1 Slum tourism in Mumbai: Inquisitiveness or voyeurism? Prof. Khevana Desai and Prof. Abhidha Vyas Department of Sociology, Mithibai College of Arts, Mumbai Introduction The present century is predicted to witness an unprecedented growth in tourism all over the world. “The World Tourism Organization projects 1600 million international tourist arrivals by 2020. Modern tourism industry is international in character and becoming increasingly so with rapid globalization”.(Munshi, unpublished article: 1) With increasing pressure on tourism agencies of various countries to expand its business, they are coming up with new products in the market such as dark (death) tourism, fertility tourism, space tourism, slum tourism etc. Slum tourism is a recent trend for westerners looking for a slice of life in the third world countries. The United Nations defines a slum as, “a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security” (UN, 2007). Slum tourism is defined as guided tourist tours through the poorer quarters in the cities of the global south. ‘The term ‘slumming’ originally stood for the leisure activities pursued by the upper and upper-middle classes touring through the poorer quarters of London at the end of the nineteenth-century’. (Meschkank, 2010: 47). More than one century later, slum tourism was used to designate touring practices through (black) Harlem in New York (Meschkank, op cit). With urban populations in the developing world expanding rapidly, the opportunity and demand to observe poverty firsthand have never been greater. Since its founding 16 years ago in Rio de Janiero, slum tourism has spread to seven major metropolises in four continents. The hot spots are the poorer quarters of Mexico City, Manila, Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Delhi and Mumbai. As such, slum tourism is not simply a matter of a few backpackers seeking authentic and realistic experiences, but rather denotes a profoundly organized branch of tourism that, for example in 2006 alone attracted 3,00,000 visitors in Cape Town, South Africa (Meschkank, op cit).