Going by the varying definitions developed by state governments, several parts of Dharavi might not qualify as slums. Despite having the largest slum population in the world, India till recently did not have a common accepted definition of the most prevalent form of living in urban areas.
As a result, measures to make a dent in the slum population face an even bigger problem. The problem of figuring out what is being measured. The UN Population Report has estimated India?s urban slum population for 2001 at 158.42 million. The number is about three times the figure of 52.4 million according to the Census of India 2001, which enumerated slums in 1,743 towns. Latest government estimates say slum dwellers account for 25-65% of the urban population. The policy for them is predicated on two pillars ? a slum-free India and assigning property rights to the relocated population.
Yet researchers like Partha Mukhopadhyay at the Centre for Policy Research, one of India?s leading think-tank on urban issues, say this is not the the best way to approach the slum problem in India. According to him and several others, these slums play a key role in the life of a city. In Delhi, for instance, the entire labour force that forms the lower strata of the service sector, including shop assistants and waiters, lives in slums. The adult males living in these slums often dominate the share of employees in trade, construction and transport.
The National Sample Survey report on informal sector and conditions of employment in India bears this out. It shows that in kirana shops and small-scale manufacturing units that dot the lanes of most Indian cities, the employees are mainly from the slums. In sectors like wholesale trade and construction, it is as high as 97% and 88%, respectively. Typically, in sectors that require college education the share of these workers is limited.
Mukhopadhyay argues that this means slum workers are as essential to a city as the better-off sector. Moreover, plans like the Rajiv Awas Yojana ? that intend to make India slum-free, essentially by carting the population to far off places ? will be costly errors as the workers will find it impossible to commute and work at their current wage level.
Then there is also the issue that several services need the workers to stay close by, like women who work as household maids. So for more than 53% of the women in slums, their place of work is where they stay. If they have to commute longer, the entire structure of this economy would collapse and actually hurt the viability of living of the other segments of city dwellers.
A slum is defined as a settlement comprising at least 20 households with a collection of poorly built tenements, mostly of temporary nature and crowded together, usually, with inadequate sanitary and drinking water facilities, and unhygienic conditions.
The government, as housing and poverty alleviation minister Kumari Selja informed Parliament recently, is using the Rajiv Awas Yojana to create a slum-free India in five years. The finance ministry has allocated the programme R5,000 crore in the first phase, which is largely the preparatory phase. The equation is simple: People below the poverty line make up about 25% of the urban population. These people, naturally, stay in slums and so removal of poverty would need their physical removal from there.
But these slums often account for far more segments of the population than the desperately poor. In the metros, for instance, the slum population often reaches 65% of the total urban population, which means that a much larger percentage of the populace and not only the poorest live there. So tackling the needs of this intermediate strata should be the most critical subject in the growing pace of Indian urbanisation.
Draft slum-free plans have been prepared for Hyderabad, Pune and Indore, while Bhubaneswar, Chennai and Vijaywada have even prepared detailed project reports. The ministry has commissioned a study with the Asian Development Bank (Small Scale Policy and Advisory Technical Assistance or Spata) to find out ways to make India slum-free in the next five years. It aims to study the demand for and supply of housing of different types in Delhi that will ?develop a framework for providing low-cost, formal housing for slum dwellers?.
But, as Mukhopadhyay says, at the present level of development, it may be more practical and productive to provide legal avenues for the slum dwellers to earn their living rather than expending money on making India slum-free.