The Hindu Business Line : Building solutions out of slums

Exploding populations mean that the problem of urban slums can no longer be ignored. It is time to acknowledge the reality and take slum-dwellers along the path of economic development, says SANTANU MITRA.

Humanity will have to undergo a ‘revolution in thinking’ in order to deal with the doubling of urban populations in Africa and Asia by 2030, warns the UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.

In its latest report released on June 27, 2007, “The State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth,” the organisation cautions that over 30 years, the population of African and Asian cities would double, adding 1.7 billion people — more than the populations of China and the US combined.

“What happens in the cities of Africa and Asia and other regions will shape our common future,” says the UNFPA Executive Director, Ms Thoraya Ahmed Obaid. “We must abandon a mindset that resists urbanisation and act now to begin a concerted global effort to help cities unleash their potential to spur economic growth and solve social problems.”

China and India together contain 37 per cent of the world’s population; thus, their approaches to urban growth would be of importance to the future of humankind. India’s urban areas hold less than 30 per cent of the total population. This is expected to rise to 40.7 per cent by 2030. This relatively low level is partly atrributed to a stringent definition of ‘urban’ in India (for instance, it excludes peri-urban areas). But even with such a restricted definition, urbanites are expected to number some 590 million in 2030.

According to the UNFPA report, natural increase is the major factor in India’s urban growth. Of course, the contribution of rural-urban migration cannot be ignored. The Government of India hopes to contain urban growth by implementing the National Rural Employment Scheme enacted in 2005. It remains to be seen what impact this will have on rural-urban migration.

Policymakers have been much concerned with the speed and magnitude of urban growth. Many would prefer slower growth or none at all; slower growth would give them more flexibility to deal with problems, mainly of social and physical infrastructure and attendant social problems.

Generally, they attempt to slow growth by restricting incoming migration but, as the report points out, this rarely works. Hence, it is imperative that the problems emanating from natural increase in urban population are confronted head-on.

According to the report, the latest comprehensive research effort to separate natural increase from other components of urban growth puts the contribution of natural increase at about 60 per cent in the median country. The remaining part of urban growth — roughly 40 per cent — is a combination of migration and reclassification.

Reining in the numbers

In India, a recent assessment of the components of urban growth 1961-2001 found that the share of growth attributable to urban natural increase ranged from 51 per cent to about 65 per cent over the period. Given the greater importance of natural increase and the failure of anti-migration policies, it seems obvious that fertility decline is much more likely than migration controls to reduce the rate of urban growth. Since high fertility in rural areas often underlies rural-urban migration, lower fertility in both rural and urban areas can decelerate urban growth substantially since it would have a double effect on the growth rate of urban population. Such a reduction would give policymakers more time to prepare for the expansion of the urban population.

Policies that aim to slow urban growth should, therefore, shift their attention to the positive factors that affect fertility decline — social development, investment in health and education, the empowerment of women and better access to reproductive health services. On reflection, it is surprising how rarely this agenda has influenced policy decisions, as opposed to an anti-migration approach.

Urban slums

The UNFPA report says the term ‘slum’ is used to refer to many types of housing, including those that could be upgraded. Terms such as ‘slum’, ‘shantytown’, ‘informal settlement’, ‘squatter housing’ and ‘low-income community’ are used interchangeably.

According to UN-Habitat, a ‘slum household’ is a group of individuals living under the same roof in an urban area who lack one or more of the following: durable housing, sufficient living area, access to improved water, access to sanitation and secure tenure.” However, not all poor people live in slums, and not all people who live in areas defined as slums are poor. However, for simplicity’s sake, the report equates urban poor with slum dwellers.

Poverty, begging and homelessness have been part of the urban scene since the first cities of Mesopotamia. The basic features of slum life have not changed: The difference today is one of scale. Slum dwellers of the new millennium are no longer a few thousand in a few cities of a rapidly industrialising continent. They include one out of every three city dwellers, a billion people, a sixth of the world’s population.

Over 90 per cent of slum dwellers today are in the developing world. South Asia has the largest share, followed by Eastern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. China and India together have 37 per cent of the world’s slums. In sub-Saharan Africa, urbanisation has become virtually synonymous with slum growth; 72 per cent of the region’s urban population lives under slum conditions, compared to 56 per cent in South Asia. The slum population of sub-Saharan Africa almost doubled in 15 years, reaching nearly 200 million in 2005.

But such a huge population does not have policies focused on its needs. These needs are categorised as merely unavoidable problems of larger urban planning. It is often lost sight of that no effective solution to the problems of urban living can be found unless the needs of slum-dwellers are taken care of in a proper fashion.

Municipal authorities in most countries take an ostrich-like attitude and wish away the very existence of slums by declaring them illegal settlements and encroachments on Government property. Most social problems in urban living have their roots in this act of neglecting the needs of slum-dwellers.

Unhealthy disparity

Nowhere are the disadvantages of the urban poor compared with other city dwellers more marked than in the health area. Poor women are at a particular disadvantage. Income poverty is only one aspect of urban poverty.

Others are poor-quality and overcrowded shelter, lack of public services and infrastructure such as piped water, sanitation facilities, garbage collection, drainage and roads, as well as insecure land tenure. These disadvantages increase the health and work burdens of the urban poor and also increase risks from environmental hazards and crime. The association between poverty, environment and housing in urban areas is critical because it indicates a key area for intervention.

Policies directed to improving shelter in urban areas can have huge impacts on poverty reduction and on environmental well-being. Advances in health and mortality indicators depend very much on urban water and sewage treatment.

In some instances, Organisations of the Urban Poor (OUPs) have had an impact. In Pune, nearly 2 million inhabitants were supplied with public toilet blocks by the local Government, the result of a concept pioneered by the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres and the National Slum Dwellers Federation, Mahila Milan. But such efforts are not sufficient. Furthermore, if such a huge activity is left entirely to Non-Government Organisations (NGOs), the Government will not be able to regulate the activities.

The Government needs to ensure that urban slum-dwellers are empowered to contribute to a process of planning for themselves. This process takes the slums as given and does not wish them away.

Relocation of slums may be possible in one or two cases but is unworkable given the volatility and explosiveness of the issue in a democratic set-up and the broader issues of human and constitutional rights.

In a landmark judgment, the Supreme Court has pointed out that by allowing settlers to encroach upon public property and to continue to allow them to have the property (land) under their possession, the State gives rise to a reasonable expectation about the continuance of the situation.

If the State decides to evict such encroachers after a long time gap after allowing such a reasonable expectation to grow, that action of the State violates their constitutional right to life. Hence, the slums themselves, if they have been allowed to exist for long, would have to be given legal recognition in all possible manner and all efforts made to improve them to a given standard.

Slum development board

It would be best if the Union Government set up a slum development board on the basis of representation from slum-dwellers, NGOs working with them, representatives of local self-government bodies, of State Government authorities and right-minded intellectuals.

This board will frame a national policy for in situ development of slums and their management. This board, once the national policy is framed, would work as a regulatory body for the NGOs and Government authorities for supervising the development of slums. Funds, if not available in adequate quantity, may be raised by imposition of a cess of central taxes and duties. These efforts may not be sufficient to solve all the problems at hand but are necessary to progress towards the solution.

(The author is Deputy Secretary, North-Eastern Council Secretariat, Government of India.)

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