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Photo Essay: India's Real-World Slumdogs

With the nomination of Slumdog Millionaire for an Academy Award, it's easy to view Mumbai's slums as wastelands of filth and misery. But they're actually vibrant business centers filled with scrappy entrepreneurs. If some wealthy elites get their way, though, the slums' days may be numbered.

About half of Mumbai's 16 million residents live in informal settlements known as slums, the largest of which is Dharavi. Between 600,000 and 1 million people call Dharavi home, but for many, it is also their place of business, the site of approximately 15,000 cottage-industry factories powered by an unflagging entrepreneurial spirit. "You in the West so easily see the slum as a negative concept. ... But Dharavi has also been mirroring India's economic revival," one Dharavi advocate told The Guardian.

Go here for a photo essay on FP [Foreign Policy].

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