Bainganwadi Slums is an old slum which has gone through the test of times.
One cannot exactly say how, when and which year the slum came into existence, but surely it started with very few hundreds of persons who were working as laborers for construction job on the highway which was not very far from the slums. Further the slum started fuelling with individuals who were fantasized by Mumbai and came here to work from different parts of India. They were attracted by Mumbai, called as the city where no one sleeps, a city of miracles where beggars and illiterates have turned their fortunes into becoming multi millionaires.
However their fortunes made them lose whatever they had in their villages and small towns; they even could not get a place to sleep on the streets of Mumbai… Soon they shifted their residence to the slums of Baiganwadi where they started making illegal hutments. Most of them started earning petty incomes from rag picking from the garbage mountain, as Mumbai could not give them any employment.
This led to the development of Bainganwadi, which is now a partly legalized slum but badly struck with a cycle of diseases, specially TB, HIV-AIDS causing poverty and poverty causing diseases. Baiganwadi recently is the only place where two fresh cases of polio were detected.
Of the over 200,000 estimated population:
· Only 2% follow safe sanitation and hygienic practices.
· Only 5% drink safe water.
· Over 80% are living below poverty line.