The central government has come up with a new definition for slums. Now on, any compact housing cluster or settlement of at least 20 households with a collection of poorly-built tenements, which are mostly temporary in nature with inadequate sanitary and drinking water facilities and surrounded by unhygienic conditions, will be termed as slums.
This new definition will serve as a guideline for Slum Census 2011 and will replace the existing one used by Census of India and the states. Till now, while various states have their own definitions to identify slums, the Registrar General of India office that conducts Census identified a cluster of 60 houses as a slum, leaving out smaller ones.
The new definition is based on the recommendations of the committee of ministry of housing and urban poverty alleviation (Hupa) headed by Pranob Sen, principal advisor to the Planning Commission. Sen’s report claimed that there was no proper definition of slum in the Maharashtara Slum Areas (Improvement, Clearance and Redevelopment) Act, 1971.
“All clusters of 20-25 or more households having no roofs or non-concrete roofs, and not having any facility of drinking water, toilets or drainage would be considered as slums. Earlier, the cluster size for identification of slums was 60 households,” said Hupa minister Kumari Selja.
To prevent future indiscrepancies and have an accurate estimate, the committee has not only formulated a proper model which will include cities with less than 20,000 population as well.
Meanwhile, the committee also recalculated the slum population projections of the country given by Census 2001 based on a new model which included smaller cities having less than 20,000 population. It found that the slum population in the country has gone up by 1.78 crore over the past decade and the estimated slum population of India is 9.3 crore by 2011. And by 2017, it is expected to be 10.4 crore. In 2001, it was 7.5 crore as per revised estimates of the committee.
“The slum population calculated by Census 2001 was 5.2 crore but it was actually found to be 7.5 crore by this committee when it applied the Census’s statistical model on cities that were left out since they had less than 20,000 population. This led to an increase in the slum figures. There was a lot of under reporting of slums. But with the new calculating model we will have more accurate data,” said Selja.
Accordingly, the slum population in Maharashtra is expected to increase by 41 lakh over the past decade and reach 1.8 crore by 2011 while by 2017 this number may even cross over 2 crore. The state’s slum population in 2001 as per the revised calculations done by this committee was 1.39 crore. Maharashtra, in fact, has the highest slum population in the country having almost 20% of the total slum population based in the state.
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