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Cities
God From squalor to a brighter future?
As intense poverty, debt dependence, and helplessness force the rural poor to migrate to the booming metropolises in search of jobs and a better life, urban conglomerations continue to battle the demons of shanty towns, proliferating by the dozen. Neglected by municipal authorities and forgotten by the upwardly mobile, slums degenerate into dens of crime and destitution. The proposal to provide low-cost housing under the JNNURM has brought the appalling conditions prevailing in slums under the scanner. Roshni Sengupta investigates.
Photo: Joe Athilay
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ere, now, a slum, a neo-slum of concrete, brimming with dealer-doorways, sinister-silences, and cries of despair along its lanes and in the indecision of its crossroads”— wrote Brazilian author Paolo Lins in his 1997 masterpiece, City of God, a dogged, shocking, gut-wrenching chronicle of life and lifelessness in Cidade de Deus or City of God—Rio De Janeiro’s limitless, swarming, gangster-infested slum, which inspired the 2002 cult film by the same name. A stark, lyrical odyssey of poverty, in general, and urban poverty, in particular, City of God is a story that lurks in the slimy lanes of every other urban slum around the world. Underdogs are eventual victors, even though the ultimate victory might come in the form of a hail of bullets or the slash of a knife, is the credo that the book—and the film—raise, all the while holding a disturbing yet truthful mirror to the condition of slums in urban centres, especially in the developing countries. Like all mirrors, this one, too, reflects reality, and reality is nowhere more pronounced and
moth-eaten as that in India. Remember Dharavi (1991), Sudhir Mishra’s attempt at showcasing urban poverty and squalor in Mumbai? Mira Nair then vowed audiences worldwide with her screen adaptation of life on the streets and slums of Mumbai— Salaam Bombay (1988). Urban poverty and life in the slums of Mumbai brought British director Danny Boyle his first Oscar along with tonnes of accolades for the well-timed realism promoted on screen (Slumdog Millionaire, 2008). Somehow beginning an article on urban poverty, the deteriorating condition of the poor quarters of cities, and the initiatives taken by municipal authorities to improve the situation by invoking cinema and its many exploits seems proverbial. Perhaps, films have, over the years, provided the most thought-provoking insights into the hell that urban slums have turned into. As the quality of life plunges to the depths of depravity, the population of urban poor grows out of bounds, and urban planning experts spend sleepless nights trying to strategize as cities
grow and expand in mercurial ways, the statistics continue to disturb.
The slum story According to government records, the number of people living in slums in India has more than doubled in the past two decades. And now, not surprisingly, it exceeds the entire population of Britain. The population of slum dwellers has risen from 27.9 million in 1981 to 61.8 million in 2001, when the last census was taken—a reflection of the lopsided development boom that swept India in the past decade or so, leaving behind millions of its poorest. The Indian economy has grown by over 8% annually over the past two years, yet a quarter of its population lives on less than 50 paisa ($1) a day. As the total population increased from 683 million in 1981 to 1.03 billion in 2001, more of those stricken by poverty and helplessness poured into the cities. Mass migration was prompted by diminishing returns on agricultural produce and the relatively high returns available in return for daily wage labour Dharavi, Mumbai
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in the fast-developing urban centres. Also in evidence is the utter and complete failure of the civic authorities and the government, both current and previous, to provide affordable and suitable housing to the burgeoning population of the urban poor. India’s largest slum population lives in Mumbai—the city of dreams—with nearly 6.5 million people—at least half the city’s residents—living in makeshift shacks with open sewers running alongside. Home to Dharavi, Asia’s single largest slum (housing more than 1 million people), Mumbai, a city where one of the world’s biggest film industry thrives, is, in places more than one, nothing more than an unplanned, extended urban sprawl, with the poor occupying the lowest rung of the ladder. If the commercial capital of India leads the pack, how can the country’s political (and everything else) capital be left behind? Delhi holds the distinction of being home to India’s second largest slum population—over 1.8 million people— followed by Kolkata with over 1.5 million. The problem, hence, is an acute one. And, the solution to the problem is even more delicate. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation estimates that it will cost India `4 trillion ($49 billion) to accommodate the entire population of urban poor in 24 million dwelling units—an effort that will require the government as well as the civil society to pool in resources and strategies. The government has called on the society at large to participate in the endeavour, a call civil society activists term as a method to shirk responsibility and wilfully neglect India’s slums, while clandestinely siding with builders and real estate promoters who more often than not bribe government officials into evicting slum-dwellers from one location and planting them elsewhere, leading to the extension of the problem and not the solution. In May 2010, the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) released a report titled “Some characteristics of urban slums, 2008/09”, which stated that close to 49,000 slums continue to blight the urban landscape in India despite the increased
economic growth experienced by the country in general and the urban centres in particular. To make things worse, according to this report, 24% of these 49,000 slums are located along nullahs and drains and close to 12% along railway tracks. Further, about 50% of slums come up on public land owned mostly by local bodies and the state government. The report also provided, in detail, information on the sanitary conditions prevalent in slums across India. Even though the provision of toilet facilities had shown some improvement during 2008/09 (since 2002), a lot needs to be done. Toilets with septic tanks were available in 68% notified and 47% non-notified slums (up from 66% and 35% in 2002). The report noted that as the incumbent UPA government makes promises of a slum-free India to its constituency, about 10% of the notified and 20% of the non-notified slums has not toilet facility at all. And what is more, the report made it amply clear that the living conditions in these poor tenements were degrading and humiliating with its figures on the current situation regarding water logging, road facilities, and electricity connections. While about 48% of the slums recorded reported water logging during the monsoon season, just about 50% of the slums in India had any semblance of roads running along
Rajiv Awas Yojana The recently announced Rajiv Awas Yojana is envisaged as a magic wand solution that will solve the problem of housing for the urban poor once and for all. Approved by the Union cabinet, the plan would endeavour to build low-cost structures for close to 32 million slum dwellers in 250 cities and towns. The project will undertake the constructions through a public-private partnership (PPP) model, where the government will foot 50% of the bill and the rest will be supplemented by a mortgage fund worth $222 million, which will support the urban poor. The government would like this plan to generate enough goodwill to first, create houses for the slum dwellers, and second, to prevent the proliferation of more slums.
Photo: Andy Ash
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Photo: Andy Ash
UN Photo/Kibae Park
its length and breadth. It is, perhaps, heartening to know that only about 1% of the slums in India were not connected to the grid; however, it is worth noting that a large majority of slums are run by local, slum-grown mafia groups that extort money from the dwellers in return for favours like pilfered electricity connections. A trip through any such squalid block is enough to bring anyone face-to-face with the reality of life in these quarters of penury; anyone who’s read former Australian convict Gregory David Roberts’ magnum opus Shantaram can identify the unsanitary conditions prevailing in these alleyways of filth and garbage, where a large percentage of young children are malnourished and in need of immediate medical care. A study, published in The National Medical Journal of India, concluded that high levels of stunting (17.6%) in boys living in urban slums occurred due to lack of access to healthcare, unclean drinking water, repeated childhood infections, and undernourished mothers and their inability to breastfeed. Health check ups on 198 children, in the Rafi Nagar slum in Mumbai, conducted by Apnalaya, a community organization that has been working for betterment of slum children in Shivaji Nagar since 2005, have revealed that only 29 children were found to be of ideal weight, 23 children fell into the first
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degree of malnutrition, 54 in second degree, and 92 were found to be severely malnourished. Similarly, in April 2010, health check up of a of total 374 children revealed that only 173 children had ideal weight, 116 were in first degree of malnutrition, 66 in second degree, and 19 children were severely malnourished. Further, as per statistics obtained by Apnalaya, with each passing year, the number of child deaths have increased. Four children died in the year 2005/06, seven children died in the year 2006/07, eight in 2007/08, nine in 2008/09, and thirteen children died in the year 2009/10. While five children died in April 2010, four children died in just the first 17 days of December 2010. The impact of these conditions is exacerbated by the primitive abodes in which these children are forced to grow up. A survey conducted by the
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Bengaluru-based not-for-profit Citizens Voluntary Organization for the City (CIVIC) to study the implementation of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) in Bengaluru city, revealed that not only were the slum dwellers unaware of the rehabilitation work undertaken in their slum, they considered their current lodgings of better quality than what was being provided by the government! Similarly appalling conditions prevail in most slums, irrespective of the city in which they are located.
Out-of-the-box solutions Although pinning the blame for the sub-human conditions that millions in India are forced to live in on the government is easy enough, some ingenious minds are requisitioning the services of their grey cells to come up
What is a slum? A slum, as defined by the UN agency UN-HABITAT, is a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor, and lacking in tenure security. According to the UN, the percentage of urban dwellers living in slums decreased from 47% to 37% in the developing world between 1990 and 2005. But, due to growing population, especially urban, the number of slum dwellers is rising. One billion people worldwide live in slums and the figure is likely to grow to 2 billion by 2030. The term has traditionally referred to housing areas that were once relatively affluent, but deteriorated as the original dwellers moved on to newer and better parts of the city. Now, it has come to include the vast informal settlements found in cities in the developing world. The characteristics and politics associated with slums vary from place to place. They are usually characterized by urban decay, and high rates of poverty, illiteracy, and unemployment. They are seen as “breeding grounds” for social problems like crime, drug addiction, alcoholism, mental illness, and suicide. In many poor countries, they exhibit high rates of disease due to unsanitary living conditions, malnutrition, and lack of basic health care. But, some like Dharavi, Mumbai, are a hive of business activity, such as leather work and cottage industries. A UN Expert Group has created an operational definition of a slum as an area that combines, to various extents, the following characteristics: inadequate access to safe water; inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure; poor structural quality of housing; overcrowding; and insecure residential status. A more complete definition of these can be found in the 2003 UN report titled “Slums of the World: the face of urban poverty in the new millennium?”. The low socioeconomic status of the residents is another common characteristic given for a slum.
with solutions to the problem that are off the beaten track. Anjali Kelkar and Alex Kinnebrew from IIT-Delhi have much in common with policy-makers and urban development experts. They have been developing what they call the Urban Opportunity Project—an amalgamation of strategies and concepts for new products, services, and businesses capable of generating sustainable economic improvement in urban slums. Ambitious they are, but their ambition is based not only philanthropic solutions, but on harnessing the entrepreneurial spirit evidenced in abundance among slum dwellers, coupled with the financial support and energy of private investment. The Project takes off from the projection that the urban population living in slums is expected to increase from 33% today to 45% in 2025, worldwide, and aims to integrate improved job opportunities with improved living conditions. The Indian Alliance of SPARC (an Indian non-governmental organization, NGO), Nirman (a not-for-profit company, which acts as the financial and construction arm of SPARC), and two community-based networks (Mahila Milan and the National Slum Dwellers Federation) is a shining example of how communities have organized themselves and developed
capacity in addressing the complex issues of housing and infrastructure in slums. Over the 20 years that the Alliance has been working together, their capacity, activity, impact, and credibility has also grown. Towards the end of the 1990s, the Alliance had developed a portfolio of housing and infrastructure projects that would test or challenge existing slum development policies and practice. SPARC and Nirman have built up their own ‘bridge finance’ fund for lending to projects, but this had become insufficient given both the growing number and size of projects. Banks were often positive about the prospect of lending for such projects in the initial stages of engagement, but proved unreliable when it came to delivery. Without sufficient finance, the Alliance had to drip-feed the projects in their portfolio with finance from their own bridge funds, which prolonged
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implementation and hampered the further development of the Alliance in terms of capacity, activity, impact, and credibility. Homeless International acted upon this and, with the support of DFID, carried out a four-year research project entitled ‘Bridging the finance gap in housing and infrastructure’ that essentially examined how easy or difficult it was for communities to carry out their own habitat developments in a number of countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Homeless International and international partners used the research to examine regulatory frameworks, which affected slum upgrading, and analysed examples where communities had achieved this. This research is what led to the development of CLIFF. The Community Led Infrastructure Finance Facility (CLIFF) is distinctly different from municipal development fund mechanisms. It provides venture capital and other financial products directly to organizations of the urban poor, rather than to the government, to support community-led slum upgrading schemes conceived in partnership with
city authorities; CLIFF can only, therefore, work where poor communities have built the capacity to manage slum-upgrading initiatives. The India Population Project (8) Kolkata programme aims to address the formidable challenge of delivering cost-effective, affordable, and quality RCH interventions in the slums of Kolkata. The project was a critical part of the World Bank’s strategy of supporting human development and poverty alleviation in India, providing the opportunity to extend rapid and targeted assistance to the most vulnerable slum populations who were not adequately covered by the existing primary health care infrastructure. The objectives were to reduce fertility by improving access to demand for family planning services and improve maternal and child health by decreasing mortality rates, which were addressed by measures like recruitment of volunteers as Honorary Health Workers (HHWs). Enhancing access to RCH services was also a priority through the construction of new service outlets and
Photo: Chensiyuan
A favela is the generally used term for a shanty town in Brazil. In the late 18th century, the first settlements were called bairros africanos (African neighbourhoods), a place where former slaves with no land ownership and no options for work lived. Over the years, many freed black slaves moved in. However, before the first settlement, called “favela” came into being, poor black citizens were pushed away from downtown into the far suburbs. Most modern favelas appeared in the 1970s, due to rural exodus, when many people left rural areas of Brazil and moved to cities.
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upgrading of existing facilities. Emphasis was placed on pre-service and in-service training for medical and paramedical staff, training of female volunteers to help outreach service delivery, increased involvement of community-based organizations (CBOs), and private medical practitioners in training as well as service delivery. Essential supplies, such as health worker kits, medicines, and so on were provided. A two-pronged strategy was adopted to generate the demand for Family Welfare (FW) and Maternal Child Health (MCH) services—first, establishment of client-friendly services; second, development of an Information, Education, Communication (IEC) strategy, which had a focus on priority health seeking behaviours, giving attention to inter-personal communication. To facilitate women’s empowerment and income generation, the project involved innovative schemes focusing on young females and adolescent girls and included vocational training, entrepreneurship development training, reproductive health education, and so on. The implementation
Photo: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen
Gecekondu is a Turkish word meaning a house put up quickly without proper permissions, a squatter’s house, and by extension, a shanty or shack. Gecekondu bölgesi is a neighbourhood made of those gecekondular (plural of gecekondu). In common usage, it refers to the low cost apartment buildings or houses that were constructed in a very short time by people migrating from rural areas to the outskirts of the large cities.
was done in close collaboration with CBOs and local municipalities. The project evaluation report prepared by the World Bank found that the infant mortality rate in the area of implementation went down from 55.6% to 25.6% and the rate of institutional delivery was up from 53.9% to 89%. It was also reported that the number of fully immunized children went up from 57.1% (mid-term) to 89.1%. Between late 2001 and mid-2003, the Ahmedabad Electricity Company (AEC) worked with local NGOs to implement a pilot Slum Electrification Project in Ahmedabad to develop a private sector/civil society partnership to extend critical legal and reliable modern energy services to slum communities. This pilot project subsidized connections for 820 households and provided each household with a legal private meter and a compact fluorescent bulb. The costs for connecting the customer and installing internal wiring was split between the household, USAID, and AEC; the household paid `3350, and USAID and AEC each contributed `2200.
AEC’s Slum Electrification Project team worked with NGOs, announcing the programme by megaphones, cloth banners, and handbills, distributed door to door. In each slum, they arranged group meetings with what would become the community-based organization that implemented the programme. The AEC provided onsite services to receive applications, accept payment of service line charges, and answer consumer inquiries. Women played a prominent part in the programme, exercising significant influence on the programme design and implementation. The Organization for Awareness of Integrated Social Security (OASiS) is a social innovations lab in India, where people can experiment with ideas on social development and ultimately become social entrepreneurs. Since its inception in 2003, OASiS has developed five social innovations: a social security system, an insurance system for the disabled, a social credit system, a forest village integrated development model, and an education model for the children
of urban slums called the Museum School. The Museum School was inspired by a group of children in tattered clothing at a bus stop in an upscale residential area of Bhopal. In 2005, OASiS launched the Museum School, or Parvarish, in collaboration with three museums in Bhopal. It started with 40 children from two slums. Today, the Museum School boasts a student body of about 150 children from five slums, six literacy teachers, and 20 volunteers. In 2010, OASiS reported 250 more children waiting to be included in their Museum School project. The Museum School can be replicated in any city with a museum and where there exists a population of non-school going children. n
Photo: Matt-80
New Villages, also known as Chinese New Villages, are settlements created during the waning days of British rule over Malaysia in the mid-1950s. It is estimated that today, about 1.2 million people live in 450 New Villages throughout Peninsular Malaysia. About 85% of the population in New Villages are ethnically Chinese. The ethnic Malays take up about 10% and ethnic Indians roughly 5%.
Slums in South Africa are known as shanty towns (also called a squatter settlement)— a slum settlement (sometimes illegal or unauthorized) of impoverished people who live in improvised dwellings made from scrap materials.
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