reveal everything from aluminium smelters recycling drink cans to perspiring bare-chested men stirring huge vats of waste soap retrieved from rubbish tips and local hotels. Walking through Dharavi, home to an estimated 15,000 single-room factories, it becomes difficult to conceive of anything that is not made or recycled here.

Sign me up boy .......

Yet survival in a slum rarely means adhering to the law. Barely 10 per cent of the commercial activity here is legal. Most of the workshops are constructed illegally on government land, power is routinely stolen and commercial licences are rarely sought. There is just one lavatory for every 1,500 residents, not a single public hospital, and only a dozen municipal schools. Throughout the slum filthy chicken and mutton stalls dispose bloody viscera into open drains thick with untreated human and industrial waste - cholera, typhoid and malaria are common. Taps run dry most of the time and tankers bring in potable water once in a fortnight.

Notttt