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Caption: DIRTY LAUNDRY Mumbai is home to the world's biggest unmechanised laundry, but what lies inside its vast wet walls is very far from clean
Caption: Beneath Mumbai's Mahalaxmi bridge, and spreading far and wide beyond it, lies the world's largest human-powered laundry. Known as Dhobi Ghat, it is the workplace of approximately 5000 people, from many different parts of India.
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Caption: The city's hotels, restaurants and businesses make use of the laundry, where an average of 1 million items a day are physically beaten clean.
Caption: Those who work here are impoverished, joining many others who migrate to to city filled with dreams of wealth and a better life for their families. The reality, though, is very different. Most of those who find work at Dhobi Ghat earn little more than $200 a month. They work tirelessly from 4am to 7pm every single day, and here, the concept of a weekend does not exist. This is not a job where annual leave allowances apply. Added to that, the numerous stone squares, which are filled with cloudy, filthy water, do not come for free. The washermen all pay rent, and many are victims of extortion.
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Caption: "I at least have some money for food and a roof over my head. Many others in this city don't have that" SURAJBALI KANAUGIA
washerman
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Caption: Workers stand in the water for up to 14 hours a day. Many get sick, many suffer burns and infection from the chemical cleaning products that are used.
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Caption: "It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver" MAHATMA GANDHI
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Caption: Washermen will likely be so all their lives, and it is a profession that is passed down through generations. Children as young as 10 start by folding cleaned items, graduating to washers (dhobis) in their teens. They will live and die inside Dhobi Ghat's harsh conditions. It is physically demanding work, and there is little or no relief. Home is likely the nearest slum, where as many as 15 or 20 people may live in a space that is suitable barely for one.
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Caption: The busy Mahalaxmi Station sits alongside Dhobi Ghat, adding to an already grossly polluted atmosphere.
Caption: It is not only men who work here. Women are tasked with ironing, for the most part using equipment that is heated by burning hot coals rather than more modern day electricity.
They also hang the clean items on the twisted rope lines that are strung across every available space.
While there is some electrical machinery, the bulk of the work is undertaken via the old methods that were employed in 1890, when this beast of a workplace was inaugurated.
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Caption: Meanwhile it is the men who soak the dirty laundry in suds and bleaches before beating them dry with sheer physical strength. Over and over again.
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Caption: BEYOND MUMBAI Washing in the open is a way of life in India, both in terms of clothing and oneself. In the rivers that snake through the country, people can be seen hand washing everything, from saris, to sheets, to their hair. In the cities that run along the Ganges, bathing in its holy waters is considered purifying. The Ganges, Hindus believe, absorbs and cleanses impurities of one's spirit.
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Caption: "An actress once told me - make sure you do your own laundry. It will keep you honest" CATE BLANCHETT
actress
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Caption: FOLLOW ON INSTAGRAM @foraggiophotographic
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