ABSTRACT

The Indian coastal city of Mumbai, formerly Bombay, is home to India’s vibrant film industry (“Bollywood”) and probably boasts more cell phones per capita than any other city on the subcontinent. But it is also home to one of Asia’s largest slums. Half of Mumbai’s population lacks running water or electricity, and the smoke from hundreds of thousands of open cooking fires joins with the sooty smoke from twostroke auto rickshaws, belching taxis, diesel buses, and coal-fired

C H A P T E R F I V E

power plants in a symphony of air pollutants. Breathing Mumbai’s inversion-trapped air, they say, is the equivalent of smoking twenty cigarettes a day.