Mumbai gets its first ever colourful slum; painted by the city’s residents

Mumbai is a city offering endless things for travellers to explore. There’s the sea and its beaches, the restaurants, the street food, the malls, the nightclubs, and so on and so forth. However, what if we tell you that now there’s also a slum to check out? Well, you guessed it wrong; we are not referring to the famous Dharavi slum here.

What now looks like a small section of a quaint and colourful Italian town is actually Mumbai’s Asalpha Village which has just got a colourful transformation. Wondering how? When a campaign named Chal Rang De was launched with an aim to make slums across cities colourful and vibrant, the residents of Mumbai turned up in huge numbers to participate in the initiative.

While more than 1,000 people came forward and registered for the event, 400 of them were invited to colour more than 120 walls in a period just three days from Dec 2nd to Dec 4th. All the participants were provided with paints and brushes to colour the houses in a variety of hues, including bright red, pink, and shades of yellow. The colours chosen were such because they go in tandem with the underlying objective behind this campaign, which is to turn the urban slums in India into art canvases and thus make them look beautiful.
Dedeepya Reddy, the brainchild behind the Chal Rang De initiative expressed her thoughts by saying, “A world without colours is a sad place to be in. Life can be tough and challenging. But how can I ease up things with minimum resources? What is the least I can do? And I decided to colour; colour the community, colour the hill, colour the humanity. Some would say what difference can a colour make? I believe it gives them a sense of joy, an identity and hope that things are going to be okay. Colour has the power to create change. Small changes together can make a huge impact and with that notion in mind, Chal Rang De was born."


The result of this amazing amalgam of Mumbaikars coming forward to paint the Asalpha Village was the birth of the first-ever colourful slum in the city.