Gallery: Sustainable solutions from Mumbai's streets

Food vendors, knife grinders and ear cleaners aren't simply interesting India street fixtures. They're lean business models flourishing at the street level

By Meena Kadri 1 November, 2011

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Roaming peanut and lentil sellers in Mumbai are equipped for micro-doses and single-serve portions. Goods are freshly roasted and vendors will customize orders with additional spices. Plus, it’s all wrapped up in the recycled goodness of yesterday’s news. Simplicity reigns.

Mumbai's knife sharpeners use a cycling mechanism to rotate their grinding stones. Sparks fly from their roadside perches while they keep the mega-city's blades ready to carve up local delicacies.

Chor Bazaar, Mumbai's so-called Thieves Market, is where India’s cellphones go to die. Or, more accurately, to get recycled and reincarnated.

Resource scarcity drives sustainable behaviors, in this case the recycling of wooden fruit boxes at Crawford Market. Throughout the market, various items are re-purposed to lengthen life cycles and extend value.

Mumbai's kaan-saaf wallas (ear cleaners) don brightly colored headgear, which hold fresh Q-tips and other professional apparatus. This alerts passersby to their services without the need for brash announcements -- nor an expensive uniform.

Marking of clothes at the Dhobi Ghat, Mumbai's open-air laundry, ensures that garments are returned to their rightful owners. Keeping track of the laundry is a significant procedure given that more than three quarters of a million items are washed here each day.

From cycle delivery to one-man-band traders on foot, lean business models dominate the streets of Mumbai. Locals are spoiled for convenience as merchants tend to seek them out, even down alleyways and side streets, bringing everything from vegetables to waste paper recycling to brooms to local doorsteps.

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Ingenuity rules Mumbai business, often flourishing at street level, where stretched resources fuel efficient work-arounds.

Lean street-business models frequently yield sustainable solutions based on the conservation of materials and energy.

While Mumbai's skyline rises, engines rev and technology advances -- lo-fi traders are seldom short on adaptive flair.

The old school Mumbai businesses featured here continue to thrive, while adding to the local scene.

More on CNNGo: Dhobi Ghat: Mumbai’s human washing machines

More on CNNGo: Celebrating the wallah and walli of Mumbai's streets

More on CNNGo: Video: Mumbai's master street chefs

A New Zealand-born designer and photographer with a background in cultural anthropology, Meena Kadri has spent time working in Hong Kong, teaching at India's National Institute of Design, and a stint in Europe writing for publications including Monocle magazine and the Guardian Weekly. See her work at Random Specific and her Flickr photostream Meanest Indian.

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Gallery: Sustainable solutions from Mumbai's streets

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