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Slum-free cities

Making cities slum-free is well-worn rhetoric lacking credibility. When Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee promised, in his recent budget speech, that India would become slum-free in five years, there was little enthusiasm. The allocation of Rs.3,973 crore has failed to provide real hope. Slum clearance schemes, as they were previously known, were initiated as early as 1956 by the central government. States such as Tamil Nadu set up their own Slum Clearance Boards in 1970 and proclaimed that cities would become slum-free within a short period of time. However, the number of households living in slums continues to increase. The housing shortage for economically weaker sections was estimated in 2007 at 24 million units. Creating a slum-free city seems to be an unrealistic vision. However, this does not mean the struggle for improving slums and the objective of providing acceptable housing options for poor people should be given up. As long as the focus is on improving slums and not on evicting slum-dwellers because they don’t fit in with pretensions of hyper-modernity and grandeur, it is a desirable target to pursue.

Most official policies have looked at slums in isolation — not as part of the larger problem of housing and mass deprivation, rural and urban, that confront a city. The emphasis has been on providing built units to replace the ‘kutcha’ houses of slums. If this approach is single-mindedly pursued, an investment of about Rs.3,60,000 crore, as the Eleventh Five Year Plan estimates, will be required by the end of 2012. Accessing urban land for housing the poor will be an even tougher challenge. In a high-value real estate market, government-owned lands and places where the slums exist are seen as potential sources of funding infrastructure and mixed residential development. Accordingly, when such lands are developed, only a fraction of the built area is dedicated to social housing and an opportunity is lost to accommodate more of the slum population. The use of such lands can be optimised and additional land banks created through appropriate land-use zoning. Existing rules such as reserving about 10 per cent of the proposed residential layouts for economically weaker sections are hardly complied with. Measures to reduce urban poverty, creative financial schemes, and socially responsible real estate practices need to be simultaneously put in place to achieve enduring solutions. Instead of viewing slums as ‘urban badlands’ that need elimination, reframing the housing and livelihood issues imaginatively and justly is the way to go.

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