gy. Whether it is Mumbai’s Dharavi or Delhi’s “Lal-dora” villages, most Indian slums have a surprising variety of commercial activity, including shops, food vendors, garages and mini-factories.
Indeed, slums like Dharavi are remarkable in how safe and cohesive they are. Most readers of this article will be able to walk through the average Indian slum even at night without fear of being harmed. This is more than one can ask of down-town Johannesburg or Camden, New Jersey. Contrary to popular wisdom, inequality of income and wealth appears to have little impact on crime and social envy. Mumbai has many social schisms: Hindus versus Muslims, Marathi-speakers versus Hindi-speakers and so on. However, the city suffers little conflict between the rich and the poor despite having the most extreme differences in wealth and income.
This cohesion comes from the fact that migrants do not view slum-life as a static state of deprivation but as a foothold into the modern, urban economy. Life may be hard but, in a rapidly growing economy, there is enough socio-economic mobility to give most slum-dwellers hope and keep them hard-working, enterprising and law-abiding. This is being recognised even in China where leading intellectual Professor Qin Hui recently published a paper arguing that China needed more slums!
What should we do about slums?
I am not arguing that slums do not need help. Clearly, we need to provide the urban poor with better sanitation, public health, education and so on. However, we need to rethink the framework of our interventions:
I am not arguing that slums do not need help. Clearly, we need to provide the urban poor with better sanitation, public health, education and so on. However, we need to rethink the framework of our interventions:
First, advocates of slum redevelopment should recognise that they are not just dealing with a housing problem but are tampering with a complex eco-system. Thus, plans need to allow for informal commercial activities, public transport, and so on. To the extent possible, the redevelopment projects should be phased in a way that the ecosystems are not killed in the name of progress.
Second, we need to understand that slums are about ease of entry, upward mobility and churn. This process should not be disturbed by indiscriminately handing out non-marketable property rights. Instead, public intervention should encourage a market for rental accommodation starting from basic dormitories. However, when it is deemed appropriate to give property titles to slum-dwellers, the rights should be marketable.
Finally, and very importantly, we should not expect slums in the largest cities to act as routers for all the hundreds of millions of migrants. This is why we need to think of the small mofussil towns as mini-routers for the regional job markets. As I have argued in an earlier column (“Small town India holds the key”, Business Standard, 11th June, 2009), we need to revive small towns as social and economic hubs.
(The author is President, Sustainable Planet Institute & Sr. Fellow, WWF)