The housing and urban poverty alleviation ministry, headed by Kumari Selja, has re-calibrated the method of measuring slums in India and the result is startling.
According to a new report, India’s slum population has gone up by 1.78 crore in the past decade and by 2011 the total will touch 9.3 crore. The new method includes smaller cities and counts smaller clusters to get a more realistic figure.
Anyone who has lived in any Indian metro would not be surprised that the numbers finally tally with reality. Our urban growth story now has two sides to it: new middle classes that want the good things in life and growing pockets of relative poverty.
This poverty is not always seen in incomes (many slum families in Mumbai earn more than Rs10,000 a month), but in sub-human living conditions.
In cities like Mumbai — where slum dwellers are estimated to make up more than half the population — the problem is compounded by the lack of space. But the core issues are the same — a fleeing migrant rural population, lack of affordable housing for most income groups and civic infrastructure that’s near collapse.
Urban planners have a thankless task on their hands since the ministry claims that slums have been under-reported in the past.
The effort in Maharashtra — which has a slum population of 20% — has been to share the housing shortage with the private sector. This has had limited success and has instead led to the usual problems of corruption and creation of shoddy infrastructure.
As India becomes more urbanised, this problem will get compounded. We must have greater focus on making our urban centres more liveable and try to provide people that that elusive intangible called “quality of life”.
Housing, water, drainage, roads, access to schools, markets and public transport as well as open spaces are non-negotiable human needs.
Not paying heed to these needs will ensure that our slums become breeding grounds for extremism — just as our failures in rural and tribal areas have given rise to Maoism. Money, reforms and sensible urban governance are the need of the hour.
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