essay on slums in india

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Children growing up in Indian slums: Challenges and opportunities for new urban imaginations

The physical environments of slums present many challenges to residents, particularly children. Even so, there are thriving communities in slums with strong social and economic networks. This article looks at the reality of growing up in slums in Delhi, and explores how well-intentioned slum improvement efforts can fail children. It concludes by identifying ways in which India’s policy environment could support efforts to make slum improvement programmes more child-friendly.

Children growing up in slums experience a childhood that often defies the imagination of both the ‘innocent childhood’ proponents and the ‘universal childhood’ advocates. The slums typically lack proper sanitation, safe drinking water, or systematic garbage collection; there is usually a severe shortage of space inside the houses where the children live, and no public spaces dedicated to their use. But that does not mean that these children have no childhood, only a different kind of childhood that sees them playing on rough, uneven ground, taking on multiple roles in everyday life, and sharing responsibilities with adults in domestic and public spaces in the community.

Some years ago I spent a year working closely with and observing children in Nizamuddin Basti, an 800-year-old historic settlement in the heart of central New Delhi best known for its famous Sufi shrine, the Nizamuddin Dargah. This internationally renowned spiritual centre is also a prominent cultural and philanthropic institution for the community and the city. The Basti is now considered an urban village with a historic core and layers of slums on its periphery. A predominantly Muslim community, Nizamuddin Basti and its slums together comprise ten notional precincts. These precincts were first delineated by children who worked with the local NGO, the Hope Project, in a community mapping exercise; the ngo is using the map to develop strategies for the different precincts of the Basti, given the different profiles of their residents (long-term residents vs. new migrants, regional origin, language and customs, and professions).

Children were to be seen everywhere as one entered the Basti. They played in the parks that wrapped the Basti on the western side to hide it from the gaze of the city. They played on the rough ground and vacant lots dotted with graves, in the open spaces in the centre where garbage was manually sorted. The parked rickshaws, vending carts, cars and bikes all served as play props in the streets. As soon as they could walk, children could be seen outdoors walking around mostly barefoot, climbing on debris and petting goats that freely roamed around. Girls as young as 5 carried infants and toddlers on their hip and moved around freely in the narrow pedestrian bylanes of the village, visiting shops for sweets and the houses of friends down the street. Many houses open out directly onto the street through a doorway that often is nothing more than a 5-foot-high opening in a wall. Infants reach out of these holes in the wall and interact with passers-by.

The Basti has an approximate population of 15,000, based on the counting done by the Hope Project 3 years ago. Since a major focus of the Hope Project’s admirable work was on health and education, I looked up the data on child health as recorded in the outpatient registers of the paediatric unit. Just over 5000 children aged under 14 years live in the Basti. For common ailments the majority of households visit the Hope Dispensary, with the next most commonly visited medical facilities being private doctors and government hospitals and dispensaries (Prerana, 2007). The most common childhood diseases reported at the Hope Project are respiratory diseases, diarrhoea, gastritis, intestinal worms, anaemia, scabies, and ringworm. An adverse living environment characterised by overcrowding, lack of ventilation in homes, and inadequate sanitation, water supply and water storage facilities no doubt contributes to the childhood diseases reported.

However, despite a largely unplanned physical environment, with debris and garbage generously strewn around, very few serious injuries occur in the public domain. Only a few superficial cuts were reported. I too had noticed that during my year-long observation in the Basti. In fact, the only accident I witnessed involved play equipment provided by the government in front of the municipal school.

The stories of Rani and Wahida

Rani’s family lived in one of the peripheral slums of the Basti called Nizam Nagar, one of the most deprived precincts and also the most crowded. The average monthly income of a family there barely exceeds 30 euros. Spread over about an acre, this informal housing accommodates 4458 people. Rani lived with her mother, two unmarried sisters and a married sister and her family in their two rooms arranged one on top of the other. The married sister occupied the top room. Half of the bottom room was occupied by a bed and the remaining floor space at the back was used for cooking, storage and for sitting around. The room had windowless walls on three sides and only opened onto the street in front. Rani’s mother had carved out a small shop selling cigarettes in the front of the room. There was no attached toilet or any piped water supply in this house.

When she was 11 years old, Rani kept a journal for me for a week, recording her day before she went to sleep. This account of her life provides some valuable glimpses about the multiple roles a girl child plays in this community. Rani was responsible for fetching milk for tea for her family every morning from Hasan Bhai’s tea stall. She would meet and chat with friends and neighbours here. In poor families such as hers, food is purchased on a daily basis, as there are no refrigerators for storing groceries.

Rani was a good practising Muslim. She washed herself in the morning and routinely offered all five prayers, or namaz, throughout the day. She called on her friend Meher, who lived around the corner, every morning and walked with her to the Hope Project’s non-formal school for adolescent girls. Rani performed daily household chores and shopping for the family, fetching cigarettes, snacks and groceries both for her mother’s shop and for home. Rani acted as guardian to her little niece, playing with her, feeding her, looking after her. She was a part-time shopkeeper, and sat in their small house-front shop to relieve her mother of her shopkeeping duties for some time every day.

Rani was a good student; other girls came to her for homework help. She bought sweets with small change, liked to play with domestic pets and with friends in the street in front of her house, in the nearby open spaces including the yard of the public toilet across from her house, in Meher’s back yard, and in the city park that was just outside the wall that separated her street from the park. Rani’s two older unmarried sisters took care of the cooking, cleaning and washing.

Rani had a friend called Wahida – unlike her, an orphan who had grown up in many households. Wahida split her time between the houses of her older siblings, her grandmother and her friend Rani’s family in Nizam Nagar. Her days were filled with household chores, besides attending the non-formal Hope school and evening religious studies. Wahida also attended a vocational training course in tailoring and sewing every afternoon in the community centre across from Nizam Nagar.

Both Rani and Wahida had grown up in severe poverty. Rani’s father had died of a drug overdose after reducing the family to penury. Rani’s mother barely earned a dollar a day from her shop and found it difficult to pay even the two rupees that would have bought Rani a hot lunch at school. Wahida had no one to watch over her and depended on charity for meals and a roof for the night. Yet both girls not only survived but thrived in this slum which represents one of the best examples of social capital in an urban neighbourhood. Seven years later, Rani and Wahida have both successfully completed school and are undergoing training as nursery teachers. Wahida is also working as an assistant to a city physiotherapist.

Slum redevelopment with children in mind

There are many such stories in Nizamuddin Basti that speak to the power of family and community social capital in aiding the well-being and future prospects of children. The many everyday places in Nizam Nagar and the larger Nizamuddin Basti that allow children like Rani and Wahida to be active social participants in everyday life are the stuff that communities are made of.

When families are driven out of their slums and taken by truckloads to a resettlement site, they are not only driven away from their homes but also from their communities. Sadly, this is the reality of how many cities are tackling slum renewal – notably Delhi, where families living in squatter settlements are routinely displaced from their squatter locations to make way for profitable new developments and are relocated to barren resettlement sites typically outside the city. Delhi has 44 such resettlement colonies, with a total population estimated to be 1.8 million (Government of Delhi, 2002). Less than 1% of the land occupied by squatters is privately owned (Kundu, 2004), implying that if there were political will, the state could easily provide adequate housing with secure tenure inside the city.

Most slum redevelopment assumes that overall slum improvement processes will automatically benefit children. This is unfortunately not always true. Even the best of initiatives that work on improving sanitation – such as through providing more public toilets, as is currently happening in Nizamuddin Basti – do not take children’s needs into account. Public toilets are scary places for children and with long adult queues, children have to wait a long time for their turn. These are reasons why children can often be seen to squat in the space outside the toilet block or in the street right outside their homes.

The new toilet blocks were part of a larger improvement plan in the Basti that did not adequately consider children. For example, the Basti improvement plan ostensibly benefited children by creating two new landscaped parks. One of them was exclusively for women and children, although it opened its secure gates for only a few hours in the evenings. (Recently a local NGO negotiated access at least once a week outside of the evening hours for children who are part of their programmes.) The other new park replaced a large, central open space in the heart of the community, which was used for sorting scrap. As most residents in the peripheral slums of the Basti depend on this business for a livelihood, the unavailability of this space meant sorting scrap at home. As a result, the home environment is now extremely hazardous for children. These kinds of problems result when communities are not made partners in development, and solutions instead come from a myopic outside view.

In Khirkee, another urban village in Delhi south of the Nizamuddin Basti, children living in a small slum cluster in neighbouring Panchshel Vihar had access to only one badly maintained park, even though the local area had several landscaped parks. When I asked 12-year-old Rinki, who was a play leader of the slum children, what sort of improvements she would recommend for the park, she told me, ‘Please don’t do anything otherwise we will not be able to play here any more.’ This poignantly sums up the attitude of the city. While in theory investment in parks is seen as benefiting children, in practice the temptation is to protect the newly beautified parks from slum kids, who are viewed as vandals. In some communities, slum children are actively evicted from parks, which defeats the purpose of providing them. Rules on park use also discourage imaginative play – when we observed children in landscaped, rule-bound parks that kept out slum children, we counted them playing 12 to 16 different games. In contrast, the slum children from Panchsheel Vihar were counted playing 34 different games in the badly maintained park in Khirkee.

Children use the public realm of neighbourhoods not only for playing but for many other activities including privacy needs and concealing secrets. This requires a range of spaces of different scales and character. Well-designed parks are no doubt very desirable for slum kids, but throughout the day more play happens in the streets and informal open spaces of the neighbourhood than in formal parks. Children in both Nizamuddin Basti and Khirkee referred to the importance of having friendly adults around their play territories, which tells us we need to create new, more imaginative solutions for children’s play than resource-intensive parks which inevitably become sites of conflict between different user groups.

Children from both communities routinely sought out open spaces in the local area outside their neighbourhoods. This points to the importance of integrating slums with the wider local area and securing access to open-space resources for slum children outside of the slum. The importance of community-level open spaces for children living in slums cannot be overemphasised. As there is little opportunity for innovation within the 12.5 m2of cramped private domestic space that Delhi slum dwellers are typically allocated, children in slums, including very small children, spend a large portion of their day outdoors. The cleanliness, safety and friendliness of the outdoor spaces in a slum thus play an important role in the health and well-being of children. Slum improvement plans will work better for children if we consider environmental improvements to the slum neighbourhood as a whole by involving children and by considering slums to be an integral part of the city.

The policy environment in India

India deals with slums only through poverty alleviation strategies. Since the 1980s, every Five Year Plan has included strategies targeting the environmental improvement of urban slums through provision of basic services including water supply, sanitation, night shelters and employment opportunities. But as urban slum growth is outpacing urban growth by a wide margin (UNDP, 2007), the living conditions of more than a 100 million urban slum dwellers in India remain vulnerable.

Is it possible to create a new imagination of slum development within the current policy environment of India? Following the liberalisation of India’s economy in 1991, two landmark events unfolded which may enable this:

• the 74th Constitutional Amendment of 1992, which proposes that urban local bodies (ULBs) should have a direct stake in urban poverty alleviation and slum improvement and upgrading, with participation of citizens, and
• the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), launched in December 2005, which embodies the principles of the 74th Constitutional Amendment. jnnurm outlines a vision for improving quality of life in cities and promoting inclusive growth, through substantial central financial assistance to cities for infrastructure and capacity development for improved governance and slum development through Basic Services to the Urban Poor. These include security of tenure at affordable prices, improved housing, water supply, sanitation, education, health and social security.

In promoting an integrated approach to planned urban development and the provision of basic services to the urban poor, JNNURM can perhaps reduce some of the existing lapses in planning and service delivery and improve living conditions for the urban poor in a fairer manner. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation has recently launched the National Urban Poverty Reduction Strategy (2010–2020): ‘A New Deal for the Urban Poor – Slum Free Cities’, which adopts a multi-pronged approach to reducing urban poverty involving measures such as slum renewal and redevelopment (Mathur, 2009). This calls for developing Slum Free Cities plans for some 30 cities which have been selected for a ‘National Slum Free City Campaign’. None of the national policies on poverty has any focus on children’s well-being or development, however, or on slums as vibrant neighbourhoods that offer affordable housing to Indian citizens.

Slum Free Cities is operationalised through a government scheme called  Rajiv Awas Yojana  (RAY), using JNNURM support. RAY sees slum settlements as spatial entities that can be identified, targeted and reached through the following development options:

• slum improvement:  extending infrastructure in the slums where residents have themselves constructed incremental housing
• slum upgrading:  extending infrastructure in the slums along with facilitation of housing unit upgrading, to support incremental housing
• slum redevelopment:  in-situ redevelopment of the entire slum after demolition of the existing built structures
• slum resettlement:  in case of untenable slums, to be rehabilitated on alternative sites.

RAY provides detailed guidelines for spatial analysis and situation assessment and recommends a participative process, involving slum communities with the help of ngos and community-based organisations active in the area of slum housing and development, to identify possible development options. Slum Free Cities provides an opportunity for new thinking, as well as posing a problem to municipalities and ngos who may not have the technical knowledge and imagination to create innovative community-driven solutions.

As the well-being of children – in terms of health, nutrition, education and protection – is closely connected to the quality of physical living environments and to the delivery of and access to services, children must be central to slum improvement programmes. Slum improvements funded by jnnurm should be used to make Indian cities child-friendly, and build on the assets of intricate social networks, inherent walkability and mixed uses which are considered by new planning theories to be vital in making neighbourhoods sustainable (Neuwirth, 2005; Brugman, 2009).

Slum Free Cities planning guidelines already incorporate many elements that could secure children’s right to an adequate standard of living, such as secure tenure, improved housing, reliable services and access to health and education. However, intentions are often not translated into action. Children’s direct participation in local area planning and design for slum improvements would be a good step forward in creating child-friendly cities in India. Action for Children’s Environments (ACE) is currently working on a study supported by the Bernard van Leer Foundation to understand how the first phase of JNNURM-funded slum improvements have affected children, with the aim of informing these policies and improving the practice of planning and implementation of projects to make slum redevelopment more child-friendly.

References can be found in the PDF version of this article .

Also in this edition of Early Childhood Matters

Please note that “slum-dweller” as used in this piece is not intended to be offensive and is intended only to refer to individuals living in housing lacking proper sanitation, drinking water, and transportation facilities.

Introduction:

Due to rapid urbanization and lack of a proper housing scheme in India, slums have become a dumping ground for the surplus urban population. These slums are regarded as illegal from the point of view of city planners. The total number of slums in India amount to more than 65 million , of which around 11 million are in Maharashtra, followed by Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh. These slums lack basic amenities, such as safe drinking water and sanitation.

In order to remove these slum dwellers, the government authorities resort to “forced evictions”, which results in serious violation of their human rights. This article is an attempt to analyze the rights of these slum dwellers.

Previous approach regarding the Human Rights of Slum Dwellers:

The accumulation of a large population in a small area (slums) with an inhabitable infrastructure leads to the inadequate distribution of resources among the people making them more vulnerable and ultimately leading to the infringement of human rights. Living in slums leads to a lack of proper sanitation, clean drinking water, and transportion facilities. Slum-dwellers often face poor economic conditions and thus have little power to oppose big companies who often encroach on their rights.

Most slums are located on the government’s land. Evictions from this land used to take place without even providing alternate housing to the slum dwellers leaving them to live at road paths with no other option. The court’s decisions would often favor the government and disregard the serious human rights violations the slum dwellers would face. But more recently, as more non-profit organizations have begun spreading awareness of human rights violations, the trend has started to change.

International Stance

Human Rights are termed as the “basic parameters” which assure the integrity of individuals are met for their overall development and that their rights will be protected against the more powerful entities. The section of society that is most vulnerable to having their rights infringed upon is the poorer section, which works in an unorganized sector and lives in a self-made informal structure, also known as slums. To provide more adequate housing, several treaties, laws, and legislations have been laid by several different nations.

The major laws that deal with the protection of slum dweller’s human rights are:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights ( UDHR ) : Article 25 of UDHR states that every individual has a right to a satisfactory standard of living, along with the enjoyment of clothing, food, and medical care. Special care is to be taken of women and children. It also covers the right to security in the event of unemployment. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights ( CESCR ): Article 11 of the CESCR recognizes the right of adequate housing to everyone with a focus on continuous improvement in living conditions. It also ensures the right to remain free from hunger (identified as a fundamental right) for every individual and commands the state to take adequate measures to ensure that these rights are not infringed. The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families – Article 43 in the convention discusses the right to access housing of migrant workers and their families. It also provides them protection against rent exploitation. The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees – Article 21 states that the most possible and favorable atmosphere is to be provided to refugees along with other adequate and basic requirements.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child – Article 27 states that appropriate measures should be taken to provide adequate housing, clothing and nutrition along with material assistances and support programs.

The primary goal each of these regulations is to provide shelter and immunity against encroachment on basic human rights of the aggrieved population.

The largest problem of slums arises in the densely populated states or the under-developed states lacking the resources to provide accommodations in habitable atmospheres to their economically deprived community. Some of the largest slums in the world are located at Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa with 400,000 inhabitants, Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya with 700,000 inhabitants and Dharavi in Mumbai, India: 1,000,000 – all of which fall under the above-mentioned criteria.

Apart from the legislation, there are several governmental and non-governmental organizations, such as UN-Habitat and GPRBA , which deal with the issues in slums and provide alternate shelter to dwellers.

Indian approach towards securing the rights of Slum Dwellers:

The Supreme Court of India has held that the right to life of human beings is not limited to mere animal existence and extends to the right to live with human dignity, including shelter, clothing, nutrition. The Court has also interpreted the right to be a fundamental rights guaranteed under Article 19(1)(e) and 21 of the Indian Constitution .

There is no specific law in India that deals with the removal of slums. For the purpose of eviction, the government resorts to laws dealing with property and cleanliness, which are distinct from forced eviction laws. Also, none of the provisions from the Public Premises Act or the Land Acquisition Act discuss the forced eviction of slum dwellers.

The  Supreme Court of India declared in Ratlam Municipal Council vs. Vardichand that ensuring the public health of slum dwellers is the statutory duty of municipal corporations. The Court has also recognized the slum dweller’s right to life is not limited to a mere roof over their heads, but extends to the right to water, food, education, medical care, and sanitation. The question of whether the forced eviction of slum dwellers is a human rights violation came before the Supreme Court in Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corpn , where the Court held that eviction would amount to the violation of the right to life, and although Article 21 of the Indian Constitution does not give slum dwellers the absolute right to reside anywhere, the eviction process should be just, fair and reasonable and the dwellers must be relocated to other suitable places.

Conclusion:

There is a need for a shift in perception regarding slum dwellers when it comes to town-planning. The international obligations regarding the rights of slum dwellers must be followed in order to prevent human rights violations. It must not be forgotten that the slum dwellers, who constitute major part of the population, are human beings and should be provided the basic amenities of life, as well as resources to be able to contribute towards the economy. The problems faced by slum dwellers must be solved by the government with the help of long-term solutions. More non-governmental and governmental organizations must come forward to eradicate this issue and protect the human rights of slum dwellers.

Milind Rajratnam is currently in his second year at Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow. He takes an active interest in Criminal Law and Constitutional Law. He is associated with various organizations that work for creating legal awareness in the society.

Shivang Yadav is currently in his third year at Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow. He is interest in international relations and has been a part of multiple projects relating to international criminal Law and international humanitarian law.

Suggested citation: Milind Rajratnam and Shivang Yadav, Slums in India: Tracing the Contours of Human Rights Obligations, JURIST – Student Commentary, April 23, 2020, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/04/Rajratnam-Yadav-slums-human-rights/

This article was prepared for publication by Gabrielle Wast , Assistant Editor for JURIST Commentary. Please direct any questions or comments to her at [email protected]

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17 The Political Construction of Slums in India

Nandini Gooptu is a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and teaches at the Department of International Development. Educated in Kolkata and at Cambridge, she is the author of The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early-Twentieth-Century India ; editor of Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India ; and joint editor of India and the British Empire and Persistence of Poverty in India . Her current research is concerned with social and political transformation and cultural change in contemporary India, particularly in the realm of work.

• Published: 16 August 2023
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The slum in India is a relational concept, brought into being through actions of the state and non-state actors, who create specific forms of knowledge about the slum, imbuing it with multiple meanings and attributes. The colonial construction of slums as insanitary sites of disease contagion and as spatial aberrations consisting of debased humanity were further elaborated in postcolonial India, with the changing dynamics of nationalism, development, and democratic politics as well as class conflict over rights to the city. Slum populations have been variously portrayed as criminal, illegal interlopers in the city who undermine democratic politics, as multitudinous consumers of scarce urban resources, as reckless polluters who degrade urban life and thwart both urban and national development, yet worthy of benevolent ministrations of the state and elites. The idea of the slum has been at the heart of struggles over the nation and the city, spatially, ideologically, and politically.

“A Slum, for the purpose of Census, has been defined as residential areas where dwellings are unfit for human habitation by reasons of dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangements and design of such buildings, narrowness or faulty arrangement of street, lack of ventilation, light, or sanitation facilities or any combination of these factors which are detrimental to the safety and health.” 1 This approach by the Census of India 2011 gives the slum a spatial definition as a bounded and physically identifiable entity, characterized by deficiencies in its physical environment. This essentialized and reductionist characterization of the slum overlooks its multiple connotations and meanings that are created through political discourse and practice, as the following two, very different, examples illustrate.

On October 2, 2014, the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a highly orchestrated national campaign to create a “clean India” ( Swachh Bharat ) by wielding a broom to sweep dirt in Valmiki Basti, a slum in Delhi where Gandhi once stayed. The slum was projected as deserving of the virtuous ministrations of the enlightened, welfarist state and of an altruistic nationalist leadership imbued with civic virtue. It served as the ethical locus around which the government sought to galvanize the nation for developmental action to eradicate filth, animated by a spirit of morally charged social improvement associated with Gandhi as a national icon.

In contrast to Modi’s attention to the environment of the slum, its residents are highlighted on the website of the property development firm of Mukesh Mehta, best known for his controversial and highly disruptive and destructive plan for the commercial redevelopment of Mumbai’s Dharavi district, Asia’s largest slum: “The failure [of slum development policies so far] lies in not harnessing the spirit of a group of people that can and will act as an engine for economic growth. If slum-dwellers are treated as valuable human resources, they can act as a key stone to a vibrant and robust economy anywhere.” 2 The website then goes on to explain that unsanitary conditions, high incidence of disease, and the lack of educational and sociocultural infrastructure retard the realization of the full potentials of slum-dwellers as productive agents. Mehta, a private real-estate developer who made a fortune by building luxury homes, now describes himself as a social entrepreneur, and he justifies his lucrative slum reconstruction project and strategy of capital accumulation by invoking slums as repositories of entrepreneurial talent and the home of a potentially productive human resource.

These examples draw attention to the slum as a relational concept brought into being through the actions and interventions of the state and non-state actors. These interactions create specific forms of knowledge about the slum that are integrally linked with the economic and political life of the city and the nation. Slums are imbued with multiple meanings and attributes through struggles over the control, identity, and imaginaries of the city as well as through the dynamics of wider national politics. If one accepts that the slum is a socially and politically constructed category, it becomes worthwhile to eschew empirical enquiry into the condition of slums in India in order to explore their production through political and social discourse over time, and to trace the historical evolution of the slum as a concept in the colonial and postcolonial periods. This approach does not imply that the physical spaces described as slums do not exist in reality and are mere figments of imagination. On the contrary, an analysis of the conceptual development and the construction of slums through political and social discourse reveals wider urban struggles, conflicts, and inequalities that slums represent in a microcosm. As such, this analytical perspective explains why slums have proved to be so durable in India and come to signify the negative features of the urban condition. Moreover, a historically informed and contextualized enquiry into the social and political construction of slums helps to explain the local iterations of some widely prevalent global ideas about slums. It reveals the specificity and local roots of apparently similar characterization of slums across many parts of the world.

Sanitation, Poverty, and Colonial Power

Slums were first identified as an urban problem in colonial India in the later nineteenth century. Approaches to them were largely shaped by analogy with similar developments in Britain in the same period. 3 Major colonial cities like Calcutta and Bombay witnessed the influx of laboring populations, with an attendant overcrowding in under-developed areas that lacked proper housing, sanitary infrastructure, and planned roads and often consisted of informal settlements and dilapidated buildings. The identification of such areas as slums and as a major challenge of municipal governance arose out of colonial concerns with disease epidemics and the consequent preoccupation with sanitation, public health, and the safety of British troops and personnel. Colonial sanitary and municipal officers recognized the need to construct sanitary infrastructure and suitable housing. However, the lack of resources at the disposal of municipal authorities as well as the fear of unleashing urban political unrest after the country-wide uprising of 1857 against the British, prevented large-scale investment on infrastructure and the wholesale re-planning of cities. 4 Instead, the focus was on slums as habitats of the poor, who were considered responsible for causing unsanitary conditions due to their unhygienic habits and behavior.

Some of the most durable characterizations of the slum emerged from this period, as public health issues assumed overwhelming urgency during the outbreak of disease epidemics, such as the cholera, and most importantly, the plague in the 1890s. As historian Prashant Kidambi has argued in relation to Bombay, colonial officials ignored emerging scientific evidence of the microbial, rather than the miasmic, origin of the plague, and instead approached the plague through a contagionist lens as an “infection of locality” that could spread to white areas and affect Indian elites. 5 Consequently, they sought to tackle the plague through a spatialized approach, targeting areas identified as unsanitary, overcrowded, and prone to breeding disease.

As a result, the characterization of slums took on two enduring features. First, slums as unsanitary spaces were seen as localized phenomena without reference to the wider social, economic, and political factors responsible for the production of what had come to be seen as plague spots. In fact, the term “plague spot” gradually came not only to refer to areas affected by the plague, but also to signify poor hygiene, sanitation, and health as well as congestion, dirt, squalor, and filth. The outcome was the identification of the slum as a distinct type of urban space that caused disease contagion, the solution to which lay in localized interventions. Second, the culpability for the problem was placed squarely on the shoulders of those who lived in the slums, notably the poor. Irrespective of the actual composition of their populations, slums came to be synonymous with poverty and low life. In this way, the urban spatial politics of slums and control of the poor would become a critical facet of the exercise of biopower as a mode of imposing colonial rule in India.

Civic Nationalism and Elite Control of Cities

In the early decades of the twentieth century, and the interwar period in particular, slums came to be held responsible for jeopardizing not only the physical morphology and public health of the city but also its body politic and social fabric. The context for this shift in the conception of the slum was set by two sets of development that exacerbated class tensions in many rapidly growing cities: first, urban demographic expansion with migration of the poor into cities and overcrowding, and second, the increasing political mobilization and action of the urban poor through nationalist, religious, and caste politics in urban India, eliciting concerns and political unrest among Indian elites and the colonial state alike.

As the habitat of the growing number of the poor, slums came to be associated not only with squalor, but also with morally degraded life and a political threat. In north India, where urban population growth was particularly striking with in-migration of laboring classes, the insalubrious living conditions of the poor were identified by Raj Bahadur Gupta in 1930 as the factor that “lie[s] at the root of the characteristic inefficiency, slothfulness and other short-comings” of the poor. 6 An enquiry report on urban labor in the city of Kanpur in north India held the opinion that “the only relief available to the worker from the dirt and squalor of his house and its surroundings … is the liquor shop or the grog shop.” 7 Not surprisingly, the transformation of slums as the physical environment of the poor through improvement projects and slum clearance campaigns came to assume a central place in urban local policies.

This trend was further fortified by the emergence of a new form of civic nationalism among Indian elites, who were newly ensconced in town halls from the early decades of the twentieth century. 8 The colonial state had devolved the powers of local administration to Indian elites, who were to be elected by property-owning rate payers. For these new municipal elites and their propertied middle-class electorates, local institutions afforded them access to political and administrative power within the framework of the colonial state, in which they were otherwise disempowered. With their newfound power at the helm of urban affairs, these elites envisioned the city as a vehicle of nationalist modernization, progress, and order to be planned and organized under their enlightened leadership. 9 Their nationalist urbanism and economic and political predilections came to shape urban policy, notably the need of their middle-class electorate to find safe and hygienic residential areas. Municipal bodies began to replan and remold cities to expand into new areas for middle-class housing. Private investment on middle-class housing was spurred on by high rents, the opening up of new land for building construction by local authorities, and the redirection of capital from the countryside to investment on urban real estate from the time of the agrarian depression of the 1930s.

Slums were anathema to this optimistic and expansive urban vision of orderly modernity. Local bodies began to demolish or relocate slums to urban outskirts, leading to the spatial segregation of slum populations. This process was underpinned by a new moral discourse about the adverse impact of environment on character and behavior and about the interplay of dirt and degeneracy in slums, in addition to preexisting concerns about public health and sanitation. Slums, thus, came to be framed in terms of a dualistic conception of the city along the lines of class, with formally planned, well-developed areas of the well-off as the norm and informal, unwholesome spaces of the poor as the aberration.

Yet, at the same time, a nationalist vision of a common purpose of social reform and mass anti-colonial mobilization animated the nationalist leadership, thus making possible an alternative view of slums as areas deserving of benevolent attention for improvement. Patrick Geddes, the highly influential town planner, who was warmly welcomed by Indian elites in this period to develop plans of urban development, contributed to this approach by emphasizing a constructive and inclusive approach to slums. A high-profile pageant that he organized during a religious festival in the city of Indore represented this exalted mission of urban development. The festival procession, organized on the occasion of Diwali (the festival of light to usher in the new year) and well known across India in nationalist circles, depicted the war on slums, dirt, and disease as a shared social mission. Not only eminent citizens but also the lower castes featured in the event as key actors, with untouchable sweepers appearing in pure white clothing, carrying their brooms and bedecked with garlands to celebrate their contribution to urban cleansing. 10 In this way, an ambiguous and contradictory approach to slums came into existence, with a binary framing of their negative impact on cities on the one hand, and their need for benign reform on the other.

State Authoritarianism and Class Conflict

The dual approach of slum clearance and slum improvement, initiated during the late colonial period, continued into the early years after independence, until a much more accelerated and intensive phase of the onslaught on slums emerged in the 1970s, with new implications for the concept of the slum and its political significance. In 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of internal “Emergency” to deal with what she saw as the outbreak of political movements and unrest that destabilized and threatened the state. Democratic processes were suspended and civil liberties were curbed during this authoritarian interlude in Indian politics between 1975 and 1977.The Emergency period has gained notoriety for hitherto unseen violence on urban slums across the country and the wholesale destruction and displacement of many slums in major cities. The high authoritarianism of the Emergency was played out on the body and habitat of the slum poor. As Patrick Clibbens argues, the Emergency removed any inhibition and impediment to a full-scale onslaught on slums by putting central emphasis on a uniform urban policy. 11

The attack on slums was also a manifestation of rising class tensions, and slum demolition reflected increasing middle-class anger and hostility toward the poor. In the period immediately preceding the Emergency, Gandhi had launched a populist campaign, claiming to eradicate poverty. She undertook a number of policy initiatives that were ostensibly for the benefit of the poor. Indeed, she proclaimed the Emergency in the name of the common people of India whose interests she purported to represent and advance. On the one hand, Gandhi invoked the poor not only to legitimize her authoritarian populism or authoritarian republicanism, but also to justify draconian slum clearance measures. On the other hand, this rhetorical political emphasis on the poor served to create an image of Gandhi as a leader who failed to uphold the interests of the middle classes, not least because the early and mid-1970s and Gandhi’s regime coincided with a period of economic problems affecting the middle classes, with high levels of unemployment, inflation, and an agrarian crisis.

All this had fueled middle-class discontent and at times, fed into political unrest. Moreover, Gandhi’s populist electoral mobilization imparted the poor hitherto unprecedented visibility in electoral politics and conveyed a mistaken impression of their growing power and agency in politics. In this context, slums, as the most easily identifiable residential concentration of the poor multitude, came to represent spaces that endanger the proper functioning of democracy and middle-class interests. Underpinned by middle-class support, large-scale, often brutal and violent, initiatives of slum clearance as well as fertility control of the poor through forced sterilization of men were rolled out in this period across India, and notably in Delhi. 12 Many of these campaigns are attributed to Sanjay, Gandhi’s son, who was at the helm of the youth wing of the Congress Party that is associated with disgruntled middle-class urban youth, venting their anger through public violence.

Clibbens’s study of Delhi during the Emergency further shows that policies to remove and relocate slums to the urban periphery and the poor to the margins of the city aimed at an elitist cultural regeneration and revival in the city, in order to rectify what was seen as the rise of debased plebian public culture. Jagmohan, lieutenant governor of Delhi, who presided over slum clearance, said that he aspired to achieve a “revolution of the mind” and a new civic consciousness as well as a new aesthetic of the city that would remove the putatively unaesthetic presence of slums of the poor from the heart of the city. Elaborating on his vision of Delhi, Jagmohan explained: “I have often believed in the destiny of this city, in its historic role, in its being a spiritual workshop of the nation, in its capacity to impart urbanity and civility to the rural migrant…. The real problem of the slums is not taking people out of slums but slums out of people.” 13 The Emergency unambiguously cast legitimate urban aesthetics and civic life in terms of the superior preferences and priorities of elites and the middle classes, with slums of the poor being marked as illegitimate anomalies that were to be subjected to a civilizing mission and to be excised from the city, due to their degraded culture and lack of civic virtue. This echoed similar elite propensities during the late colonial period, but a common nationalist purpose of an earlier era to solve the problem of slums gradually gave way to a more explicit class polarization, which would be further hardened in the following decades.

New Urbansim and the Middle Classes

Following the excesses of the Emergency and after the restoration of democracy, the intensity of slum clearance campaigns abated for some time and in situ slum development became the main thrust of slum policy. However, matters changed with the liberalization and globalization of the Indian economy from the early 1990s and into the early decades of the twenty-first century. This period is marked by the acceleration of urbanization, increasingly lucrative investment in urban real estate and an intensified struggle over the urban built environment as well as the unabashed expression of hostility against slums by a culturally and socially ascendant and aspiring middle-class. Historical constructions of the slum have fed into present-day policies and practices, and new approaches to slums have emerged as cities are reimagined as instruments of economic globalization and modernization and as sites of a middle-class consumer revolution, lifestyle enhancement, and upward social mobility. With the emergence of a new economic nationalism, the early years of the twenty-first century have elicited most intense nationwide controversy over slums.

Extensive slum demolition started taking place in the early 2000s. P. Sainath, a journalist, put into perspective the physical scale, demographic magnitude, and human cost of slum demolition in Mumbai (previously called Bombay) in December 2004 and January 2005: “Number of homes damaged by the tsunami in Nagapattinam [the worst-affected coastal district in southern India]: 30,300; Number of homes destroyed … in Mumbai: 84,000.” 14 With the full backing of the local state’s coercive powers and extensive public support in the city, an estimated three hundred thousand people were displaced in this slum clearance drive alone. This particular spate of demolitions eventually stopped when the national government in Delhi instructed the local government in Mumbai to exercise restraint for fear of alienating slum electorates. This immediately led to a public outcry against the government, and party politics more generally, for capitulating to electoral considerations, instead of resolutely stamping out the problem of slums.

Delhi did not lag far behind Mumbai in demolitions. As in Mumbai, citizens’ groups and residents’ associations of private middle-class housing colonies in Delhi mounted concerted anti-slum campaigns from the 1990s. They appealed to the local authorities and the law courts through public interest petitions to remove slums and squatter settlements in order to cleanse the city. In February and April 2004, with the help of armed police, more than 150,000 people were violently evacuated from the Pushta colony in Delhi, along the river Yamuna, to develop and “beautify” the area into a recreational promenade. The experience in other major Indian cities, such as Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai, were not quite so catastrophic, but all witnessed middle-class citizen activism against slums and often their removal, affecting several million people.

The onslaught on slums and the related urban land grab have been analytically understood in terms of the growing importance of real estate as an important site of private investment since the 1990s, when the Indian economy began to be gradually liberalized. The urban building boom from the turn of the century is also driven by rising demands from India’s burgeoning middle class and the private corporate sector. The geographer Swapna Banerjee-Guha argues that urban land is now the key instrument of capital accumulation. 15 This has led to a process of displacement of slums and dispossession of the poor from valuable urban space and prime real estate, often through force and coercion, in order to reconfigure the built environment for exclusive use by the privileged and the well-off. Beyond this economic rationale, the reconceptualization of the role of slums is also underpinned by new visions of the city that emerged from the turn of the century. One of India’s most high-profile entrepreneurs of a globally successful IT company, later turned politician, has argued that the city has come to take the place of the village as the quintessence of a “new” India. 16 Similarly, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while launching a major, nationwide urban development program on December 3, 2005, stated: “Our urban economy has become an important driver of economic growth. It is also the bridge between the domestic economy and the global economy. It is a bridge we must strengthen.”

The centrality of the city in India’s growth economy has found expression in the oft-repeated official aspiration to transform Mumbai into Shanghai, and more widely to create global cities in India. Indeed, it now seems axiomatic in the Indian state and corporate circles to envision the city as the engine of economic growth, the beacon of India’s future and the crucible of enterprise and innovation. This spirit of economic nationalism and urban optimism was reflected in the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), India’s largest ever and most ambitious urban regeneration program, launched in 2005, driven by a shared government and private corporate imperative to transform cities. 17 This economic nationalist and entrepreneurial urbanism has been further elaborated with a techno-modern civic imagination more recently, with the launch of the Smart Cities Mission in 2015 for a technology-led enhancement and management of urban infrastructure and resources. 18

The city has also been reimagined by the increasingly assertive and consumerist middle and upper classes. The past few decades of the liberalization and globalization of the Indian economy have witnessed the crystallization of a new passionate commitment by the Indian elites and middle classes to the idea of economic growth, enterprise, and consumption. As is widely recognized, political ideas have hardened against the redistributive policies of an earlier era and against what is now widely perceived to be the pro-poor orientation of India’s post-independence developmental state, which is held responsible for undermining capitalist development and prosperity.

The sociologist Satish Deshpande has argued that middle-class visions of nationalism have come to be focused on an imagined economy defined by consumption. He states: “cosmopolitan consumption (rather than the patriotic production of Nehruvian socialism) appears to be the preferred terrain for the national imagination associated with India’s globalized capitalist economy.” 19 The middle classes as sovereign consumers have focused specifically on cities as not only the symbols of the new imagined economy but also the site of fulfilment of consumer identity. Urban prosperity and modernity are at the heart of this vision. The cliché of urban shopping malls as the icons of a globalizing India does indeed capture this buoyant middle-class mood. The middle classes now view the city in terms of privatized enclaves and spaces, from which the poor are sought to be excluded, as evident from the rise of a vast private security system to protect spaces of consumption, leisure, work, and housing for the exclusive use of these classes. Sanjay Srivastava refers to the consumer-citizen whose identity is now rooted to private spaces of consumption. 20 “Bypass urbanism” 21 now characterizes Indian cities, with new residential areas being fortified within gated spaces and constructed away from the perceived filth and squalor of the poor and bypassing congestion and overcrowding, most notably in slums.

These middle and upper classes have also staked their prior claim to urban citizenship and privileged entitlement to the city through myriad forms of civic activism and “social municipalism” 22 that also seek to exclude the poor and outlaw the slum. An opportunity for this urban stakeholder activism has been afforded by the institutional reengineering of urban local governance to elicit the participation and involvement of citizens, as stakeholders, in the management of local services in partnership with municipal institutions. In particular, urban residents have been given greater autonomy to form local associations in their neighborhoods to mobilize local resources for service delivery. In response, Residents Welfare Associations (RWA) have been formed in many India cities, but overwhelmingly in affluent and middle-class areas. In contrast, local units of municipal governance and representative institutions in slums and other settlements of the poor are largely defunct or paper organizations, or only engaged in limited activities. This is despite the fact that some of these, such as ward committees (wards are the primary units of local governance) are mandated by law and have a statutory status. In comparison, RWAs have been highly activist, for local residents possess the skills and resources to fulfil their role as active citizens. In Delhi, for instance, RWAs implement neighborhood security arrangements, manage local infrastructure and services, such as drinking water and sanitation, and maintain roads, parks, community halls, and street lights. 23

In addition, RWAs have emerged as vociferous campaigners for the right of the privileged and the denial of the rights of the poor. As they are given direct access to municipal councils, they have the capacity to corner existing resources at the cost of poorer neighborhoods. The poor are seen to contribute little to the resource base of the city compared to tax-paying, property-owning citizens, while putting intolerable and unsustainable pressure on urban infrastructure, thus thwarting the modernization and environmental upgrading of cities. Indeed, resonating with enduring tropes of the unhygienic propensities of the poor, they are now seen to contribute to an environmental crisis in the city, consisting of overcrowding, congestion, insanitation, and pollution, thus imperiling the health and lifestyle aspirations of the upper and middle classes.

In contrast to the supposedly public-spirited, active citizens of RWAs, the poor are seen as irresponsible and parasitic on the city, thus being undeserving of any right to the city and devoid of any legitimate claim to urban citizenship status. In tune with this zeitgeist of new urbanism, RWAs have mounted concerted campaigns to protect and insulate putatively superior residential areas from the incursion of the poor as well as to remove slums and squatter settlements away from the city. All this has fueled a strident new environmentalism among the upper and middle-classes, focused on the “brown agenda” of protecting and enhancing the quality of the built environment for citizens’ well-being. Public spaces have been privatized and wrested from occupation by the poor for “beautification” and environmental and aesthetic upgradation, reminiscent of earlier eras of urban development in the colonial, early postcolonial and Emergency periods.

Strident campaigns have also been taken to the courts through public interest litigation for the removal of slums and to enforce the rights of the upper and middle classes to a high quality of life in the city, unencumbered by squatters or slum-dwellers. The Indian judiciary has often upheld and conferred legitimacy to these dominant middle-class and elite dispositions toward the slum for the supposed economic and social havoc wreaked in cities by slum-dwellers. The hostile attitude toward slum-dwellers has been fortified by judicial activism and by marked shifts in judicial rulings in favor of the middle classes and against slums and squatter settlements. 24 In 1986, the Supreme Court gave a landmark verdict in the Olga Tellis case, upholding the right of pavement dwellers to occupy public land to earn their livelihood, under Article 21 of the Constitution that guarantees Right to Life. In striking contrast, in 2000 and 2002, in two widely known judgements in the Almrita Patel and Pitampura-Manchanda cases, respectively, the courts ruled decisively in favor of residents of private middle-class housing estates in Delhi, whose quality of life was argued to be detrimentally affected by a plethora of “nuisance” perpetrated by nearby squatter settlements. In the Almrita Patel case, the Supreme Court judgment was unequivocal about the illegal status, and consequently the attenuated citizenship rights, of slum people, by stating that “rewarding an encroacher on public land with a free alternative site is like giving a reward to a pickpocket.” 25

In the second (Pitampura-Manchanda) case, the Delhi High Court verdict held: “The welfare of the residents of these [private housing] colonies is also in the realm of public interest which cannot be overlooked…. The welfare, health, maintenance of law and order, safety and sanitation of these residents cannot be sacrificed and their right under Article 21 is violated in the name of social justice to the slum-dwellers.” 26 These judgments lent formal authority and legal endorsement, not only to government action against slum-dwellers and squatters, but also to a public mood of contempt, abhorrence and outrage against the urban poor, as vociferously expressed by residents associations, and as stridently articulated in large swathes of the media.

In tune with these court judgements, slum residents are viewed as pathological lawbreakers who not only illegally occupy public land but also have a more general criminal and immoral disposition. A sense of moral panic appears to have gripped the middle and upper classes, with a fear that the proliferation of urban crime, emanating from the slums, would cause anything from theft and burglary to large-scale violence, and imperil the lives of law-abiding citizens. Thus, for example, in 2008 a citizens’ organization filed a court case against squatter colonies in Delhi and stated in its petition:

in the process of sponsoring, motivating and encouraging the setting up of these unauthorized, and subsequently, regularized colonies, the interests of the underprivileged persons do not really get served; they are encouraged to act illegally and to gain from such illegal acts; their moral fabric gets undermined; … these measures inevitably generate an atmosphere of crime … and a general lowering of the standards of morals. 27

The outlawing of slums as illegitimate spaces also represents a significant backlash against the increasing political democratization of the urban poor. Slums are seen as a threat, not simply because of their putative illegal occupation of space, but also because of the apparent power of slum residents in urban electoral politics. It is now amply documented that the 1980s and 1990s were characterized by a democratic, electoral participatory upsurge of the poor and lower orders. 28 The increasing electoral participation of the poor in urban politics and their political assertiveness have triggered an “elite revolt,” to use the formulation of Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss, 29 in the form of upper and middle-class denial of the legitimacy of democratic politics as being increasingly driven by the perverse imperatives of electoral mobilization of the multitudinous poor.

This particular idea has manifested itself in the form of an outpouring of righteous civic opposition to so-called “vote bank” politics that is believed to thrive in the slums, and the supposed capacity of slum-dwellers as squatters to lay illegal claims to urban land as well as to demand various undeserved rights and entitlements—all on the back of electoral politics as mobilized voters. A subject of intense political controversy and contention is the concept of the slum “cut-off date,” which would allow certain slums established before a particular year to be granted legal status, or to be “regularized,” while focusing demolition efforts on settlements that appeared after the “cut-off date.” The slum “cut-off date” has become the most powerful signifier of the putative capacity of slum residents to manipulate their electoral clout to gain recognition of what is seen as their entirely illegal and unfounded claim to urban settlement and citizenship.

Thus, in obvious support of slum demolitions in Mumbai in 2005, a journalist condemned “the sea of slum-dwellers who have taken root in Mumbai and who are encouraged and protected by political parties of every hue as they provide a huge catchment area of votes.” 30 In a related vein, a report shows that in 2004, “11 prominent Maharashtrians moved the Bombay High Court to bar slum-dwellers from voting” and in 2005, “the city’s Municipal Corporation itself asked the Chief Electoral Officer to drop residents of demolished slums from the voters’ lists.” The mentality behind these demands was interpreted in this report as follows: “the Indian poor have the audacity to believe that their votes can change things…. take away their votes. That should teach them they cannot live among us.” 31

At the present juncture then, slums are seen as the key spatial concentration, variously, of criminal, immoral, and illegal interlopers in the city, of irresponsible and multitudinous consumers of scarce and vital urban resources and of reckless polluters who degrade the quality of urban life and thwart both urban and national development. Slums are, therefore, now framed through a highly charged and emotive cleavage between the “outsider” or “alien” versus the “insider” or “citizen-resident” of the city.

Politics of the Urban Poor

The action and agency of slum-dwellers themselves also shape wider understanding of slums, while the exigencies of mass electoral politics force exclusionary urban ideologies to be tempered. Precisely at the time of an intensely exclusionary approach toward slums, an increasingly and highly mobilized popular electorate in a mass democracy has rendered it politically inexpedient to mount a wholesale attack on slums. Within an increasingly strong democratic culture of the poor and their electoral democratic upsurge, slum-dwellers have developed contested urban imaginaries and forged a variety of forms of political action and engagement to claim their own rights, entitlements, services, and territories.

The terms “occupancy urbanism” and the “dynamic ground up city” in the critical analytical literature describe the myriad ways in which the poor challenge and subvert urban elite policy and politics and shape the aesthetics of the city. 32 These have an impact on discursively reshaping space and reimagining the city, even though the ability of such politics from below to affect major shifts in urban policy remains limited. Nevertheless, these forms of subaltern urbanism in slums and “chronic street level subversion” 33 of policies represent the political agency of the poor that can scarcely be ignored or marginalized by the government and political parties, and it requires the hostility toward slums to be reined in. A war on slums could unleash significant political instability and unmanageable violence, posing a far greater threat to life and property than slums otherwise do. Veena Das and Michael Walton argue that it is “in the process of engaging the legal, administrative, and democratic resources that are available to them—in courts, in offices of the bureaucrats, and in the party offices—that the poor learn to become political actors.” 34 Through these forms of action, the slum poor assert their legal and moral right to live in the city and articulate their vision of inclusive cities. In this way, the poor have made it impossible to treat slums as unmitigated and irredeemable negative spaces, and have wrested the right for slums to be represented in a positive light and to attract developmental attention of both the state and middle and upper classes. In this context, a rhetoric of inclusion of slums and slum-dwellers has taken shape, as in the examples of the prime minister and a real estate developer construing slums and slum-dwellers as morally deserving of support.

This inclusive orientation has taken many different developmental and political forms. The provision and improvement of basic services for the poor in slums was a key component of JNNURM, India’s largest-ever urban renewal project. 35 For the delivery and embedding of such developmental programs, participatory forms of governance have been promoted at the local level to involve slum-dwellers, with greater or lesser degrees of effective implementation in actual practice in different places. However, these institutional arrangements for the involvement of slum-dwellers in local governance have created the channels of transactional, patron-client relationships between politicians and local residents. Various studies show how slum-dwellers are located in networks of urban political patronage. 36

Not only politicians, but also a large variety and number of NGOs now work among slum-dwellers for the provision of local services as well as for poverty alleviation. The NGOs, at times, assist slum-dwellers to resist draconian slum demolition policies and to ensure adequate rehabilitation, relocation, and alternative housing for displaced populations. Some commentators have seen NGO action in aid of slums as a form of deepening of democracy on behalf of the poor that also enables the articulation of development alternatives. 37 Others, however, argue that they fail to represent the interests of their constituents adequately and help to buttress government policy. 38 Indeed, the action of NGOs as well as the operation of patron-client linkages in slums have been critically assessed, variously for disciplining the political assertion of slum-dwellers, containing political energy within slums, muting the political expression of the slum poor, and casting them in a supplicant mode vis-à-vis the state as denizens rather than citizens. 39

Despite these limitations, popular politics in slums has undeniably drawn attention to inequality, neglect, and unjust deprivation, and thus given rise to a positive discourse and inclusive orientation that has even drawn in the otherwise hostile middle and upper classes to engage with slums through various kinds of voluntary developmental and charitable interventions, social enterprises, and NGO activism. These initiatives also represent the search for political agency and civic virtue by the middle classes, who have lost their faith in electoral democracy and eschewed party politics. Through a new culture of voluntarism that resonates with older traditions of social service associated with Gandhian nationalism, 40 these middle classes seek to assert their superiority and control over the slums, in an idiom of non-political or apolitical charity and welfarist philanthropy. Social-service-oriented involvement in slums, thus, enables middle-class self-constitution as political actors. These various forms of management of and intervention in politics in slums have served to reverse and complicate some of the hostile attitudes toward slums and have instead led to their construal as objects of reform and benevolent succor.

A further dimension of the positive orientation toward slums is the creation of the image of slum-dwellers as fundamentally entrepreneurial in disposition. Slum-dwellers are imagined to be adept at enterprise, supposedly due to their unparalleled resilience, coping ability, and capacity for frugal innovation ( jugaad in Hindi), in the face of the enduring adversity that they face in slums. This entrepreneurial image of slum inhabitants is in tune with current Indian economic nationalism and the much-vaunted image of India as the nation of entrepreneurs par excellence. Economic inclusion of slums through the mobilization of the entrepreneurial potentials of their inhabitants is now seen as an important element of the strategy of national economic growth, in line with prevalent global and national narratives of inclusive development. 41 This is evident from the extensive promotion of micro-credit, micro-enterprise, and self-help groups as a major plank of developmental intervention and poverty alleviation in slums. More broadly, with reference to the economic promise and profitable market potential of those at the bottom of the pyramid, slum populations and the vast informal economy of slums are sought to be integrated, or even adversely incorporated, into the wider economy through a boost to enterprise. Moreover, as is evident from the example of the property developer, Mukesh Mehta, the environment of slums is argued to stifle and constrain the supposedly innate entrepreneurial urge of slum populations, thus justifying the need to redevelop slums. The rhetoric of slum enterprise then paradoxically turns into an alibi for attacks on slums as a physical space endowed with negative characteristics, harking back to the abiding tropes that originated in the later nineteenth century under colonialism and that were reproduced repeatedly throughout the twentieth century.

The colonial imagery of slums in India as unsanitary, miasmic sites of disease contagion, and the late-colonial construction of slums as a spatial aberration consisting of debased humanity, were further extended and elaborated in postcolonial India with the changing dynamics of nationalism and national politics as well as class conflict over the right to the city and citizenship. New connotations of environmental degradation, illegality, and threat to democracy and development were attached to slums, while also construing slums as worthy of benevolent attention, in response, at least in part, to the assertion of political agency by slum-dwellers. It hardly bears stating that slum residents, their economic activities. and political engagement are all central to the very constitution of a city’s economy and polity. Slums supply labor and sustain the urban informal economy, while slum populations are arguably the mainstay of urban democratic politics. Yet slums in India continue to be seen as a problem, an imposition on the city and the source of many of its woes, sustained by myths and narratives of their fundamentally detrimental impact on the city. The idea of the slum has been at the heart of political conflict and contestation, and of struggles over the city and the nation, spatially, ideologically, and politically.

Dr C. Chandramouli, Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, “Housing Stock, Amenities & Assets in Slums—Census 2011.” Powerpoint presentation, http://censusindia.gov.in/2011-Docuements/On_Slums-2011Final.ppt .

“Development Strategy,” cited on website of M M (Mukesh Mehta) Project Consultants Pvt Ltd., https://www.mmpcpl.com/development-strategy .

3.   Christine Furedy , “Whose Responsibility: Dilemmas of Calcutta’s Bustee Policy in the Nineteenth Century,” South Asia 5, no. 2 (1982): 24–46 .

4.   David Arnold , “Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896–1900,” in Subaltern Studies V , edited by Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 55–90 .

5.   Prashant Kidambi , “‘An Infection of Locality’: Plague, Pythogenesis and the Poor in Bombay, c. 1896–1905,” Urban History 31, no. 2 (2004): 249–267 .

6.   R. B. Gupta , Labour and Housing in India (Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co., 1930): 64 .

Report of the Cawnpore [Kanpur] Labour Inquiry Committee, Chairman: Babu Rajendra Prasad (Allahabad, 1938): 420.

8.   Prashant Kidambi , “From ‘Social Reform’ to ‘Social Service’: Indian Civic Activism and the Civilizing Mission in Colonial Bombay, c. 1900–1920,” in Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development , edited by Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 217–239 ; Nandini Gooptu , The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 66–110 .

9.   Helen E. Meller , “Urbanization and the Introduction of Modern Town Planning Ideas in India, 1900–1925,” in Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economic and Social History , edited by K. N. Chaudhuri and Clive J. Dewey (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 330–350 .

10.   Philip Boardman , Patrick Geddes: Maker of the Future (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 386–390 ; Philip Boardman , The Worlds of Patrick Geddes: Biologist, Town Planner, Re-Educator, Peace-Warrior (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1978), 294–297 .

11.   Patrick Clibbens , “‘The Destiny of this City is to be the Spiritual Workshop of the Nation:’ Clearing Cities and Making Citizens during the Indian Emergency, 1975–1977,” Contemporary South Asia 22, no. 1 (2014): 53–55 .

12.   Emma Tarlo , Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) .

Cited in Clibbens, “Destiny of the City,” 62 and passim.

14.   P. Sainath , “The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing,” The Hindu , February 5, 2005 .

15.   Swapna Banerjee-Guha , “Neoliberalising the ‘Urban’: New Geographies of Power and Injustice in Indian Cities,” Economic and Political Weekly 44, no. 22 (2009): 95–107 .

16.   Nandan Nilekani , Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century (New Delhi: Allen Lane, Penguin Books India, 2008), 207–232 .

17.   Darshini Mahadevia , “Branded and Renewed? Policies, Politics and Processes of Urban Development in the Reform Era,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 31 (2011): 56–64 .

18.   Ayona Datta , “Postcolonial Urban Futures: Imagining and Governing India’s Smart Urban Age,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space , online only (October 4, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818800721 .

19.   Satish Deshpande , “Imagined Economies: Styles of Nation-Building in Twentieth Century India,” Journal of Arts and Ideas nos. 25–26 (1993): 27 .

20.   Sanjay Srivastava , “Urban Spaces, Post-Nationalism and the Making of the Consumer-Citizen in India,” in New Cultural Histories of India , ed. Partha Chatterjee , Tapati Guha Thakurta and Bodhisattva Kar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014) , ch. 13.

21.   Rajesh Bhattacharya and Kalyan Sanyal , “Bypassing the Squalor: New Towns, Immaterial Labour and Exclusion in Post-Colonial Urbanisation,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 31 (2011): 41–48 .

22.   Janaki Nair , “‘Social Municipalism’ and the New Metropolis,” in Contested Transformations: Changing Economies and Identities in Contemporary India , ed. Mary John et al. (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006), 125–146 .

23.   Debolina Kundu , “Elite Capture in Participatory Urban Governance,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 10 (2011): 23–25 .

24.   D. Asher Ghertner , “Analysis of New Legal Discourses behind Delhi’s Slum Demolitions,” Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 20 (2008): 57–66 .

25. All these cases are cited in ibid .

26.   Ibid .

27. Cited in Aman Sethi , “Some Home Truths,” Frontline , August 15, 2008, 38 .

28.   Yogendra Yadav , “India’s Third Electoral System, 1989–99,” Economic and Political Weekly 34, nos. 34–35 (1999): 2393–2399 .

29.   Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss , Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) .

30.   Siddharth Srivastava , “Mumbai Struggles to Catch Up with Shanghai,” Asia Times On-line , March 16, 2005, https://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GC16Df02.html .

31.   P. Sainath , “The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing,” The Hindu , February 5, 2005 .

32.   Solomon Benjamin , “Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy Beyond Policy and Programs,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, no. 3 (2008): 719–729 ; Solomon Benjamin , “The Aesthetics of ‘the Ground Up’ City,” Seminar 612 (August 2010), http://www.indiaseminar.com/2010/612/612_solomon_benjamin.htm .

33.   Gavin Shatkin and Sanjeev Vidyarthi , “Introduction: Contesting the Indian city: Global Visions and the Politics of the Local,” in Contesting the Indian City: Global Visions and the Politics of the Local , ed. Gavin Shatkin (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, Blackwell, 2014), 1–38 .

34.   Veena Das and Michael Walton , “Political Leadership and the Urban Poor: Local Histories,” Current Anthropology 56, Supplement 11 (October 2015): S53 .

35.   Darshini Mahadevia , “NURM and the Poor in Globalising Mega Cities,” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 31 (2006): 3399–3403 .

36.   Das and Walton, “Political Leadership” ; Lalitha Kamath and M. Vijayabaskar , “Middle-Class and Slum-Based Collective Action in Bangalore: Contestations and Convergences in a Time of Market Reforms,” Journal of South Asian Development 9, no. 2 (2014): 147–171 ; John Harriss , “‘New Politics’ and the Governmentality of the Post-Liberalization State in India: An Ethnographic Perspective,” in The State in India after Liberalization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives , ed. Akhil Gupta and K. Sivaramakrishnan (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), 91–108 .

37.   Arjun Appadurai , “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 21–47 ; Colin McFarlane , “Geographical Imaginations and Spaces of Political Engagement: Examples from the Indian Alliance,” Antipode 35, no. 5 (2004): 890–916 .

38.   Judy Whitehead and Nitin More , “Revanchism in Mumbai? Political Economy of Rent Gaps and Urban Restructuring in a Global City,” Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 25 (2007): 2428–2434 ; Ananya Roy , “Civic Governmentality: The Politics of Inclusion in Beirut and Mumbai,” Antipode 4, no. 1 (2009): 159–179 .

  Harriss, “New Politics” ; Roy, “Civic Governmentality.”

40.   Carey A. Watt , “Philanthropy and Civilizing Missions in India, 1820–1960: States, NGOs and Development,” in Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development , ed. Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 271–316 .

41.   Colin McFarlane , “The Entrepreneurial Slum: Civil Society, Mobility and the Co-production of Urban Development,” Urban Studies 49, no. 13 (2012): 2795–2816 .

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Urbanization & Growth of Slums in India: Evidence from Census of India (2001-2011)

2021, Towards Excellence

Urbanization has been recognized as a symbol of development as well as a burden over resources. The latter dimension is particularly so in developing countries since the process of urbanization is very rapid. The main reason for rapid urbanization is natural growth, migration from rural to urban areas, and small cities to large cities. It leads to many issues like haphazard urban growth, overcrowding, lack of essential services, ill health, unemployment, inadequate housing facilities, and others. Such problems in developing countries, especially in India, may become acute from its current state of being chronic. Therefore, present research work is an attempt to understand the level, trend, and pattern of urbanization and growth of slums in India during the 2001-2011 census years. Moreover, to examine the association between urbanization and growth of slums in India during the last two decades. In India, the rate of urbanization and slum growth is not equally proportionate. Some states/UTs have a high urban percentage, but a low slum growth rate has been registered, i.e., Chandigarh followed by Pondicherry, Goa and Mizoram. In comparison, some states have low urban population growth, but a high percentage of the slum population is emerging.

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Slum population being a global phenomenon poses several challenges relating to the society, culture, economy, politics and environment. Increasing slum in the developing countries like India is a result of unplanned and haphazard way urbanization. In the last few decades slum population has tremendously grown in most of the major cities of India and has posed serious threat to sustainable urban development. This paper aims at investigating and mapping out the demographic, socio-cultural and economic characteristics of slum population in India with a view to arrive at certain conclusions for formulating viable plans and policies for upgrading slums towards the well-being of the poor slum dwellers. The analysis of this paper is exclusively based on the secondary data collected from various published sources. The findings of the study shows that there is high density of population characterized by low general sex ratio, high child sex ratio, high growth rate of population, large share of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe population, low level of literacy, low income with high poverty, high work participation with large share of working population in informal sector of urban economy. The analysis of the paper is supported by the cartographic representation.

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Urbanization in developing world is unprecedented, and in coming few years the number of urban dwellers is expected to exceed rural dwellers. In India, due to unprecedented and unplanned urbanization the slum areas in urban society are rapidly increasing posing serious threat to sustainable development of the country. The objective of the present study is to map out major slum areas of an urban centre, the environmental conditions in and around of those slum areas and the impact of environmental condition on health profile of the dwellers. The analysis is based on primary data collected at two points of time i.e. November-December 2001; May-June 2009 with the help of a questionnaire through a comprehensive survey of ten major slum areas of Aligarh city, India. The analysis reveals that these areas are characterized by complete absence of basic amenities and facilities like drinking water, toilets and bathroom, drainage system and garbage disposal facilities, and no improvement has b...

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Life Satisfaction among the Poorest of the Poor: A Study in Urban Slum Communities in India

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• Volume 67 , pages 281–293, ( 2022 )

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This study investigates the level and predictors of life satisfaction in people living in slums in Kolkata, India. Participants of six slum settlements ( n  = 164; 91% female) were interviewed and data on age, gender, poverty indicators and life satisfaction were collected. The results showed that the level of global life satisfaction in this sample of slum residents did not significantly differ from that of a representative sample of another large Indian city. In terms of life-domain satisfaction, the slum residents were most satisfied with their social relationships and least satisfied with their financial situation. Global life satisfaction was predicted by age, income and non-monetary poverty indicators (deprivation in terms of health, education and living standards) ( R 2 15.4%). The current study supports previous findings showing that people living in slums tend to report higher levels of life satisfaction than one might expect given the deprivation of objective circumstances of their lives. Furthermore, the results suggest that factors other than objective poverty make life more, or less, satisfying. The findings are discussed in terms of theory about psychological adaptation to poverty.

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Introduction

Over the past decades, life satisfaction has received an increasing amount of attention. Life satisfaction refers to the cognitive evaluation of the quality of one’s life as a whole (global life satisfaction), or of specific life domains (domain satisfaction) (Myers & Diener, 1995 ). Numerous studies have emphasized the links of life satisfaction with several benefits such as health, longevity, social relationships, prosociality and productivity (de Neve et al., 2013 ; Diener & Tay, 2012 ; Heintzelman & Tay, 2017 ; Lyubomirsky et al., 2005 ). Given its benefits, life satisfaction has become more and more relevant, both for individuals and policymakers (Maccagnan et al., 2019 ). It is, therefore, not surprising that over the past decades there has been an extraordinary amount of effort put in the assessment of life satisfaction, both on the national and the individual level. For instance, since 2005, the Gallup World Poll has collected data on life satisfaction of large samples in more than 160 countries in over 140 languages (Helliwell et al., 2019 ). This allows for between-country comparison on life satisfaction as well as analysis of change in life satisfaction within countries over time.

The positive effects of life satisfaction highlight the importance of improving our understanding of its antecedents and what can be done to improve it within society for psychology, public health and policy makers in these fields. One of the most interesting questions with regard to life satisfaction is the extent to which life satisfaction is influenced by external and material conditions versus personal factors (including the attitude towards these conditions). A more specific question is “What are the conditions for a satisfied life: to what extent needs life to be trouble-free?”. Available evidence shows that the average ratings of life satisfaction are lower in nations and people who are afflicted by serious hardship (e.g., war, violence personal adversity and loss) than in nations/people that are not. On the other hand, evidence obtained in various settings shows that people can be quite happy and can even thrive in spite of difficult circumstances (Veenhoven, 2005 ). These paradoxical findings make clear that there is more to learn about life satisfaction, in particular in people confronted with serious hardship.

The current study has been carried out in India, which is extreme in terms of population density and wealth inequality. Moreover, India is facing a large number of other social issues such as caste system, gender inequality, child labor, illiteracy, poverty, religious conflicts, and more. It represents, therefore, a particularly interesting setting for research on life satisfaction. This study focuses on life satisfaction of people living in a very low resource setting i.e., in urban slums in India where hardship is bounteous, which remains a vastly understudied group.

Growth and Inequality in India

India is one of the most culturally, linguistically, and genetically diverse countries in the world. It consists of 28 states and 9 union territories, has 22 official languages and over a thousand dialects, six major religions and over 4000 castes (Venkata Ratnam & Chandra, 1996 ). It is a country of opposites: on the one hand, India is known for its immense population and population growth, its pollution and poverty (Chandramouli, 2011 ; Khilnani & Tiwari, 2018 ; Thorat et al., 2017 ). On the other hand, however, it is a country of opportunities, where the economy and technological development are thriving at enormous speed: India has the second biggest annual GDP growth in the world and the national GDP grew about 260 percent from 2000 to 2019 (The World Bank, 2021 ). Regardless of the economic growth and newly achieved wealth in India, the wealth inequality in the country has increased rapidly since 1991. Where the wealth of Indian billionaires increased by almost 10 times over the last decade, the poorest half of the population saw their wealth rise by just 1 percent (Himanshu, 2018 ). Taking into consideration that about 22 percent—270 million people—of the total population in India is living below the poverty line (Reserve Bank of India, 2015 ), economic wealth is far out of sight for a significant number of people.

Throughout the twentieth century distress and poverty in the rural areas in India resulted in a huge influx of refugees and migrants into urban areas which has led cities to grow rapidly since the 1950s (Singh, 2016 ). The rapid urbanization resulted in lack of space and acceptable housing which culminated in the emergence of slum settlements in and outside the city (Ray, 2017 ). Although the living conditions in most slums are generally bad, there is significant variation between slums for example with regard to available facilities, identity groups (e.g., Hindu versus Muslim) and reported incomes (Lange, 2020 ). Another source of variability between slums is legal status. More than half of all slums in India are not recognized by the government (Nolan et al., 2017 ). These slums, also known as non-notified slums, are more deprived in access to basic services and living security than notified slums and people living in these slums live under a constant threat of eviction (Ray, 2017 ). This deprivation of living security may have negative consequences. Evidence from a systematic review revealed that threat of eviction is related to lower mental and physical health such as depression, anxiety, psychological distress, suicide, elevated blood pressure and child maltreatment (Vásquez-Vera et al., 2017 ). Even with significant variation in living security, facilities and ethical/religious demographics, slums are often deprived with respect to economic, social and living conditions (Ray, 2017 ) and most people would consider these places as unsuitable for living. When it comes to well-being, one might expect that a population of this enormous magnitude, living in these deprived circumstances, is less happy as their more privileged, Indian counterparts. But are the poor really as dissatisfied with life as one might expect them to be?

Poverty and Life Satisfaction in Urban Slum Settlements

The idea that material conditions (e.g., money) matter to happiness has inspired many scholars to explore the relationship between income and life satisfaction (e.g., Tay et al., 2018 ). The results of these studies show that income contributes to life satisfaction. For instance, the World Happiness Report 2019 found that higher national incomes are linked with higher life satisfaction of citizens, indicating that on average, those living in richer countries are happier than those living in poorer countries (Helliwell et al., 2019 ). The results from within-nation studies show however that the positive correlation between income and life satisfaction varies. The highest correlations between income and life satisfaction were found in low-income groups living in economically less developed countries. Yet, this relationship remains weak, which implies that income explains little of the variance in life satisfaction (Howell & Howell, 2008 ).

Despite the plethora of research on life satisfaction, few studies have focused on life satisfaction in people living in extreme poverty. Traditionally, poverty has been conceptualized as economic deprivation. Yet, since the 1980s, the definition of poverty has broadened from a monetary approach (measured by income only) to a multidimensional approach which takes into account other factors related to basic needs such as housing, sanitation, and education. Previous studies (Bag & Seth, 2018 ; Ki et al., 2005 ) showed that a multidimensional assessment of poverty more completely captures the phenomenon and it is now widely recognized that multidimensional poverty is a richer concept than the traditional unidimensional monetary approach (Asselin, 2009 ). The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), constructed by (Alkire & Foster, 2011 ), is a methodology to measure poverty corresponding to the three dimensions: Health, Education and Standard of Living (Table 1 ). It gathers different household-level information with the use of ten indicators and captures whether households suffer deprivation according to the dimensions. Most of the research on poverty and life satisfaction has focused on the monetary approach solely, whereas the current research builds on this by including non-monetary indices of poverty.

The Current Research

The purpose of this study is to examine life satisfaction and its predictors in the context of extreme poverty. The study is set in Kolkata which is one of the largest cities in India. Out of a total population of about 4.5 million people (Government of India, 2011 ), almost a third of its inhabitants lives in slums (Ray, 2017 ) showing the importance of carrying out research in this particular population.

The current study aims to replicate the work of (Biswas-Diener & Diener, 2001 ) who performed a study on life satisfaction among the poorest inhabitants of Kolkata in 2001. Their results showed that their sample, consisting of pavement dwellers, slum residents and sex workers, scored slightly negative on global life satisfaction. It is noteworthy, however, that the level of global life satisfaction in slum residents (which was significantly higher than in the other disadvantaged groups) almost matched the level of global life satisfaction in Indian students. Moreover, it was found that the participants were satisfied with most of the assessed life domains. These findings suggest that certain communities and cultures, although poor, may enjoy a relatively high level of life satisfaction.

Nearly 20 years have passed since then and during that time India has seen rapid changes. Economic growth has combined with actions by government agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to address the newly revised target of the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG): “to end poverty in all forms everywhere” (United Nations, 2015 ). Yet, despite these efforts, the gap between the rich and the poor has widened and still a substantial proportion of the population lives below the poverty line (World Bank Group, 2020 ). After 20 years of change it might be time to investigate the life satisfaction of the extreme poor again.

The current study focuses on the level and determinants of life satisfaction of people living in slums in Kolkata. In line with the study by Biswas-Diener and Diener ( 2001 ) the assessment of global life satisfaction will be complemented with measures of life-domain satisfaction (e.g., income satisfaction, health satisfaction). What is new is that the study does not solely focuses on monetary poverty as a predictor of life satisfaction, but also takes the explanatory power of multidimensional aspects of poverty into account. Last, as 59% of the slums in India are non-notified (Nolan et al., 2017 ), the role of fear of eviction as a predictor of global life satisfaction will be explored.

The specific aims of this study are:

To document the level of life satisfaction (global and domain-specific) of people living in urban slums in Kolkata, India.

To test whether there is a difference between the different domain satisfactions (social relationships, physical environment, physical health, psychological health and financial situation) in people living in urban slums in Kolkata, India.

To compare the level of global life satisfaction of slum residents with global life satisfaction measured in a representative sample from the general population of another large Indian city (Delhi) as measured by the Gallup Poll.

To examine age, gender, poverty indicators (monetary, multidimensional) and fear of eviction as predictors of global life satisfaction.

Participants and Procedure

Participants.

The present study, conducted by Calcutta Rescue in 2019, is part of a larger cross-sectional research project on poverty in urban slums (Lange, 2020 ). Calcutta Rescue is a medium-sized NGO that focuses on supporting the slum communities in Kolkata which are most poorly served by the local and national government. Participants were eligible for this study if they were 18 years and older and resided in one of the six different slum settlements in the urban area of Kolkata in India (see Sect.  Slum Selection and Sampling Method ). Participation was voluntary and participants did not receive any financial compensation for their participation. The informed consent was read to (or by) all participants, dependent on whether the respondent was able to read and write. In case the respondent was illiterate, the informed consent was explained verbally, and a literate family member was asked to sign on behalf of the participant, or a thumbprint was obtained from the respondent.

Slum Selection and Sampling Method

A slum area is defined broadly in line with the 1997 Indian Compendium of Environment Statistics as groups of 25 or more poor-quality dwellings (Kundu, 2003 ). The slums to be sampled were all part of the operational area of Calcutta Rescue and were distributed across the city. Part of the slum settlements was unregistered and part was registered (legal). The slums varied in population size: based on the average household size and the number of households, the estimated population numbers vary between 132 (Baranagar) and 1107 (Local Bustee). Following Kundu’s (Kundu, 2003 ) study on slums in Kolkata, a systematic sampling method was used. According to this method, an equal distribution of 15 percent of the households is considered as a minimum sample size. The current study aimed at sampling/interviewing 20 percent of the slum or 30 households, whichever was bigger. In order to get an equal sample across the whole slum, the area was mapped and households were counted prior to data collection. Every fifth household (20 percent) was asked to participate. Data were collected during the day and the structured interviews lasted between 25 and 50 min. Interviews were conducted in the participant’s home with the researcher and a translator, who was fluent in English, Bengali and Hindi. The data were recorded on smartphones in (KoBoToolBox, 2019 ), an online data collection system for challenging environments.

Life Satisfaction

Global life satisfaction was assessed using Cantril’s ladder (Cantril, 1965 ). Respondents were asked to evaluate their satisfaction with their lives as a whole using the Ladder Scale; an illustration of a ladder which represents their life, 1 being their worst possible life and 8 being their best possible life. Participants’ domain satisfaction was measured with 5 single items assessing participants’ satisfaction with different life domains: social relationships, physical environment, physical health, psychological health and financial situation. The items were derived from the WHO questionnaire on Quality of Life (WHOQoL Group, 1994 ) (e.g., In general, how satisfied are you with your social relationships ) using a 5-point Likert scale format. The one-to-five rating was depicted on a piece of paper ranging from an extreme frown (1) to an extreme smile (5), similar to earlier research by Biswas-Diener and Diener (Biswas-Diener & Diener, 2001 ). Higher scores reflect higher levels of life satisfaction.

Predictors of Life Satisfaction

Socio-demographic variables.

Socio-demographic variables included age and gender (female = 0, male = 1).

Poverty was measured in two ways: using both monetary (income) and non-monetary approaches (MPI).

Monthly income per capita was calculated based on the monthly household income divided by the number of household members.

Multidimensional Poverty

Table 1 illustrates the assessment of multidimensional poverty based on the Multidimensional Poverty Index (Alkire & Santos, 2014 ; UNDP, 2020 ). The MPI identifies deprivations at the household and individual level across three dimensions and 10 indicators: Health (child mortality, nutrition), Education (years of schooling and school enrollment) and Standard of Living (water, sanitation, electricity, cooking fuel, floor, assets). As shown in the table each of the three dimensions is equally weighted (one third each), though the individual indicators receive different weights. Weights are thus applied to each of the indicators, which are then summed up to a total MPI score. The total MPI score for each person lies between 0 and 1. A higher score represents a higher level of multidimensional deprivation.

Fear of Eviction

In addition to the above-mentioned MPI-indicators, information was gathered about whether the participant experienced a fear of being evicted ( 0  =  no, 1  =  yes ).

Statistical Analysis

An a priori power analysis was conducted through G power (Faul et al., 2009 ) (α = 0.05, power = 0.80, medium effect sizes) to calculate the required sample size. Descriptive statistics (medians, means, standard deviations, percentages) were used to describe the data and to address the first research aim. Repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the significance of the mean differences between the five life domains (research aim 2). The Greenhouse–Geisser adjustment was used to correct for violation of assumption of sphericity, which is common in ANOVA within-subject analyses. Effect sizes (ES) were based on Cohen’s η 2 (ES: 0.01 = small, 0.06 = medium, 0.16 or larger = large) (Draper, 2011 ). To address the third research aim we compared the sample mean with the mean life satisfaction score of a representative sample of the general population in Delhi as measured by the Gallup Poll (De Neve & Krekel, 2020 ). We first homogenized the responses for the Cantril’s ladder of our study (measured on a 1–8 response format) with those obtained by the Gallup Poll (the Cantril’s ladder in the Gallup Poll uses a 0–10 response format) using the linear stretch method (de Jonge et al., 2014 ). The one sample t test was used to determine whether the Kolkata slum sample mean significantly differed from the Delhi general population mean. Effect sizes were based on Cohen’s d (ES: 0.2 = small, 0.5 = medium, and 0.8 or larger = large; Draper, 2011 ). The fourth research aim was tested by applying hierarchical multiple regression analysis (method enter) in which age and gender were entered in the first step, income per capita in the second step and the MPI and living security in the third step. Effect sizes were based on R 2 (1% small, 9% medium, 25% large; Draper, 2011 ). Statistical significance (alpha) was assessed at the 0.05 level.

Sample Characteristics

The characteristics of the sample (N = 164) are described in Table 2 . As shown in the table, the sample was predominantly female (90.9%). Almost two-thirds of the sample were literate and from a Hindu background. The participants were long-term residents who had, themselves or their families, lived in the slum settlement for decades (not shown in the table). Almost two-third of the households was deprived in living security (64.6%). Most participants were able to meet daily needs. The results showed that the participants were most deprived in terms of housing, assets and living security.

The Level of Life Satisfaction in Kolkata Slum Residents

The descriptive statistics for global and domain-specific life satisfaction (research aim 1) are presented in Table 3 . With regard to research aim 2, the results of the repeated measures ANOVA with a Greenhouse–Geisser correction demonstrated a significant difference between the mean satisfaction levels across the different life domains ( F (3.61, 580.69) = 21.83, p  = 0.000, partial η 2  = 0.12). A Bonferroni-adjusted post hoc analysis revealed that the participants reported significantly lower satisfaction in the financial domain than in the other life domains, whereas their ratings of satisfaction in the social domain were significantly higher than those of the other life domains (all p  < 0.05). The satisfaction levels of the living environment domain and health domains (physical and psychological) did not significantly differ from each other (all p ’s > 0.05).

Life Satisfaction: Kolkata Slum Residents vs. the General Population

Regarding research aim 3, the results of the one sample t test showed the mean global life satisfaction score measured in Kolkata’s slum population ( M  = 4.27, SD  = 3.19) did not significantly differ from the average global life satisfaction score of 4.01 of people living in Delhi (De Neve & Krekel, 2020 ). The difference, 0.26, 95% CI [-0.24 to 0.75], t (160) = 1.02, p  = 0.31, represented an effect size of d = 0.08.

Prediction of Life Satisfaction

Table 4 shows the relationships between (non)monetary indices of poverty, fear of eviction and global life satisfaction (controlled for age and gender) (research aim 4). The results of the bivariate analyses (presented in the second column of the table) revealed that lower age, higher income, lower levels of multidimensional deprivation (MPI scores) and lower scores on fear of eviction were associated with higher levels of global life satisfaction. When entered in the multivariate model (presented in columns 3–5 of the table) the association between fear of eviction and global life satisfaction was no longer significant. The MPI (reflecting the non-monetary approach to poverty) accounted for additional variance (above income). The full model explained 15.4% of the variance ( F (5, 150) = 5.46; p  = 0.00) in global life satisfaction.

This study investigated the level and predictors of life satisfaction of people living in slums in Kolkata, India. In line with previous research, it was found that slum residents were less dissatisfied with their lives than one would have held given the dire living conditions of these people. For the prediction of global life satisfaction, income (monetary poverty) was complemented with the Multidimensional Poverty Index (non-monetary poverty) and fear of eviction. The results showed that not only income but also non-monetary indices such as education, living standards and fear of eviction are important correlates of life satisfaction of people living in slums.

The level of global life satisfaction observed in this study was comparable to those measured in a representative sample from Delhi, another large metropole in India. Although counterintuitive, our finding of a relatively high level of life satisfaction in a marginalized group is not new. For example, in a study among the poorest of the poor in South Africa, it was found that landfill waste pickers scored higher on life satisfaction than the national average (Blaauw et al., 2020 ). The same study found that there was a significant group of waste pickers who were very satisfied with their lives. Our findings also resemble those reported by Biswas-Diener and Diener ( 2001 ) and Cox ( 2012 ) who found slightly positive global life satisfaction in urban slum residents and dump dwellers in Kolkata, India and Managua, Nicaragua, respectively.

With regard to domain satisfaction, the slum residents were fairly satisfied with three of the five life domains assessed in this study i.e., their social relationships and health (physical and psychological). They were least satisfied with their financial situation and physical environment. Similar findings have been reported in previous studies addressing domain satisfaction in poor populations (Biswas-Diener & Diener, 2001 ; Cox, 2012 ; Sharma et al., 2019 ). Various scholars have emphasized the importance of social ties for well-being (Diener & Seligman, 2004 ), especially in poor populations (Boswell & Stack, 1975 ; Domínguez & Watkins, 2003 ; Henly, 2007 ). Social connectedness has been associated with access to various forms of social support and cognitive processes associated with subjective well-being such as life satisfaction, enhanced self-esteem, self-worth, purpose and meaning in life (Thoits, 2011 ). Social ties may serve as a private safety net, a poor family can fall back on in times of need (Edin & Lein, 1997 ).

In terms of prediction, higher levels of life satisfaction were related to age, income and deprivation. Due to shared variance with the MPI, fear of eviction did not explain unique variance in life satisfaction. Specifically, younger residents and those with higher incomes and lower scores on the MPI reported higher levels of global life satisfaction. Our findings regarding the relationship between age and global life satisfaction related to those reported by (Cox, 2012 ) who examined age as a predictor of life satisfaction in poor populations in Nicaragua and data from the Gallup World Poll (Fortin et al., 2015 ). Our results are in line with previous work which emphasized the role of income in life satisfaction (Whitaker & Moss, 1976 ). Moreover, the income-life satisfaction relationship in this study was comparable to the average r effect size of 0.28 computed for low-income samples in developing countries in Howell and Howell’s ( 2008 ) meta-analysis. The current study also confirms the results of research reporting a negative relationship between the MPI and life satisfaction in people living in the poorest districts of Peru (Mateu et al., 2020 ) and India (Strotmann & Volkert, 2018 ).

Overall, data from several studies suggest that slum residents in developing countries, such as India, are more satisfied with their lives than one would expect based on their living conditions. This contradicts the common-sense belief that poor people are unhappy by definition. Such judgment is, however, an illustration of the “focusing illusion” (Schkade & Kahneman, 1998 ) which has received a lot of attention in the literature on life satisfaction. The “focusing illusion” takes place when individuals exaggerate the importance of a single factor (e.g., living circumstances or material wealth) on well-being. Going beyond the stereotype that poverty equates unhappiness may provide a different picture. Research suggests that people living in poverty may consider different aspects of life important for their well-being than people from a more affluent background. For example, extremely poor Nicaraguan garbage dump dwellers in the study by (Vásquez-Vera et al., 2017 ) reported that their happiness did not emerge from job status or income, but rather from meaningful interactions and relationships with others.

Moreover, the explanatory power of objective poverty (as measured by income and the MPI) for life satisfaction was limited. This is in line with a vast array of research showing that objective life conditions do explain only a minor part of inter-individual differences in life satisfaction (Argyle, 2013 ; Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2002 ). How hardship is perceived on the other hand, may be of much bigger importance for the appraisal of one's life (Veenhoven, 2005 ). Poverty is a subjective feeling, which means that people defined as poor by objective standards do not necessarily have to feel poor. Indeed, results from a recent meta-analysis (Tan et al., 2020 ) indicate that life satisfaction has a stronger link to subjective socio-economic status than objectively measured income or education.

Our findings could be interpreted in the light of the human capacity to adapt to environmental demands. Adaptability is a self-regulatory resource which allows individuals to adjust to good and bad phenomena by altering their standards, thoughts, behaviors and emotions to the requirements of situations at hand. Adaptability can help prevent or mitigate the negative impact of challenge and adversity on well-being (Carver & Scheier, 2001 ). Following the multiple discrepancies theory (Michalos, 1985 ), life satisfaction relates to the discrepancy between what one has and what one wants (desire discrepancy) and what relevant others have (social comparison discrepancy) (Brown et al., 2009 ). Perceived negative discrepancies between one’s standards and one’s actual situation have a negative impact on life satisfaction. In the context of slums, perceived discrepancies between what one has (slum dwelling) and what one wants (a decent house), or what one has (no income) and what relevant others have (improvement in daily wage) could be a source of dissatisfaction with life. Effects of perceived negative discrepancies can be counterbalanced, however, by self-regulatory discrepancy reducing processes such as choosing a relevant reference group for social comparison and lowering aspirations (Carver & Scheier, 2001 ).

Regarding social comparison, it has been found that people have a natural tendency to compare themselves with others (Festinger, 1954 ), in particular with relevant reference groups such as people with a similar ethnicity, background or occupation (Khaptsova & Schwartz, 2016 ). In the case of low status or minority groups, several studies found that exposure to a successful referent from a low-status group is more pleasant and meaningful than exposure to a referent from a high-status group (Blanton et al., 2000 ; Leach & Smith, 2006 ; Mussweiler et al., 2000 ). This highlights the value of identifying local champions (e.g., former classmates who have excelled in school or sports) to serve as role models for young people living in low resource settings (Kearney & Levine, 2020 ).

Lowering aspirations is another discrepancy reducing mechanism. This has been observed in deprived neighborhoods including two Kenyan urban slums (Kabiru et al., 2013 ) where the constraints of the environment had a leveling effect on young people’s occupational and educational aspirations. Similar findings have been reported for youth in disadvantaged neighborhoods in the US and Scotland (Furlong et al., 1996 ; Stewart et al., 2007 ). In the case of Kolkata, it is possible that slum residents compare themselves mostly to people within their community and set their aspirations and goals accordingly. Indeed, research has found that expectations of life and oneself are influenced by one’s relative position and social norms within one’s community (Knight et al., 2009 ). Both social comparison and lowering aspirations are self-protective strategies that may help to ensure subjective well-being in situations in which the remediation of disadvantage is beyond the scope of personal control (Blanton et al., 2000 ; Leach & Smith, 2006 ; Mussweiler et al., 2000 ). Unfortunately, such strategies may also lead to aspiration traps where people under-aspire in occupational and educational goals, thereby contributing to the intergenerational transmission of poverty (Flechtner, 2014 ).

This study is one of the few examining life satisfaction in people living in a very low resource setting such as an urban slum in India. Other strengths are the relatively large sample size and the inclusion of non-monetary indicators of objective poverty as predictors of life satisfaction. The use of non-monetary poverty indices such as the MPI in life satisfaction research is relatively new. This approach is in line with new perspectives on measuring the material situation (combining income with a direct measure such as a deprivation index) (Christoph, 2010 ). Our results (showing an incremental contribution by the MPI) suggest the added value of combining monetary- (income) and non-monetary measures (the MPI) when analyzing the relationship between the material situation and life satisfaction.

Nevertheless, some limitations merit attention. First of all, this study only included objective measures of poverty. The addition of subjective measures of poverty (the individual’s perception of his/her financial and material situation) could have offered a more complete picture of the poverty-life satisfaction relationship. Secondly, the cross-sectional design of this study failed to establish causality. Thirdly, because the interviews were conducted in person and in the participants’ homes, which gave the possibility onlookers or family members meandering in earshot of the survey being asked, the research design could have been prone to social desirability bias (Tourangeau et al., 2000 ). Finally, the fact that the sample was predominantly female was most likely caused by the fact that interviews were conducted during the day when women were more typically at home. This may limit the generalization of the results. However, a recent meta-analysis of 281 samples (Batz-Barbarich et al., 2018 ) did not show significant gender differences in life satisfaction. In addition, the study of Biswas-Diener and Diener ( 2001 ) which was conducted in a comparable sample in Kolkata showed no significant differences in life satisfaction between men and women. This gives us no reason to believe that the unequal sample sizes in gender influence outcomes in life satisfaction in the current study.

The results of the present study highlight the need for further research. A mixed methods design adding qualitative approaches to the assessment of life satisfaction could illuminate a more holistic and contextual understanding of slum residents’ perceptions and experiences in daily life (Camfield et al., 2009 ). Secondly, in addition to measures of objective poverty, further research should also include subjective indices of poverty as this accounts for a better prediction of life satisfaction compared to objective poverty measures (Tan et al., 2020 ). Lastly, it would be valuable to learn more in-depth about psychological processes underlying life satisfaction of people living in slums such as social comparison and aspirations.

In terms of clinical practice, practical assistance such as slum upgrading should be complemented with efforts to improve the life satisfaction of slum residents. Research highlights the benefits of a positive mindset including a less pronounced stress response (Smyth et al., 2017 ), better role functioning (Moskowitz et al., 2012 ) and more efficient decision making (Isen, 2000 ). This has been explained by research showing that a positive mental state helps building coping resources by broadening the individual’s attention and action repertoire (Fredrickson, 2004 ). Other research has shown that the presence of a positive mindset buffers against the negative psychological impact of adversity (Suldo & Huebner, 2004 ; Veenhoven, 2008 ). Psychological interventions aimed at improving the mental health of people living in slums should thus not exclusively focus on the reduction in problems but also on the enhancement of positive mental states. The few studies that have examined the effect of individual and group-based positive psychology interventions in disadvantaged populations in developing countries show promising results, including a large increase in life satisfaction, positive affect, positive thoughts, generalized self-efficacy and reductions in self-reported symptoms of depression and negative affect (Ghosal et al., 2013 ; Sundar et al., 2016 ). Efforts to improve the life satisfaction of the slum residents may thus be worthwhile to consider, as it may help them deal with the harsh reality of life.

The common belief that poor people are unhappy by definition is challenged by the results of this study on life satisfaction in urban slums in India. The findings of the study show that the slum residents in Kolkata scored comparable to the general population in terms of global life satisfaction (evaluation of the quality of life as a whole) and that they found satisfaction in other life domains than finances and their living environment. Moreover, in terms of prediction, objective poverty indicators explained only a minor part of the variance in life satisfaction. This suggests that it is not correct to determine a person’s life satisfaction on the basis of income and other socioeconomic variables alone and that other factors such as the appraisal of one’s life should be taken into account when examining life satisfaction. A suggestion for future studies is to include measures of subjective poverty and other personal individual difference factors when measuring the impact of poverty on life satisfaction.

Availability of data and material

Open ICPSR, https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/ . https://doi.org/10.3886/E136141V1

Code availability

IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, version 26.0

Abbreviations

Effect size

Gross domestic product

Multidimensional poverty index

Non-governmental organization

Sustainable development goal

World Health Organization

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Mr. Jaydeep Chakraborty, Chief Executive Officer at Calcutta Rescue, the Calcutta Rescue Research Collaborative and volunteer researchers Eleo Tibbs (UK), Maurice Lange (UK), and Ezra Spinner (NL) for their contributions to the foundation of this study. Debuprasad Chakraborty & Ananya Chatterjee (CR, India), and the interns (Madhubanti Talukdar, Annesha Dasgupta, Amrita Mukherjee, Sagnik Pramanick, Varbi Mridha) are thanked for all their help with data collection.

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Sulkers, E., Loos, J. Life Satisfaction among the Poorest of the Poor: A Study in Urban Slum Communities in India. Psychol Stud 67 , 281–293 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-022-00657-8

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Transforming India’s Slums: A Critical Step in Creating the New India

One of India’s biggest challenges today is coping with the wave of urbanisation unleashed by economic liberalisation. An estimated 160 million people have moved to the cities in the last two decades, and another 230 million are projected to move there within the next 20 years. Unfortunately, as any visitor to India can see for themselves, its major metros and tier-II cities are clearly finding it difficult to cope with the inflow of people. It is no surprise that India’s famously poor infrastructure is critically over-strained. In response, the ill-equipped urban systems and the informal housing that are the slums have expanded exponentially in the last few decades without proper access to basic services such as sanitation, healthcare, education, and law and order. While they are often teeming with entrepreneurial activity, they are nevertheless an inefficient use of the city’s human resources and land. In order to truly unleash the productive potential of this dynamic urban population, India will need to build scalable urban systems capable of housing, caring for, employing and integrating large and increasing numbers of new inhabitants. India is not alone in this challenge of course; Mexico, Brazil and Africa have some of the largest slums in the world. It is unclear whether there are simple solutions to the problem of slums given their extraordinary organic growth rates– 70% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban centres by 2050 – and solving slums requires a rethink of the design of cities and their borders as well as of the role of rural areas. The challenge, like with many such difficult transformations and reformations for India, is whether it can muster the political will and concerted efforts of its stakeholders to implement the level of change required.

India’s Struggle to Keep Pace with Urbanisation

Today, 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, a figure that is expected to reach 70% by 2050, implying an almost doubling of the global urban population within less than 40 years. Among global city dwellers today, almost 900m people live in areas considered slums. As cities continue to attract excess rural populations and people looking for economic opportunities, slums’ share of the urban environment will surely continue to grow, particularly in fast developing and low income countries where the rate of urbanisation exceeds urban systems’ ability to scale. “Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future’s victims.” Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, 1994 With an additional 230 million people projected to move to the cities in the next two decades,India is creating the equivalent of a new Mumbai every 18 months. Given this urbanisation phenomenon looks unstoppable, unless the relative size and power of the Indian economy and its distribution of wealth outpaces this shift by a substantial margin, India’s emergence will not result in a better quality of life for the majority of its citizens. If India’s politicians fail to deliver on the economic front, the disparity will grow between those living on the edge and those in the centre. It is widely held among a smug political and business class in India that the religious values of the nation forestall social unrest, but the patience of 230 million people housed in slums might well be tested if the government fails to deliver.

How Slums Develop, India’s Freedom Trap

India’s democracy provides free mobility to its people, of course. Part of the freedom of India’s democratic population is the apparent liberty to pursue their dreams anywhere in the country and India’s aspiring population is dynamic and determined to do so. The great slums of India are predominantly created when large numbers of individuals or families move to the urban centres of their dreams, usually in search of better economic prospects. Mumbai has been the number one choice of generations of Indians for decades. These urban centres are not geared to, nor governed in a manner that can accommodate (or reject) such an influx of people. As a result, the incoming migrants find accommodation in unorganised dwellings. India’s slums have received global attention not just from the global NGOs but also in popular culture through movies like Slumdog Millionaire, which portray them as centres of unmitigated squalor and despair. However poor this quality of life may seem from the outside, from a migrant slum-dweller’s perspective, living there is an entirely rational decision based on three basic factors:

• A Higher and More Stable Income. The productive employment opportunity in the urban centre will likely generate a higher and more consistent personal disposable income than in the place of origin - likely a rural, farming centre (e.g. being a chauffeur in Mumbai is a more lucrative and sustainable job proposition than being a labourer at a farm, typically a small plot in an un-electrified village with erratic water availability.
• Social Mobility for the Next Generation. Raising children in an urban environment creates a higher “option value” for the next generation. Typically, cities offers a wider choice of education and employment opportunities, and while no parent wishes their child to grow up in a slum, the chances that the child could rise to a middle class life provides a strong incentive to migrate to one from the countryside. This contrasts to a child growing up in a village dominated by a sub-scale farm with poor education and employment opportunities, who will not likely ever have the same social mobility opportunity.

Indian Slums in a Global and Historic Context

In that context, India’s slums are perhaps the to-be-expected outcome of the rapid economic changes the country is currently undergoing. However, before classifying them as a “necessary condition” and relegating them to the list of unsolved global phenomenon (and therefore not India’s responsibility to address), India’s leaders will need to recognise three important facts about slums unique to India:

• Unprecedented Scale. No country has or is facing the issue on the scale at which India is. By 2017, India is expected to have over 100 million people living in slums and another 10 million migrants moving to the cities each year. India cannot afford to pause or be complacent on urban development given the scale of this migration and in fact needs to play some ‘catch-up’ in scaling the infrastructure of its cities to match their populations.
• Political Clout Cuts Both Ways. India’s slum-dwellers are fully enfranchised and actively vote for national and local leaders who they feel will protect their interests. Slum-dwellers’ today know they represent a strong and highly influential vote and politicians know that delivering things of value to this constituency plays an important part in their ability to win their vote.
• No Control. Some other developing countries have more effective political tools to control urban migration. However, India’s democracy which assures the free movement of people throughout the country prevents any such controls from being even remotely feasible.

While slums may be born organically, they will not disappear automatically just because cities build more houses. If the slum is a fact of modern urbanisation of India, India’s choice is to decide what is its vision for the slum of the future, the role of the slum, its design and purpose, how it will transform slums to make them assets and thereby put them on the path to transforming into being the waiting room to enter a better life. If this is to happen, the real challenge is to support the organic process of mutating slums into dynamic city sub-centres in an ever-expanding city boundary.

Strategies for Transforming India’s Slums

As we have said of London, Paris and New York, the history of urbanisation is full of examples of cities which started off by being the hosts (willingly or not) to the economically weaker section of the population who were ultimately graduated from poor living conditions to a combination of affordable housing and basic civic amenities. The solution ultimately lies in better nations, not just better cities, which are scalable and capable of not only absorbing the inflow of people (from within or without), but in fact are economic magnets in attracting the best talent from the country. Five insights provide the basis of the solution. Firstly, slums are a logical response to urbanisation and the relative lack of opportunity outside of major urban centres in predominantly poor countries. They are facilitated by the right to migrate. So, they are a structural phenomenon. Secondly, slums become a system of living perpetuated by economics, politics and societal factors. Therefore, it makes sense to see them as a part of the system of a country and also the global system of trade and distribution of wealth. Thirdly, people accept and adapt to their circumstances without (external) triggers to encourage them to do otherwise. In this sense, slums are adaptive organisms. Fourthly, slum dwellers can improve the slum to a large extent if mobilised to do so. Therefore, they can also be developed as one would any organisational entity through the application of techniques of change management. Finally, slum dwellers cannot transform their slum (into a non-slum) without the support of the environment around them. They lack the critical human and financial resources to make a clean break from their situation. Their transformation requires external impetus and resources. In the absence of this external intervention, they can become disenfranchised rather than citizens in-waiting and have the potential to develop a culture, set of values and behaviours that can threaten the on-slum environment they live in.

Therefore, ultimately, a comprehensive and long-term solution to the problem of India’s slums cannot be about the slums themselves. A viable solution would have to take a holistic view dealing with India’s larger macro challenges and recognise the critical role which cities will have to play if India is to successfully transition into a middle-income country, and would include the following strategies:

• Industrial Revolution and Continued Development. While it was the industrial revolution which led to a wave of rapid urbanisation in the West which gave rise to slums, without the industrial revolution, the West would not have been able to afford to develop housing and infrastructure required for its growing populations. The solution to slums is not to reverse industrialisation or to try and contain urbanisation, but indeed to press forward with it more aggressively so that businesses can afford to provide jobs to slum-dwellers and pay them a proper wage.
• Knowledge and Freedom Advantage. India is not fully leveraging its “freedom advantage” (see our previous paper on China which highlights the strong link between a society’s freedom and its development potential) which should in theory allow for people to strive to realise their aspirations. In particular, India needs to create an open knowledge economy where the slum-dwellers are empowered to solve their own problems and have the access to financing to do so. This requires scaled charities and NGOs that can apply global best-practices to tackling India’s urban issues and also raise the necessary financing.
• Slum Architecture. Lesson from other cities indicate that slums are best solved when housing is horizontal not vertical. In order to assimilate slum-dwellers into urban life instead of further ostracizing them, India cannot just bulldoze the slums and pile up the people into apartment blocks. A real solution would involve building high-quality, low-cost, multi-storey, diverse formats such that these areas become integrated with the rest of the city (as we see in London or Paris). This needs the best brains in India and the world to come in and design the solutions. The slum is merely the platform for an urban re-invention.
• Sustainable Continuous Dynamic Infrastructure Provisioning. The government needs to create a framework for gradual and continuous upgrading of slum infrastructure through innovative public-private models and by leveraging the many dynamic charities and NGOs in India. Such a model would see the slum-dwellers become the driving force of, rather than bystanders to, the improvement of their living conditions by empowering them to identify the solution and then finance and implement it.
• Rural Re-Visioning and Investment. India cannot solve its slum problem by focusing on the cities alone. Any city which develops the systems to accommodate more people and create economic opportunities will attract a disproportionate number of migrants putting it under further strain unless opportunities in rural areas are sufficiently attractive relative to those in the city. Therefore a comprehensive solution would necessarily have to involve improved infrastructure, schools, employment opportunities and the overall quality of life in India’s small towns and rural centres. India’s countryside has all the potential of a Switzerland (Kashmir and the Himalayas), the Caribbean (the many beaches along its long coast), an African safari (the many wildlife sanctuaries and forests), and a Gulf desert trek (Rajasthan’s deserts and palaces) – however, the country has barely begun to exploit this potential.

Reflections: The Transformation of Slums is Really about the Transformation of India Itself

None of the five strategies described above on their own can transform the slums. However, if implemented together, they could represent a sea change in the way that India’s mass migration and resulting urbanisation is managed. This requires a recognition that the reason why slums in India persist and continue to expand is because of the failure to address fundamental issues of economic opportunity across the country, population growth, urban and rural development and education and skills development. A middle income India will indeed demand world-class cities and conversely, to reach middle income levels, India needs to create opportunity for the population to be gainfully employed. "Solving the issue is about as difficult as putting a man on the moon, but would have massive collateral benefits for the nation as a whole and would be a true indicator that India is truly ready to play its role on the global stage" Given India is already in the midst of a rocky economic cycle at the same time as slums are growing at the edge of every major city, the investment in urban infrastructure can create a highly positive multiplier effect for the economy while addressing a major issue. There is no single point in time or crisis which will tell us that India’s cities have suddenly become “un-livable”; however if the status quo prevails for the next 20 years, they will get progressively more chaotic and at some stage in the not-too-distant future, it will be impossible to harness the economic potential of India’s population without even more radical changes than those outlined above. Addressing this issue is one of the key steps in the regeneration of the India story and will have a highly positive impact on the success of the next government. Indeed, solving the issue is about as difficult as putting a man on the moon, but would have massive collateral benefits for the nation as a whole and would be a true indicator that India is truly ready to play its role on the global stage.

1.      Source: McKinsey, India’s Urban Awakening, 2010

2.      Source: United Nations Analysis

3.      Full defined as “residential areas where dwellings are unfit for human habitation by reasons of dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangements and design of such buildings, narrowness or faulty arrangement of street, lack of ventilation, light, or sanitation facilities or any combination of these factors which are detrimental to the safety and health.”

4.      Source: The Telegraph, Present Slum Area Not More Than Eight Percent of Total Land, 27-Feb-2005

5.      Other government reports, such as the Pranab Sen Committee Report indicated a higher slum population of approximately 90 million (as of 2010)

6.      Vishakapatnam (44%), Jabalpur (43%), Mumbai (41%), Vijaywada (41%) and Meerut (40%); Source: Government of India Statistics

7.      Housing and slum UN Habitat News, Naples Italy, (September 5, 2012)

8.      Source: Deccan Herald, “Dharavi Self-Created Special Economic Zone for the Poor”, 2011

9.      Source: Pranab Sen Committee Report, 2010

10.      For a more detailed perspective on the future of urban management systems, see Grand Design and Society: Creating the Cities of Tomorrow on GPC’s website

11.      See the Sign of the Times April 2012

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Survey-based socio-economic data from slums in Bangalore, India

• Debraj Roy   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3579-7219 1 , 2 ,
• Bharath Palavalli 3 ,
• Niveditha Menon 4 ,
• Robin King 5 , 6 ,
• Karin Pfeffer 1 ,
• Michael Lees 1 , 7 &
• Peter M. A. Sloot   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3848-5395 1 , 2 , 7  

Scientific Data volume  5 , Article number:  170200 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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In 2010, an estimated 860 million people were living in slums worldwide, with around 60 million added to the slum population between 2000 and 2010. In 2011, 200 million people in urban Indian households were considered to live in slums. In order to address and create slum development programmes and poverty alleviation methods, it is necessary to understand the needs of these communities. Therefore, we require data with high granularity in the Indian context. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of highly granular data at the level of individual slums. We collected the data presented in this paper in partnership with the slum dwellers in order to overcome the challenges such as validity and efficacy of self reported data. Our survey of Bangalore covered 36 slums across the city. The slums were chosen based on stratification criteria, which included geographical location of the slum, whether the slum was resettled or rehabilitated, notification status of the slum, the size of the slum and the religious profile. This paper describes the relational model of the slum dataset, the variables in the dataset, the variables constructed for analysis and the issues identified with the dataset. The data collected includes around 267,894 data points spread over 242 questions for 1,107 households. The dataset can facilitate interdisciplinary research on spatial and temporal dynamics of urban poverty and well-being in the context of rapid urbanization of cities in developing countries.

Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data (ISA-Tab format)

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Background & summary.

Cities have become engines of accelerated growth as they are centres of high productivity and provide easy access to resources 1 . The outcome of this high rate of urbanization has been the rise of informal settlements or ‘slums’, characterized by a lack of adequate living space, insecure tenure and public services 2 . In 2010, an estimated 860 million people were living in slums worldwide with around 60 million added to the slum population between 2000 and 2010. In sub-Saharan Africa, the slum population doubles every 4.5 years 3 . In the past decade, over 22 million people have migrated from rural to urban areas in India 4 . While official estimates indicate that the number of slum dwellers in India increased from 30 million in 1981 to over 61 million in 2001 4 , a UN Habitat report estimates the number of slum dwellers in India to be over 100 million. In 2011, 200 million people in urban Indian households were considered to live in slums 5 , of which over a third were in million-plus cities of India.

In this paper, we present granular data about slums from the city of Bangalore in India. Bangalore grew exponentially from 1941 to 1971 6 and is now rapidly growing due to the establishment of the software industry in the city. The urban agglomeration of Bangalore is the administrative capital of the state of Karnataka in India, with a metropolitan population of about 11.52 million and a population growth rate of 47.18% 5 , making it the third most populous city and fifth most populous urban agglomeration in India. The city has seen phases of growth that correspond to the different waves of industrialization and immigration. The first wave of immigration took place between 1880 and 1920, when the textile industry developed in the western part of the city. The second wave of industrialization took place in the eastern and northern areas, when a slew of state owned industries were created between 1940 and 1960. At the same time, state owned research and development establishments were created in the north western region of the city. The final wave can be characterized post 1990, with the establishment of special economic zones for electronics and the IT industry (which was initiated in the 1980s by the state government). To meet housing needs, in the period between the 1980s–1990s, state owned bodies created townships for their employees at the periphery, while housing co-operative societies met the demand for those in the formal sector 6 . A rapid shortage of housing and increased demand for manpower in the city has led to the growth and emergence of slums in Bangalore. The number of slums in Bangalore has grown from 159 in 1971 to over 2000 slums (notified and non-notified) in 2015. Those living in slums accounted for just over 10% of the city’s population in 1971 and an estimated 25 to 35% in 2015.

However, one of the biggest problems associated with studying slum populations is that, despite being ubiquitous, their needs, issues and problems are often invisible due to lack of representation. In this data collection effort the lack of accessibility to slums because of the social distance between the researcher and the respondent was overcome by the use of participatory methods. In order to measure poverty in slums, previous studies have often relied on consumption and income indicators. A Basic Needs Index requires data on literacy, water (piped), sanitation facilities and food requirements 7 . Well-being and vulnerability indicators have used household assets, access to financial services and formal safety nets and social networks 8 . In order to acknowledge the shift in thinking towards multi-dimensional poverty, we ensured that the survey moved away from consumption indicators to well-being and vulnerability indicators. The primary questions for this survey included the economic contribution of the urban poor in the city, the affordability and accessibility of infrastructure facilities, the various migration streams and access to financial systems. Using a participatory method, the survey was conducted in 1,107 households in 36 slums, with each household answering 242 questions. This study and the data descriptor provides a template for future data that can be collected to provide a better understanding of slums in other cities. The data can be used to generate a wide range of measures to study the impact of various programs on the slum dwellers, their expenditure patterns and the economic profile of the slums.

The main purpose of the study was to obtain a better understanding of the nature of urban poverty, to unpack the needs, issues and problems of slum dwellers, but also how slum-dwellers contribute to the urban economy and why households live in slums. The primary research questions were:

What is the economic contribution (labour, production aspects) of the urban poor to the city’s economy?

What are the infrastructure facilities (health, education, water, mobility, sanitation) that are available? Are they affordable, accessible and who pays for it (state/private)?

What are the key drivers of migration flows in and out of the city? When do people enter/leave a slum?

What is the demographic and economic profile of the people living in slums?

Do slum dwellers have access to financial systems and savings?

What are the expenditures of people in the slums?

We combined a structured survey with focus groups and personal interviews. While the structured survey supported the systematic data collection, the use of the qualitative methods such as focus group discussions. Personal interviews allowed for individuals living in the slums to articulate their concerns and also supported further processing of the data, for instance to create categories. The design of the questionnaire was informed by our research questions and former surveys carried out in Bangalore, a survey developed earlier by the Word Bank 9 and surveys reported in literature 10 – 12 . The slum-survey was done in collaboration with slum dwellers to get access to slum areas and have sufficient trust between surveyor and respondent to obtain a higher validity in the answers. The following sections describe the sampling strategy used to randomly select households and individuals for the survey and survey implementation.

Sampling strategy

The slums in Bangalore were stratified based on the following parameters: Age of the Slum (Old, New), Location in the city (Core, Periphery, North, South, East, West); Size of the slum; Land Type (whether the slums are on Public land or Private land); Declaration Status (Declared or Not Declared); Major Linguistic Group (slums that contain a majority of Kannada, Tamil, or Telugu speakers); Major Religious Group (slums that contain a majority of Hindi, Muslim, or Christian populations) and State of Development (Redeveloped slums, Resettled slums, In situ developed and Planned slums). A list of 597 slums was compiled using the notified, non-notified and de-notified slums published by Karnataka Slum Clearance Board (now the Karnataka Slum Development Board). A total of 51 slums were short-listed based on the stratification criteria, after which 36 were surveyed based on verbal consent provided by the slum leaders. The following question guides the calculation of samples.

How many households should be surveyed to estimate the true proportion of households who are below the poverty line (or do not have access to finance/ water etc), with a 95% confidence interval 6% wide? The 95% confidence interval is a standard used across disciplines. We have used a width of 6% instead of 10% (standard used across disciplines) to overestimate the number of samples (in case of missed households).

The required sample size ( X ) for the slum households was then calculated using the following formula 13 :

where, N is the entire population of slum households in Bangalore and

where Z is the Z-score ( Z is 1.96 for a 95% confidence level), D is the margin of error (3%), P is the estimated proportion of an attribute (such as households below poverty line) that is present in the population, Q is 1− P . Therefore, P × Q is the estimate of variance of the attribute in the population. Because a proportion of 0.5 indicates the maximum variability of an attribute in a population, it is often used in determining a more conservative sample size. Therefore, applying equation (2), we get n =1,067. The total number of slum households in Bangalore was estimated to be 321,296 (N ) as per the report released by the Karnataka Slum Development Board in 2010. Since, N ≫ n , in equation (1), the calculated sample size is 1,067.

Survey implementation

The social survey was implemented in the city of Bangalore, India with the assistance of Fields of View (FoV), a non-profit research organization, highly experienced in data collection. FoV together with Slum Jagaththu provided intensive training on survey tools, data collection methodology and ethical grounds of social data collection. The questionnaire was designed based on the research questions, after which the stratification and identification of slums (described in section Sampling Strategy) was performed. After the slums were identified, the questionnaire was modified to include questions based on the input and needs of the slum dwellers (see Table 1 ). A set of qualitative interviews on thematic topics were carried out based on the request from the slum dwellers, which served as a reference point for comparison with past surveys. The questionnaire was piloted in 2 slums and then revised after a round of feedback (see Table 2 ). A typical survey procedure consisted of the field coordinator speaking to the local leaders in each slum before the team conducted the survey. The coordinator would then introduce the enumerator team covering that slum to the slum leaders. If the slum leaders were agreeable, they would survey 10% of the slum, based on the procedure elaborated above. Informed consent was obtained at 3 different levels. First, local slum leaders were apprised of the objectives of the survey and the methods. Once local slum leaders approved the survey, we identified and approached community leaders within a slum. After the consent of the community leaders was obtained we approached individual slum households. Efforts were made to ensure that all respondents were appropriately informed about the study and thoroughly understood their participation in the study was voluntary. In the cases where slum leaders or community leaders did not agree to the survey we did not proceed further. In all cases where community leaders agreed to be a part of the survey, all households complied to the request. Participation was voluntary and interviewers ensured that participants knew that refusal to participate would not lead to any adverse consequences. If the main earner was not available at the time of interview then the enumerator excluded that household and moved to the next selected household and then reverted to the normal pattern.

The data was captured in paper questionnaires with handwritten responses, with most answers coded into structured replies (as indicated in the validation section), in addition to a few open-ended questions. Several case studies on thematic topics such as the homeless, informal workers and street vendors were also conducted. These case studies were conducted based on qualitative interviews with the participants and the data is not included in the datasets. The survey was administered by women participants from the slums in order to increase the level of comfort and trust with the participants. The enumerators comprised of fourteen women, who conducted the surveys in teams of two. The questionnaire was developed in English and then translated into Kannada (the local language of the state of Karnataka). To ensure quality of the data, a monitoring team from FoV checked one percent of the data and held periodic meetings to provide necessary feedback regarding the field work. The survey was completed in two stages, the first beginning in June 2010 included 20 slums and the second, beginning in March 2011 included 16 slums (see Table 3 ). Direct observation or spot checking in selected houses and re-interviewing with a quality control questionnaire in selected households formed part of the monitoring process. Survey data and accompanying questionnaires are available on the ReShare Repository ( Data Citation 1 ).

The data collected from this survey underwent cleaning and was stored in a relational database for further analysis. More specifically, the data was vetted by the enumerators and research team by randomly picking households and a site visit with field verification was carried out. Once the data was verified by the surveyors, the filled-in questionnaires were translated to English and then digitized by an independent group. The research team then carried out two rounds of validation, in the first round, the data was checked for consistency and outliers and in the second round, the research team coordinated with the enumerators to validate any discrepancies. This paper describes the relational model of the database, how to use it, the variables in the dataset, the variables constructed for analysis and the issues identified with the dataset. The data collected included 267,894 data points spread over 242 questions for 1,107 households.

Code availability

This study did not use any computer codes to generate the dataset. A MySQL relational database was used to store the collected data. A set of SQL queries were used to verify and validate the data.

Data Records

The Survey data is provided in SQL format ( Data Citation 1 ). All 242 questionnaire variables are named according to their number in the questionnaire and fully described in the variable labels. The household listing and survey instruments can be downloaded in English which acts as the code book for the datasets ( Supplementary File 1 ).

Technical Validation

The technical validation and quality control comprised of three stages. The first stage of quality control was done before the survey was carried and it involved: a) thorough pre-testing of the questionnaire; b) translating the questionnaire into Kannada, including local terminology and reverse translating to check quality of translations; c) recruitment of women enumerators from slums and comprehensive training in survey implementation. The survey questionnaire was designed based on the research questions of the project, using questions from other surveys already implemented in India and drawing on the qualitative data collection and expert judgement to create new questions. To ensure that the questions are relevant and meaningful, pre-testing of the quantitative questionnaire was conducted in the study area through pilot surveys and focus group discussions (described in Survey Implementation) prior to finalisation of the questions. Training of the enumerators is essential for effective implementation of a survey. A deep understanding of the questions and philosophy of the survey ensured that enumerators can help the surveyed households in answering the questions properly. To achieve this, the enumerator team was selected from the local slums (described in Survey Implementation). Role play and field practice was carried out for every section of the questionnaire.

The second stage of validation was performed during the survey and it involved field quality control questionnaires being carried out alongside the main data collection as described below. A quality control team was assigned in the field to monitor data collection. The field quality control involved quality control visits, spot check visits and checking of forms as recommended by the Demographic Surveillance Systems guidelines. Quality control visits was done by the supervisor on 5% 14 , 15 of the households in each round of data collection. It provided a way of cross-checking the accuracy and completeness of the data. Random and unannounced spot check visits were conducted to ensure that the data collection was being done as per the schedule. Finally, during the survey a field supervisor checked all the completed forms for completeness (no missing values and units) and accuracy before they were submitted for data entry. To ensure the data is accurate all possible inconsistencies (e.g., range checks, checking that only females have given birth) were checked. Forms with omissions and obvious errors were returned to the fieldworker for correction or revisits. The field quality control exercise demonstrated that most respondents were not willing to disclose their caste as it is considered sensitive in India. At the point of data entry a further checking of the forms is performed and forms that have errors or inconsistencies were returned to the fieldworker via his/her supervisor. The built-in validation during data entry comprised of standard methods such as uniqueness check, referential integrity, presence check, length check, data type check, fixed value check and cross field check 16 .

The final stage of validation was after the survey was completed and it involved checking data entry, detecting typing errors and comparison with previous studies. Two-pass verification, also called double data entry was performed to ensure correct data entry. To identify data entry errors, individual and composite variables were summarised as minimum, median, mean, maximum and compared between the two data entries. The original paper version has been retained to allow the team to check individual records in the digital dataset if necessary. Further, in this section we present a detailed quantitative validation of the survey data by comparing frequency distributions with previous studies and census surveys. First, we validate the demographic variables in the survey.

The median household size in the slums of Bangalore is 5. We find that 25% of the families have a household size of up to 4 members and 75% of the slum dwellers have a household size of up to 6 members. The maximum size of a household in the survey is 13. Figure 1 shows the family size distribution across the 36 surveyed slums in Bangalore. Table 4 indicates that the gender ratio (female to male ratio) is around 1, which is different to the trend in non-slum urban households where there are around 966 female per 1,000 male. A similar deviation has been observed in the Census of India 2011 5 and other slum studies in Bangalore 17 . Table 4 also shows that the population in the slum is young, with 35% of the respondents under the age of 18 and around 70% under the age of 35. The age distribution is consistent with the data from Census of India 2011 5 . The majority of surveyed households (67%) are Hindus. About 20% of the respondents are Muslims and 8% are Christians. The native language of 45% of surveyed households is Tamil, while 17% speak Kannada and 15% speak Telugu. Analysis of the migration data from slums show that 73% of migrants are from rural areas within Karnataka itself while the remaining 27% migrated from the rest of India, which indicates that the native language may not be an indication of migration. The above social and demographic distribution are similar to values reported in various slum studies of Bangalore 17 – 21 .

The data indicates that the average age at marriage is 24 for men and 17 for women. This is lower than the average of non-slum urban households in Bangalore, where the average age of marriage is 27.5 for men and 24 for women 5 . The median age of marriage has been rising in India. However, 49% of all women in the survey, were married before the age of 17. The median age at first pregnancy in slums of Bangalore is around 18 years, which is significantly lower than the median age of 25 years for non-slum urban households in Bangalore 5 . The average age at marriage and pregnancy are similar to the reported values in various slum studies of Bangalore 22 , 23 .

Second, we validate the data pertaining to income, expenditure and assets in the survey. The income distribution (see Fig. 2 ) shows that 25% of sample respondents earn a monthly income of less than 2,000 INR (31 USD), out of which they spend 93% on basic amenities. Around 75% of the sample respondents earn a monthly income lower than INR 4,000 (62 USD) and spend 91% of their income on basic amenities. Around 13% of households earn more than 10,000 INR (156 USD) per month and spend around 77% of their income on basic amenities. The monthly median income of slum dwellers in Bangalore is around 3,000 INR (47 USD). The median income reported in previous studies is around 3,500 INR (54 USD) 17 – 19 . Table 5 shows that the slum households spend the majority of their income on food items. The reasons for this high percentage are low income level coupled with high food inflation based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which was 12.56% during 2013. Hence, money available for other activities is very low. Education is a priority for the urban poor, but only the top 10% highest earning households can afford a school education for their children. The other key components which contribute to the expenditure are home appliances, rent, healthcare and clothing. The expenditure patterns observed in the data are consistent with previous findings 17 , 18 .

In the surveyed slums, television sets, mobile phones and electric fans are the common asset types, with more than 75% reporting ownership of each of these assets. The least common form of assets are cars, trucks and agricultural land, possessed by less than 1% of all slum households. Bicycles or motorcycles/scooters are also owned by fewer than 20% of these households. The asset distribution we observe is similar to previous studies in the slums of Bangalore 17 , 18 .

When we examine the employment patterns in the slums, we find that most slum dwellers are employed in the informal sector, primarily working as domestic help or as manual labour. Only 13% of the sample respondents are employed in the formal sector (White collar, blue collar and sales occupations). These findings are similar to the reported values in various slum studies of Bangalore 17 – 21 . Further, we find that the slum-based micro enterprises are not served by traditional financial institutions due to their informal status ( Table 6 ). Again, this is consistent with previous studies, for example the study conducted by Society for Participatory Research in Asia 17 .

Finally, we validate the data pertaining to physical structure of the houses and tenure in the survey. The survey data indicates that around 40% of the slum households have Hakku Patra , which is an important document given by Tehsildar for land ownership indicating title to the dwelling. This indicates that the majority of slum dwellers possess legal titles. Households with a legal title to their dwelling usually live in pukka structures. A pukka structure is a semi-permanent structure with a tiled or stone roof and walls that are wooden, metal, asbestos sheets, burnt brick, stone, concrete or cement bricks. Around 20% of the households have a Possession Certificate document and live in semi-pukka houses. The remaining 40%, who have either migrated from neighbouring districts or other states, do not have any proper ownership to land and live in kutcha structures. A kutcha structure is one whose roof is built using grass, thatch, bamboo, plastic, polythene, metal, asbestos sheets and walls that are grass, thatch, bamboo, plastic, polythene, mud, burnt brick, wood, metal, asbestos sheets (See Table 7 ). Analysis of ration card data from the slums in Bangalore shows that around 3% of households have Antyodaya cards, 60% possess below poverty line (BPL) cards and 17% have the above poverty line (APL) card. A comparison with the study conducted by Society for Participatory Research in Asia 17 shows that the above distributions are comparable.

Usage Notes

Data access conditions.

A benefit of the data is its spatial nature, which allows social factors to be analysed in the context of environmental conditions and resources. However, this increases the sensitivity of the data as it creates the potential for households within each slum to be identified from the survey data. As such, the data has been made available as safeguarded on the UK Data Archive’s data repository ReShare. In order to download safeguarded data the user must register with the UKDA and agree to the conditions of their End User Licence (For conditions of the End User Licence see: https://www.ukdataservice.ac.uk/get-data/how-to-access/conditions ). For commercial use, please contact the UK Data Service at [email protected].

The diversity of variables collected in the survey instrument create a high possibility for reuse of this dataset. Furthermore, certain variables are comparable with the standard National Family Health Survey v.2,3,4 surveys of Bangalore and the national census, offering the possibility of longitudinal analysis. The dataset can be used to test key associations between social and land-use outcomes that are critical for environmental policy and development strategies for Bangalore.

For example, there are a range of variables that will allow researchers to examine the social relationships that affect livelihoods in slums such as money lending, informal labour, remittances and assets. Comprehensive data on expenditure, income and livelihood choices could be used to model growth and emergence of slums (e.g., ref. 24 ) and design strategic slum management interventions, ranging from improvements in public distribution system, through to social interventions in availability of credit, or supporting mobility and migration. The dataset can be disaggregated by group identities, and crucially includes information on seasonal variation in occupation and livelihoods, a critical issue in the variation of well-being and poverty.

Additional information

How to cite this article: Roy, D. et al. Survey-based socio-economic data from slums in Bangalore, India. Sci. Data 5:170200 doi: 10.1038/sdata.2017.200 (2018).

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Roy, D., Palavalli, B., Menon, N., King, R., & Sloot, P. M. UK Data Service ReShare https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-852705 (2017)

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support from the Dutch NWO, eScience project number 027.015.G05 ‘DynaSlum: Data Driven Modelling and Decision Support for Slums’, Russian Science Foundation project number 14-21-00137 ‘Supercomputer modelling of critical phenomena in complex social systems’, SimCity project of the Dutch NWO, eScience agency under contract C.2324.0293. The authors also acknowledge the support of Mr. Isaac Arul Selva from ‘Slum Jagaththu’ for his contribution towards collecting the data as the liaison with the slums (access to the slums and data collection) and Ms. Bhagyalakshmi Srinivas from ‘Fields of View’ for training the field surveyors and cleaning the data. The survey was carried out with grants from Jamshedji Tata Trust, India and the Next Generation Infrastructure Foundation, Netherlands.

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Debraj Roy, Karin Pfeffer, Michael Lees & Peter M. A. Sloot

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

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Fields of View, Bangalore, 560078, India

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Centre for Budget and Policy Studies, Bangalore, 560004, India

Niveditha Menon

Urban Development, Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, World Resources Institute, Washington, DC 20002, USA

School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA,

National Research University ITMO, St Petersburg, 197101, Russia

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Contributions

D.R. wrote sections of this paper and led the writing of the paper, carried out technical validation and quality control of the database received from the survey team; M.L. is also the principal investigator of the DynaSlum project and helped in writing the paper and acted as the daily supervisor for D.R.; K.P. helped in writing the paper and served as the supervisor for B.M.P.; B.M.P. was involved in conceptualization, data collection, verification, data cleaning, analysis, qualitative research and prepared sections of the manuscript; N.M. was involved in conceptualization, analysis, qualitative research and helped with preparing the manuscript; R.K. was the principal investigator for the survey, led the design of the qualitative research of the study; P.M.A.S. is the principal investigator of the SimCITY project and contributed to the design of the study.

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Correspondence to Debraj Roy or Peter M. A. Sloot .

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Roy, D., Palavalli, B., Menon, N. et al. Survey-based socio-economic data from slums in Bangalore, India. Sci Data 5 , 170200 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2017.200

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Role of Slums in Indian Society

  Syllabus: Indian Society/ Urbanization/ Governance

Context: The article explores the evolving narratives and definitions of slums in the context of Indian parliamentary debates.

Evolution of the discourse on slums :

What are Slums ?

  Slums have been defined as those areas where buildings are unfit for human habitation , or are by dilapidation, overcrowding, design of buildings, narrowness of streets, lack of ventilation, light or sanitary facilities or any combination of these factors, are detrimental to safety, health or moral (Slum Area Improvement and Clearance Act 1956).

An all-India average where the cities with 10 lakh and above population have over 29% population living in slums. The percentage of slum population in the four mega cities is – Bombay (over 34%, Calcutta 32%, Madras 32% and Delhi 31%). As much as 65% of Indian cities have adjoining slums where people live in small houses adjacent to each other.

The role played by Slums in Indian cities

• Informal economy : Slums are home to a large number of people who work in the informal sector, such as rickshaw drivers, street vendors, and construction workers.
• Contribution to Urban Workforce : Many slum residents form an integral part of the urban workforce, providing essential services in construction, domestic work, transportation , and other sectors. Their contributions are critical to the functioning of the city.
• Social Networks and Solidarity : These communities develop strong social networks and a sense of solidarity. Residents support each other through mutual assistance, shared resources, and collective problem-solving.
• These informal support systems are vital in the absence of formal social services, creating a sense of belonging and resilience within the community.
• Culturally : Slums are characterized by their diverse population with people from different regions, religions, and cultural backgrounds . This diversity fosters cultural exchange, tolerance, and understanding among residents. Slums can be dynamic spaces where diverse traditions, languages, and cuisines coexist , enriching the social fabric of the city.

Common problems faced by Slum dwellers

Government Initiatives for Slum Dwellers/Urban Poor:

• Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana
• Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan (self-reliant India).
• PM- Awas Yojana- Urban .

Recommendations for Improving Conditions of Slum Dwellers in India

• Efforts should focus on addressing the underlying issue s, such as poverty, housing, and infrastructure, while also recognizing the strengths and resilience of slum communities.
• For e.g. Dharavi Redevelopment Project is the makeover of Mumbai’s slum cluster, Dharavi. It entails resettling 68,000 people, including slum dwellers and those with commercial establishments.
• Local authorities need to be empowered with financial and human resources to deliver services and infrastructure to the slum dwellers in India.
• These should include access to affordable land, reasonably priced materials , employment opportunities, and basic infrastructure and social services.
• These services and infrastructure must reach the poor living in informal settlements.
• Building codes and regulations should be realistic and enforceable and reflect the local community’s lifestyle and needs.

  Conclusion

By addressing the challenges faced by slum dwellers, the Govt’s can help to improve the lives of millions of people and make India a more inclusive society. Human well-being is broadly considered to include the consumption of goods and services and the access to basic necessities for a productive and socially meaningful life to all sections of the population, especially the deprived slum dwellers in India.

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• Government Initiatives to manage Slums

Mains Links:

  Why slums are considered as ‘problems’ in urban regions? 

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Sample essay on the problems of slums in India

What are slums? They are the homes of the poor and their families, and provide the minimum shelter to the people. It has been noticed that, slums are mostly found on the outskirts of all big towns. This was the position when they started coming up but now, we find slums right in the hearts of towns and specially the big towns.

This fact of the increasing population of slums needs to be thought about and analysed. Let us analyse as to why slums are found just near all posh colonies of all the big towns. Every big town has, on the one hand five star hotels with their accompanying prosperity, and, on the other hand, there are huge slum colonies also popularly known as Jhuggi Clusters.

The reason for their existence mostly near the colonies of the elite, is not far to seek. Who are these slum dwellers? Why are they here? These slum dwellers are mostly people who work for the affluent class, they are working in the homes, cleaning cars etc.

They are labourers and other workers like rickshaw pullers, scooter drivers etc. The reason for their being here in big towns is that, they come here in search of greener pastures or rather in search of some jobs. Since the big towns offer more opportunities they throng here, and also do get the required work.

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Once they get work, they obviously get settled in homes in the form of slums. With several people of this category coming to big towns for work gives birth to a number of slum colonies – and all are near their place of work that is near the posh colonies.

Another big chunk of a population of this category is the construction workers. With the expansion of construction activities in the big towns, these workers come and gather here, and then stay put in slums. With an enormous potential in getting work in construction work people from neighboring areas come to towns and get settled.

Thus we can see that, slums develop in the course of time as people come to towns in search of occupation, and once they get the desired work they get settled here and cause a nuisance to the affluent. However, let us remember they are all the time working for the affluent gentry either in their homes or in making homes for them.

It is such a pity to realise that, though they are working all the time for the affluent class, for the rich metro dwellers, their residence in the vicinity close to the rich is objectionable for the rich.

Let us realise that, if the slum dwellers are there to work for us, they have to be near us – so, if we want them to work for us, we have to accept their presence also. However, the cause of the objection is also not quite wrong.

These slums in the nearby areas are a cause of a lot of pollution and thus result in health hazards. Since they have no place to bathe, go to the toilet, wash their clothes, all this daily work is done in the open causing inconvenience to the residents of the areas.

Besides this, the presence of slums near by the colony, make the colony look ugly and dirty, which is why they are an objectionable lot. Since this class is mainly of the menial class, their presence so near the affluent is enough cause of worry in regard to crime.

Their presence thus poses a problem of security for the colonies. Criminals of all hues and colours find heaven in the slums, and are a constant source of worry for the inmates of colonies. With the slums rising in numbers the population graph of these cities and towns also becomes unmanageable.

They also need the basics of water and electricity, these become a scarce commodity in towns for the permanent dwellers. Everything is in short supply as, the amount available is to be shared with these slum dwellers. This, in turn is because the cities and towns were originally not planned for the huge exodus into the original towns.

Thus, slums destroy the scenario of towns and also add to the innumerable problems that already exist. The calm and quiet existence of the areas is lost to the dirty and noisy appearance of the slums.

However, at the same time if slums are removed and slum dwellers vanish, where will the so- called big people get their workers from? Let us ponder upon this aspect and allow them their poor existence – and that also for our own sake.

The only thing that can be done to improve the scene is, to teach them to be neat and clean and more disciplined. If they live as neat and disciplined citizens there should not be much of a problem.

Related Articles:

• Essay on the problems in the slums of India
• Short Essay on the Slum Population
• Free essay on the miserable conditions of people living in Indian slums
• Short essay on the Problems faced by modern cities in India

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Guest Essay

A Dangerous Game Is Underway in Asia

By Mike M. Mochizuki and Michael D. Swaine

Dr. Mochizuki is a professor at George Washington University. Dr. Swaine is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

This month, President Biden threw one of the most lavish state dinners in Washington’s recent memory. Celebrities and billionaires flocked to the White House to dine in honor of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, posing for photos in front of an elaborate display of Japanese fans. Jeff Bezos dropped by; Paul Simon provided the entertainment.

The spectacle was part of a carefully orchestrated series of events to showcase the renewed U.S.-Japan relationship — and the notable transformation of the United States’ security alliances in Asia. The next day, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines was also in the U.S. capital for a historic U.S.-Japan-Philippines summit, during which a new trilateral security partnership was announced.

Both events were directed at the same audience: China.

Over the past several years, Washington has built a series of multilateral security arrangements like these in the Asia-Pacific region. Although U.S. officials claim that the recent mobilization of allies and partners is not aimed at China, don’t believe it. Indeed, Mr. Kishida emphasized in a speech to Congress on April 11 that China presents “the greatest strategic challenge” both to Japan and to the international community.

China’s recent activity is, of course, concerning. Its military has acquired ever more potent ways to counter U.S. and allied capabilities in the Western Pacific and has behaved aggressively in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere, alarming its neighbors.

But Washington’s pursuit of an increasingly complex lattice of security ties is a dangerous game. Those ties include upgrades in defense capabilities, more joint military exercises, deeper intelligence sharing, new initiatives on defense production and technology cooperation and the enhancement of contingency planning and military coordination. All of that may make Beijing more cautious about the blatant use of military force in the region. But the new alliance structure is not, on its own, a long-term guarantor of regional peace and stability — and could even increase the risk of stumbling into a conflict.

The security partnership rolled out this month in Washington is only the latest in a string of new defense configurations that reach across Asia and the Pacific. In 2017 the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, known as the Quad, was revived, promoting collaboration among the United States, Japan, Australia and India. In September 2021, Australia, Britain and the United States began their partnership, known as AUKUS, and the United States, Japan and South Korea committed to closer cooperation in a summit at Camp David last August.

All of these moves have been motivated primarily by concern over Beijing, which has, in turn, castigated these countries as being part of a U.S.-led effort to create an Asian version of NATO designed to contain China. None amount to a collective defense pact like the NATO treaty, whose Article 5 considers an armed attack on one member as “an attack against them all.” But China will nevertheless almost certainly regard the latest agreement among the United States, Japan and the Philippines — with which it is engaged in an active territorial dispute — as further confirmation of a Washington-led attempt to threaten its interests.

It’s not yet clear how Beijing will respond. But it may double down on the expansion of its military capabilities and intensify its use of military and paramilitary force to assert its territorial claims in the region, especially regarding the sensitive issue of Taiwan. Beijing could also promote further Chinese military cooperation with Russia in the form of enhanced military exercises and deployments.

The net result may be an Asia-Pacific region that is even more divided and dangerous than it is today, marked by a deepening arms race. In this increasingly contentious and militarized environment, the chance of some political incident or military accident triggering a devastating regional war is likely to grow. This is especially likely, given the absence of meaningful U.S. and allied crisis communication channels with China to prevent such an incident from spiraling out of control.

To prevent this nightmare, the U.S. and its allies and partners must invest much more in diplomacy with China, in addition to bolstering military deterrence.

For a start, the United States and key allies like Japan should make a sustained effort to establish a durable crisis prevention and management dialogue with China involving each nation’s foreign policy and security agencies. So far, such dialogues have been limited primarily to military channels and topics. It is critical that both civilian and military officials understand the many possible sources of inadvertent crises and develop ways to prevent them or manage them if they occur. This process should include the establishment of an agreed-upon set of leaders’ best practices for crisis management and a trusted but unofficial channel through which the relevant parties can discuss crisis-averting understandings.

The immediate focus for the United States and Japan should be on avoiding actions that add to tensions across the Taiwan Strait. The deployment of American military trainers to Taiwan on what looks like a permanent basis and suggestions by some U.S. officials and policy analysts that Taiwan be treated as a security linchpin within the overall U.S. defense posture in Asia are needlessly provocative. They also openly contradict America’s longstanding “one China” policy , under which the United States ended the deployment of all U.S. military forces to Taiwan and does not view Taiwan as a key U.S. security location, caring only that the Taiwan issue be handled peacefully and without coercion.

Japan, for its part, has also become more circumspect about its own “one China” policy by being reluctant to reaffirm explicitly that Tokyo does not support Taiwan’s independence. Recent statements by some political leaders in Tokyo about Japanese military forces being ready to help defend Taiwan will almost certainly inflame Chinese leaders, who remember that Japan seized Taiwan after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and ’95.

Washington and Tokyo should clearly reaffirm their previous commitments on the China-Taiwan dispute. Tokyo also should confirm that it does not support any unilateral move by Taiwan toward independence and resist U.S. efforts to compel Japan to commit to Taiwan’s defense. Although American officials have reportedly been prodding Japan to join military planning for a Taiwan conflict, a large majority of Japanese residents do not favor fighting to defend Taiwan. Tokyo can best contribute to deterring China by focusing on strengthening its ability to defend its own islands.

Washington and its allies should shift to a more positive approach to China, aimed at fostering accommodation and restraint. This could include working to secure credible mutual assurances regarding limits on Chinese military deployments, such as amphibious forces and missile capabilities relevant to Taiwan, in return for U.S. limits on the levels and types of arms that it sells to the island. They could also explore increasing security cooperation with China regarding cyberattacks, the defense of sea lanes and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as better collaboration to combat climate change and the outbreak of another pandemic.

China, of course, has its own role to play. In the end, Beijing, like the United States, wants to avoid a crisis and conflict in the region. Given that, it should respond to a more cooperative American and allied approach by moderating its own coercive behavior regarding maritime disputes.

None of this will be easy, given the intense suspicion that now exists between Beijing and Washington and its allies. But new thinking and new diplomatic efforts could incentivize China to reciprocate in meaningful ways. At the very least, it’s necessary to try. Focusing on military deterrence alone won’t work. Trying to find a way to cooperate with China is the best way — perhaps the only way — to steer the world away from disaster.

Mike M. Mochizuki is a professor at George Washington University and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Michael D. Swaine is a senior research fellow focusing on China-related security topics at the Quincy Institute.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Won’t allow rehab of Dharavi slums in Mulund, says Patil

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Gurugram, May 3 (PTI) Nearly 240 shanties were gutted after a massive fire broke out in a slum on Friday in Sector 53 here, a DFS officer said.  No fatality was reported during the incident. Some people who were taking out their belongings from their homes suffered mild burn injuries, he said.  According to a fire official, around 10.40 am, a fire broke out while cooking, due to gas leakage and soon spread to other shanties in the area. Around 100 cylinders exploded in a slum near Banjara Market.

The residents of the slum work as labourers, domestic help and security guards, police said.  Following this, the residents called the fire department. Around 10 fire tenders were pressed into service and it took them five hours to contain the blaze, he said.  “It was the bursting of the small cylinder that aggravated the fire. It took an effort of five hours to control it. Around 240 shanties were gutted in the fire”, the officer said.

“The cause behind the fire was revealed due to gas leakage while cooking”, said the fire officer.  PTI COR HIG HIG

This report is auto-generated from PTI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.

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Fire breaks out at slum cluster in Gurugram Sector 53, 300 shanties gutted

Gurugram: A fire broke out in a slum cluster near Banjara Market in Sector 53 on Friday morning, police said adding at least 300 families lost their homes after their shanties were gutted in the blaze. No casualties or burn injuries were reported.

It took almost five hours to douse the fire, police said. The slum cluster had over 1,000 shanties and more than 1,500 people lived there. A majority of them worked in nearby areas and a few worked at the Banjara Market. The fire department and police said preliminary investigation revealed that the incident had taken place due to a gas leak in one of the slums and that had led to cylinder blasts, intensifying the blaze.

Haryana fire services, deputy director (technical), Gulshan Kalra, who also holds the charge of deputy director (technical) of the fire station at Sector 29, said that the fire was reported from a slum close to the Banjara Market at about 10.40am and nine fire tenders with a total of 40 firefighters were dispatched to douse the fire.

“The police control room had received a distress call and they informed us. Within a few minutes, we sent the fire tenders and the vehicles reached the spot in hardly 20 minutes. One block of huts was engulfed in flames as the fire had spread rapidly. It took us almost five hours to douse the fire and we saved nearly 800 huts,” he said.

Iba Khatun, 29, who was at work in Sector 54 when the fire broke out, said the news of her destroyed home came as a devastating blow. “My employer asked me to retrieve my savings and documents from the hut, but by the time I reached, everything was reduced to ashes,” she said. Along with her savings, documents crucial for her livelihood were lost in the blaze.

As the smoke cleared and the flames subsided, residents sifted through the charred remains of their homes hoping to save some belongings.

Tabir Hussain, 28, a worker at the Banjara Market said he had kept aside money for constructing a house in his village in West Bengal but only to see his aspirations ruined. “Where will we go and who will fund the construction. The owner starts asking for rent the day we move into a hut, but now we are left with nothing,” he said.

Teams from the district administration also reached the spot and assured swift action and assistance to the affected families.

Deputy commissioner (DC) Nishant Kumar Yadav, said that arrangements for their food and stay had been managed. “We have announced measures to facilitate the documentation of losses and the provision of necessary aid to help the affected families recover. Two teams have been deployed at the spot to coordinate with the victims and to ensure they get all the support required,” he said.

Kusum Sharma, a resident of Suncity Township in Sector 54, who reached the spot with other residents to help the victims said utensils, clothes, and even personal savings were consumed by the flames, leaving the affected families with nothing. “We have reached out to at least five NGOs to help in providing essential supplies such as food, water, and clothing. The police have initiated the process of documenting the details of those affected, while a comprehensive list of individuals whose huts were destroyed is being compiled. We have requested officials to make temporary arrangements for the affected families. We have communicated this urgency to all relevant agencies and Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) to expedite assistance efforts,” she said.

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Who is Kishori Lal Sharma, Congress's Amethi pick to take on Smriti Irani

Kishori lal sharma, a longtime aide of the gandhi family, is set to contest the lok sabha elections from amethi against bjp's smriti irani. he filed his nomination papers today..

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• Congress fields Kishori Lal Sharma from Amethi
• Sharma to contest against BJP's Smriti Irani
• Kishori Lal Sharma has close ties with Gandhi family

The Congress on Friday fielded Kishori Lal Sharma from Amethi, who will fight against BJP's Smriti Irani from the constituency.

Sharma is a close aide of the Gandhi family and has been associated with the party for over four decades.

Originally from Ludhiana in Punjab, Kishori Lal Sharma stepped into Raebareli and Amethi with Rajiv Gandhi in 1983.

His ties with the Gandhi family became more familial after Rajiv Gandhi's death in May 1991.

Sharma was the key man who looked after the two key constituencies in the absence of the Gandhis.

He paid frequent visits to the two constituencies and even accompanied Sonia Gandhi to Amethi when she entered politics and visited the constituency for the first time.

It was believed Kishori Lal Sharma looked over the Amethi and Raebareli constituencies after Sonia Gandhi left the Amethi seat for Rahul Gandhi and contested from Raebareli.