Despite the Indian government's long expressed desire to lift people out of poverty and improve living conditions, the number of people estimated to be living in slums in Delhi rose by 40 per cent between 2011 and 2013. Figures are sketchy, but it is estimated that there are currently over 100 million people living in slums in India, the majority clustered around its big cities. According to the World Health Organisation, in Mumbai almost half of the city’s 12 million residents live in what it describes “informal settlements”. Its Dharavi slum, one of the most populous on the entire continent, houses anywhere between 700,000 and one million people, squeezed into an area that is less than two and a half square kilometres.
The continued rise in people living in slums has been driven partly by the urbanisation of India’s population, as people migrate to the cities in search of work amid the backdrop of a booming economy. With the labour force residing in the slums having fuelled economic growth over the past twenty years, a 2013 study indicated that slums themselves contribute almost eight per cent of India’s annual GDP. However, the relationship between the country’s economic growth and its slum population now proves a dilemma for the country: a circular situation, in which the economy is both in an increasingly strong position to lift people out of the slum neighbourhoods and yet dependent on the people who live in these neighbourhoods to keep on growing.
The 2011 Indian census defined a slum as “residential areas where dwellings are unfit for human habitation”. They are characterised by substandard housing, overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and a lack of basic connections such as water or sewage. However, one would be amiss to think of slums in India solely as places of poverty or illiteracy, and the growth in slum the population has also been partly influenced by a widening definition of what "slum" means. Many are not the shanty towns of Slumdog Millionaire, but longer term housing constructed of bricks and steel, albeit without the input of local planners. Some slums are areas that were once considered “legitimate” neighbourhoods but, having become run down, have been reclassified.
Owing to a dire shortage of affordable houses throughout the country, particularly in Mumbai, a good number of slum inhabitants are, "not the official poor who live below the poverty line but are well-educated, middle-class people who are deprived of adequate housing.” That's according to Yue Zhang - an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois - Chicago.
According to Deloitte, by 2022 the country’s urban housing shortage is predicted to stand at 30 million. Whilst lower income groups make up the majority of those unable to afford housing, developers commonly focus on providing housing for higher income groups in order to maximise their own profits. India’s cities cannot afford to lose these individuals, but cannot afford to house them either.
The slums themselves, so often presented as places of miserable destitution by the media, are also places of community, energy and enterprise, comprising of micro-industries, such as leather work and pottery, that collectively turn over millions of dollars every year. Although some of these slum areas are "notified" by authorities, meaning residents cannot be arbitrarily evicted and are entitled to access certain connections such as water, in 2012 59 per cent of slums remained unrecognised.
There is little disagreement that living conditions for the people inhabiting these areas need to be improved, but in many cases when developments are cleared, particularly in non-notified areas, adequate replacements are not provided and many people are left homeless. In cases where replacement affordable housing is provided, it is in fact often many miles outside the city limits, leaving people unemployed and sparking accusations of state-sponsored ghettoisation as India strives to compete aesthetically with the gleaming cityscapes of Shanghai and Singapore.
In just one example of the continued complexities of India's urban improvement, plans for how to redevelop the Dharavi slum have been floated since the 1970s and are yet to reach a resolution. Once located on the outskirts of Mumbai, urban sprawl - much of it economically driven by the manpower of slum residents - means that the land that Dharavi sits on is now in the very heart of India's financial capital and is considered prime real estate. It is therefore arguably the most valuable slum in the country. Yet, interest from developers has stalled as, amid other issues, the Indian government demands that they must provide a certain amount of free floor space to each family living in Dharavi. Under the current model of redevelopment, anyone who can prove they have been living in the slum since before January 1, 2000 is entitled to free housing in-situ, but other residents must make their own arrangements, with many people simply moving into new or different slums. With no one willing to take responsibility for the situation, residents are left in limbo and the slum continues to grow.
For all of the economic dilemmas behind urban regeneration in India, it is also true that political motivations hinder progress. Despite their lower place in society, the residents of Indian slums do wield political influence. Urban renewal, and even the use of the word "slum", has become an undeniably political issue in recent years, to the extent that Yue Zhang has referred to the settlements themselves as “vote banks”:
“Politicians periodically provide services to slum dwellers in exchange for votes. The exchange through electoral politics brings about incremental improvement of the living conditions of slums, but does not solve the long-term problem of housing shortage. On the contrary, the exchange stabilizes existing slums and even provides incentives for the creation of new slums.”
In 2015, Prime Minister Modi set out his vision for “Housing for All” by 2022. Well intentioned as this may have been, it is clear that this target was, at the very best, optimistic. While successful urban regeneration and slum clearance programmes have taken place elsewhere in the world - and rapidly at that - it is clear that in India this process is fraught with multiple financial and political complexities that aren’t going to go away anytime soon. When all is said and done, it appears that a significant amount of India's economic and political stability is, sadly and ironically, dependent on the precarious foundations of slum life.
