Episode 1 Welcome to India

Don't you think it's astounding that our planet

supports seven billion of us...

BABIES' CRIES

..and counting?

Learning to survive in a crowded world is our biggest challenge.

But there's one corner where we're already well on our way to adapting.

Welcome to India.

Over one in six in the world live here,

and to make ends meet,

more of us are moving to the city than anywhere else on Earth.

TRANSLATION:

We're resourceful

and highly resilient.

It's just as well.

We need all our ingenuity to create a space we can call home.

If you want to know how to succeed in this new, unchecked urban world,

come and take a look over here.

Who DOESN'T like gold?

We'll show you how, no matter how dense the crowd,

we can carve out a home and build our future.

This programme contains some strong language.

Come and meet a 23-year-old guy

who's come to the megacity of Kolkata, looking to make it big.

Imran is known to everyone as Kaale and lives in this crumbling house

in the heart of the city's jewellery-making district.

Kaale has come here in search of gold, and he's not the only one.

This old district is crammed with over 800 workshops,

where goldsmiths create the original Indian bling.

Gold jewellery has long been the must-have adornment for Indian women,

and doubles up as an instant emergency fund.

It's our insurance policy, but far better to look at.

If you add it all together,

Indian housewives hold 11% of the globe's gold stocks.

That's more than the reserves of the US, Germany, Switzerland

and the IMF put together.

With night-time temperatures regularly over 30 degrees C,

Kaale and his friends prefer the street to their stifling room.

He and his closest colleagues get up at three to work,

while the city briefly sleeps.

Kaale and his fellow gold sweepers have an agreement,

allocating them a couple of streets each to scour for particles of gold.

The first step after sweeping

is this traditional gold-rush technique.

The most closely-guarded part of Kaale's alchemy

is carried out on the roof above his room.

Now, if you want know how to make gold out of dirt, listen up.

Take one bowl of sweepings,

reduce to a fine silt by panning...

..add a good slug of nitric acid,

before putting on the heat for just a few seconds.

Next, give the acid and mercury a thorough mix with your hand.

Once the mercury has attracted all the gold, remove it from the pan...

..and return to the heat to boil off the mercury.

Kaale's room is controlled by one man, Naukada.

He's recruited the panners for their specialist skills,

learnt in their home city of Agra, 700 miles away.

Kaale's not the only panner frustrated with the price he's getting for his gold.

Many of the panners are resigned to their position under Naukada,

but Kaale has bigger ambitions.

With 1.2 billion of us here,

all looking to make the best possible livelihood,

you've got to be very canny

at finding your niche ahead of anyone else,

and that can mean looking in the most unlikely of places.

Take Versova beach, on the northern edge of Mumbai.

This barren strip of sand hardly suggests big opportunity,

but 50 years ago, new arrivals from Rajasthan

made a surprising discovery.

Anil's grandfather realised that fresh water on a beach

made it perfect for growing the desert crops from back home.

The sand-loving, bittersweet vegetable fenugreek,

known as methi, immediately flourished,

growing its tasty sprouts in just three days.

A solid family business was born.

Today, there are 32 methi farmers here,

many with four or five employees,

and they've been granted a licence to cultivate this municipal beach.

Others have followed, providing services to the growing community.

But the houses these recent arrivals have built on the sand are illegal.

Father to one of the 40 families calling the beach their home

is Rajesh.

He came here after falling for his wife Sevita.

4-year-old Vaishnavi has an 8-year-old brother, Harsh.

They've both been brought up on the beach,

unlike their father, who grew up in his well-to-do parents' apartment.

But then he fell in love.

Sevita is from a poor family and has a limp from childhood polio.

This was so unacceptable, Rajesh's father also made sure

his son lost the job he'd secured him at Mumbai airport.

Rajesh now works from home,

so Sevita expects him to do his fair share of the early-morning chores.

My son is going to school now. Bye.

-Bye.

-Bye.

Sevita has a part-time job as a cleaner

for a middle-class family in the city.

But to earn a bit more on the side,

she deals in the beach's home-grown speciality.

The family's main business, however,

is doubling up their home as a local pub for the methi farmers.

The only drink on offer is cane liquor.

Rajesh doesn't have a liquor licence

and his illegal business has landed him in jail once already.

Too much.

Rajesh has few other options,

and so reckons the risk is one worth taking.

Besides, right now he has more immediate worries.

There's a rumour that the local council - the BMC -

are preparing for one of their periodic evictions

of the families squatting on the beach.

We're certainly hard-working,

but having our heads down doesn't mean we're cut off.

Keeping our eyes open to the world around us

might just give us that all-important edge.

In the jewellery district, the gold sweepers take a close interest

in the global spot price of gold.

A shift in value has a direct impact on their earnings,

though not in the way you might expect.

With the price of gold at an all-time high,

and fewer customers for jewellery,

there's far less gold dust on the streets.

For Kaale, this means his dream of escaping the landlord's cramped dormitory

and setting up on his own has got harder still.

But he has an idea, and is up earlier than ever.

He plans to bypass his landlord by dealing in a different kind of dirt.

The gold dust washed off the goldsmiths' bodies,

and swept from their floors,

eventually ends up with all the other muck - in the drains.

Working flat out for 20 minutes,

Kaale dredges enough sludge to fill six bags.

They dredge three more drains

before Kaale and his friends call it a night.

To shift the night's haul,

Kaale makes a call to one of the large-scale refiners.

Kaale's plan to cut out his landlord in the house seems set.

At last, the buyer, Javed, does turn up,

but he's playing it very cool.

JAVED:

Once Javed's happy there's gold in the mud, negotiations can begin.

If we've got a good business idea, we're not the type of people

to let paperwork and the law get in the way.

Over 90% of our working population earn their money off the books,

generating two thirds of our GDP.

Ironically, that includes selling knocked-off books,

something the entrepreneurs where YOU come from might not be so happy about.

Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs,

and Deepak Chopra, Life After Death.

Meet Salman, who earns his living selling the books to Mumbai commuters.

Salman works the prime retail space of this busy junction

with a bunch of friends, who have a strict profit-sharing agreement.

Salman started out selling newspapers on the streets when he was nine,

before spotting there were better returns in paperbacks

turned out by the city's top backstreet press.

Hi, sir. Novels?

Black marketeers like Salman and the gang are easy targets.

Salman's friend Ajay ended up here

after an accident with a haymaking machine back in his village.

Ajay consistently tops the cooperative's sales rankings,

guaranteeing his popularity.

Salman and some of his family currently sleep

in a municipal gardens next to the junction.

PHONE RINGS

While Salman mainly sleeps out, close to his work,

his mum lives at home, just outside the city.

Like mums everywhere, she worries for him and his future.

CHILD: Good night!

Let me take you to a secret place across the mighty Ganges.

On this abandoned riverbank,

hundreds work in an underground, yet highly organised industry.

Welcome to Kolkata's very own gold rush.

This is where Javed's brought the drain sludge

that he purchased from Kaale in the jewellery district.

He and his family are major players around these parts.

Javed's hopes of transforming the sludge into cold, hard cash

relies on the skill of his 20 employees.

Before the gold can be extracted, the sludge must be prepared.

The sieving is supervised by Javed's father Abdul,

head of the family firm.

The only mechanised phase of the process follows.

See? This is very good, fine powder.

The finely-ground mud is ready for Javed's casino.

This labour-intensive wooden sluice technology

is straight from 19th-century California,

using water hauled by hand from the Ganges.

When conjuring gold from mud, there's no beating the human touch.

A vigorous brushing

dislodges the precious sediment from the grooves in the wood.

Air is blasted into the charcoal-fired crucible

to force up the temperature and drive off any impurities.

The solidified ranga bowls are then heated to an even higher temperature

in a handmade oven for several hours, to burn off the mercury.

A small disc of alloyed silver and gold is all that's left.

Javed's brother Nabil refines it piece by piece, using nitric acid.

A final smelting produces, at long last,

pure 24-carat gold.

Earning cash is always the top priority,

but making a home is also crucial.

It provides the stability we hope will nurture

the success and wealth of the next generation.

On the beach in Mumbai,

today is Rajesh and Sevita's wedding anniversary.

It's nine years since they moved here,

after their controversial love marriage,

and even though money is tight,

Rajesh is determined to buy Sevita a present.

Splashing out on a new sari means that Rajesh needs more credit

to restock his pub.

He drops a call to his local money lender,

who he already owes a substantial sum.

The money lender relents and lets Rajesh extend his loan.

Failing to keep up his repayments now would have serious consequences.

Rajesh now desperately needs to get the pub back up and running

and stimulate some cash flow.

Once dusk falls,

he can safely make his rendezvous with his illicit liquor supplier.

Word has already got out

that the best-value bar on the beach is back in business.

Rajesh's strategy is to corner the no-frills end of the market.

With the customers having drunk their pockets dry,

Rajesh calls time at the bar,

so he can present Sevita with her surprise.

-CHILD:

-# Happy birthday to you Dear mummy, dear papa! #

But such harmony on the beach could be short-lived.

The residents of new luxury apartments

want squatters like Rajesh moved on,

and they're not alone.

Methi farmer Anil's family

built illegally themselves when they first arrived,

but they've since been given the right to remain,

and the growing competition over space explains their antipathy towards newer arrivals.

Kaale is still in the room he shares with 15 other gold sweepers,

all under the control of their landlord.

But he's just heard about a room that's come available nearby.

Perhaps this is the moment he's been waiting for to make his escape.

2,000 rupees a month isn't unreasonable,

but on top of food and other outgoings,

it's well out of Kaale's reach.

Somehow, he needs to radically improve the returns

for his drain sludge.

Down at the sludge refinery by the Ganges,

the workers turn up at first light...

..while their boss Javed can enjoy a more leisurely approach.

First things first -

breakfast.

Kaale has come down to the refinery

with fresh determination after seeing the room.

He's realised that, as a newcomer to the drain sludge business,

he must play tough if he's ever going to be paid a fair amount.

There's a mounting panic among residents of the beach in Mumbai.

There's word that the council are serious about their eviction threat

and are sending over the bulldozers.

But Rajesh has seen it all before.

Faced with the risk of losing everything,

most people aren't taking any chances.

One of the council's security guards is an old customer,

with no qualms over ordering a drink from the illegal pub.

He's not convinced by Rajesh's preparation

and tips him off that this time the eviction IS for real.

Rajesh has an added problem.

If the cops find his booze during the eviction,

he would quickly end up back in prison.

Luckily for the future of the family's home and possessions,

Sevita's rushed back from her job in time to help.

Unlike Rajesh's upbringing in a middle-class apartment,

Sevita grew up in illegal settlements.

The money lender approaches on his daily round.

In just two hours,

the houses of 40 families have been reduced to a jumbled mess.

Kaale, in the jewellery district,

is again using the brief hours of quiet in the middle of the night.

He's confident he's found a buyer

who will pay properly for the sludge.

Kaale has a new plan to strengthen his bartering position.

Instead of letting the buyer come to him,

he'll take the sludge to the buyer's own turf.

The race across town has paid off.

The new buyer, Akbar, is still present.

But will he offer more than the 5,000 rupees Javed paid

for this similar amount of sludge?

On the beach, everyone is busy rebuilding their homes

in the exact same position as before yesterday's demolition.

The cops didn't find Rajesh's booze,

and his dismantled house survived unscathed.

Rajesh himself has been off helping some friends,

leaving Sevita to reconstruct their home alone.

But there's a priority neither can afford to ignore.

Before the walls are even on, the pub is back up and running,

providing the income so crucial for servicing their debt.

Now Kaale's getting a better price for his drain sludge,

renting a room may be within reach.

He's taking his dredging friends along for a second viewing

of the place offered at 2,000 rupees a month.

And on the beach, there's a new contentment, too.

The BMC like to flex their muscles occasionally,

but attention has now moved on.

For Rajesh and Sevita, life on the beach is never going to be easy.

But, as adaptable, resourceful survivors,

they will always be able to provide a home for their family,

and with that comes hope for a better future.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd