People migrate to urban areas for many reasons: search for work, displacement from lands and livelihoods, drought, water and food scarcity, disasters, poverty, mortgage-driven debt and, in many situations, conflict.
These people are from a range of income groups, including individuals and households with lands but unable to cope with difficulties in farming.
Seasonal migration to cities in search of work is an annual phenomenon; but this year the numbers increased due to the severity of the drought. Thousands of farmers and labourers from drought-affected districts in the country, facing failed harvests, having already borrowed money at high interest rates to buy seeds, fertilisers as well as food for themselves and their cattle in their villages came to cities to find work. A number of distressed farmers, unable to repay their loans, were driven to suicide.
Migrants in cities work long hours in low-paid, insecure, unsafe jobs, and are exposed to a wide range of environmental hazards because of the lack of basic infrastructure in the informal settlements they live and work in. Migrants are disproportionately represented within some of the worst-quality informal settlements, like temporary camps for construction workers; small temporary structures on public land; or settlements set up by recent migrants, often on the urban peripheries.
Slums are just temporary. Or are they?
Dominant development theories assume that slums are a transitory phenomenon characteristic of fast-growing ecoznomies; and during the later stages of economic growth, slums progressively give way to formal housing with the trickling down of the benefits. According to these theories, living in slums is only a phase in the life cycle of rural migrants; and slum dwellers eventually move into formal housing within the city, with the benefits of migration passing to the next generations.
These theories have been proven wrong.
Slums are not always temporary. In our country, slums have been growing for decades, and millions of households find themselves trapped in poverty in slums for generations.
Today’s slums pose a deeper, persistent structural problem caused by multiple market and policy failures, poor governance and management hindering investment, and poor and unsanitary living conditions. Across diverse slum settlements, some key issues remain the same: lack of adequate living space, insufficient provision of public goods, and the poor quality of basic amenities. All of which lead to extremely poor health and diminishing human capital.
Mumbai’s M-East Ward is a classic illustration of the expanding base of poor and marginalised communities’ areas, which are unimaginably unhygienic and undermine every aspect of human development.
Within slums in different locations, there are differences in levels of poverty and development because of factors such as caste, religion, and income. Slums as a whole, compared to the city, show considerably less progress in Human Development Indicators. In fact, the lowest parameters in several slum pockets are comparable to some of the poorest regions in the world, and have no place in a modern city, leave alone one that aspires to be a global city.
Creating more housing won’t solve slums
Slums represent a major policy challenge, not just for Mumbai but for the nation as well.
We must address housing needs, but also must go beyond; we need a holistic approach to address issues related to health and sanitation, local governance, private savings and investments, and land market institutions. Both formal and informal systems of property rights may be necessary to curb the rapid growth of slum areas. In the absence of strong policy agendas similar to those adopted in Singapore or, more recently, in Brazil, it seems unlikely that slums will disappear in the foreseeable future, as implicitly assumed by dominant economic theories.
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How the social sciences can help
Overall, there has been very little theoretical and empirical social science research about how the public policy challenges posed by slums may be addressed. A research agenda on slums that can addressed by inter-disciplinary social science could focus on three distinct sets of methodological and policy questions.
Convulsive change demands study
Violence is embedded in the very way the city has developed and transformed. The state, the market and citizens have used violence as an instrument to stake their claims on it.
The city is undergoing another convulsion of transformation that is multi-layered. Some of this results in fragmented social relations, a constant instability through migration and loss of livelihoods, a mismatch in economic drivers and capabilities, and extremely high commoditisation of space that seems to engulf every nook and corner.
Mumbai is a city that is becoming more iniquitous, and losing its previous communitarian bonds. Inequality in the city has now taken on a spatial form. It is being reproduced consistently, by moving poor people the from inner city areas to city peripheries.
Mumbai has low crime statistics and continues to be statistically safe, but the real question to ask is this: is it safe for everyone?
What happens to groups that are systemically marginalised, criminalised, and pushed into vicious and accelerating cycles of violence and poverty? The incidents of terror and reported crime have produced fear across the world. In a self-providing society, this has given rise to the privatisation of security and surveillance. Growth of gated communities in Mumbai is a new phenomenon.
How can we collectively rediscover a notion of safety and rights founded in inclusivity and dignity? Or is the city condemned to a future that brings in a world class status, while simultaneously becoming more and more vulnerable to indignity and terror?
Social science research can create knowledge base on this phenomenon.
You can’t evaluate what you can’t count
First, we must address the methodological problems that hamper field research in slums. In particular, we must make efforts to properly count slum populations and to understand the experiences of different generations of slum dwellers. We must apply, more consistently, the empirical methods used to deal with survey attrition in other contexts to studies of slums.
We must systematically study key areas, like movements of individuals and groups into and out of slums, tracking of individuals who do move (even if this rare), and correlation in incomes and other socioeconomic outcomes across generations. It then becomes possible to understand the most pressing issues faced by slum-dwellers, and to integrate them better in policy processes.
What are the returns?
To choose and implement cost-effective projects and programmes that provide discernible welfare gains for slum residents, we must first identify and quantify the returns we would get from upgrading different types of public services in slums.
Several programmes with either mass investments in living condition in slums or wholesale relocation of slum households into housing estates appear to have been successful. However, political willingness to address key governance issues remains critical: specifically, engagement with actors who have filled the vacuum created by an absent government, and have a strong presence with heavy resources (such as rents) at stake. This aspect also needs to be studied.
Experiences across the country, and particularly in Mumbai, show that neither slum clearance nor ‘benign neglect’ stop slums from expanding. Slum inhabitants are not given opportunities to move to a better life; all that keeps them there is the lack of prospects of work back at home are more discouraging than unregulated slum living.
A new, emergent point of view holds that the government must ensure the basic entitlements and environment; the urban poor will then find creative solutions to improve their lives. Thus, rather than resettlement, state efforts could also focus on providing basic infrastructure: potable water, power, sanitation, waste disposal facilities. In this secure environment, slum residents will invest in their own homes, increasing their living standards. The upgradation process could also include poverty alleviation programmes. In other words, holistic solutions are required to address rural distress and urban poverty.
A city needs social science knowledge to understand how evictions and/or neglect compare with investments in slum upgradation. The latter has advantages. First, it is cheap. Second, it is endorsed by the inhabitants; communities perceive the investments as recognition of their citizenry, and participate in the maintenance of such facilities.
Early evaluation results from upgrading projects conducted in Kolkata, Mumbai, Jakarta and Manila have shown promising results. For instance, mortality caused by waterborne disease was halved among the beneficiaries in Kolkata and Mumbai, and investments in home improvements doubled in Jakarta. Upgrading programmes also seemed to increase the housing supply and the supply of labour by households.
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Points to ponder
Mumbai’s urban poverty cannot be tackled without looking at rural poverty
The rural poor migrate to cities and live in bad conditions only because the situation back in their villages is worse
Slums are not transitory phenomena, and relocation of people living in slums does not solve the problem; in fact it can cause more problems
To properly deal with urban poverty, we must study its causes, and deal with it holistically
New theories suggest that when the state guarantees basic amenities, residents are motivated to work on upgrading their surroundings
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We need more fundamental research on how to make slum upgradation sustainable.
A key concern is the reduction of rural-urban migration into metropolitan areas that are already overcrowded, where public services are already over-stretched.
Much more inter-disciplinary social science research is needed to find ways to address urban poverty, housing deprivation, and rural deprivation.
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About the author
Professor S. Parasuraman is director and vice-chancellor of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and has previously served as Senior Advisor to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, UNESCAP, Bangkok, Thailand. He has over 25 years of experience as a teacher, trainer, activist, administrator and development worker. He has served as Asia Regional Policy Director, ActionAid International, Team Leader of the Secretariat and Senior Advisor to the Commission, World Commission on Dams based in Cape Town, and Programme Director, Oxfam GB’s India Programme. He has over 50 publications in international and national journals, books and research reports. He has written several books and the one he most likes is Listening to People Living in Poverty, published by Books for Change and released in Peking in 2003.
