Most of us while travelling on train must have got glimpse of how slums look. As train approaches a city one could notice rickety shelters, little kids half naked excreting on side of railway lines, filthy water and air, huge amounts of waste dumped, women washing clothes and utensils in green muddy water. Then, as train moves inside city we see buildings, roads and all sorts of modern stuffs and we could not help but wonder: why so much disparity?
As India moves closer to the mid-point of the Eleventh Five Year plan, urban poverty remains a problem of huge proportions. Of the world’s total number of urban poor, 39% live in India on less than $ 1.08/day (PPP2002). On measures applied domestically, one in every four urban residents in India survives on less than Rs. 19/day. Over 62 million people live in slum settlements under threat of eviction and without access to even the barest of services. Most of the urban poor are the result of rural poverty. With most of the people in rural India practising subsistence farming and disguised unemployment being rampant, it is no surprise why many rural people are migrating increasingly to cities. They migrate to cities in search for better livelihood opportunities and better standard of living but most of them subsist on the periphery of the poverty line, and remain vulnerable to economic and business vicissitudes and cycles. The capacity and capability of urban poor to choose their own way of life is very small but potential is immense. Let us in brief understand economic life of a poor person.
The biggest challenge in front of a poor person is to first come out of vicious circle of poverty. Poor people are characterized by low income groups. The vicious circle starts with low investment. This results in low income which is inadequate to meet consumption needs. This result in low savings and low savings again lead to low investment. Thus, this circle moves. Now a poor person if wants to break the shackles of poverty has to first break the vicious circle by increasing the level of investment. Additional income then leads to additional savings which again increases scope of more investment.
By investment here I mean spending money to buy physical assets (like auto rickshaw, sewing machine etc) or to gain personal skills (like electrician, plumber) which would them help in earning sustained income in future. However, to make investment you need to be Entrepreneurial and also have access to capital markets (to take loan). Slum residents are neither entrepreneurial (because of lack of education) and neither do they have proper access to capital market (because banks do not find them creditworthy). To solve these problems two things need to be done. First, children of slum people should be provided quality education at low cost and second there must be efforts to link slum people to the financial system so that habit of savings is inculcated in them. I greatly appreciate government’s move to ask private schools to reserve a certain percentage of seats for poor people in the city and charge less fees from them. Moreover, the unique universal identity card that our government intends to release will definitely improve financial inclusion. Microfinance institutions in cities are also doing great job to increase financial literacy of these people.
During my internship at SAATH, I got chance to meet many slum people and talk to them about their problems. I would like to share some with you. Most of the people I talked had come from villages of Rajasthan and Gujarat. They migrated to Ahmedabad in search for livelihood opportunities as it was becoming difficult to sustain in village. After coming to city they settled in one of the slum areas. Here I would like to add an interesting point. Nobody knows who owns the land where slums thrive. Slum people have divided land among themselves and charge rent when a new family comes to live on their land. Slum people who proclaim themselves to own land do not have any kind of registry to tell that they actually own the land and when they leave the city they also sell their land to another slum dweller for say Rs 5000 (too low amount to be true price of land). The land actually belongs to the government or a private party but nobody knows to whom. So, these slum dwellers live in constant threat of eviction. One day true land owner may come and ask them to evict.
Most of the people I talked did not have any bank account or social security instrument like insurance cover. I also found out that most of the children in slums went to schools but could not develop interest in learning. They would drop out of school by the time they reach class eight. Very few would go for matriculate and intermediate exams. Health facilities were also not adequate. Roads inside slum areas were not cleaned as municipality workers do not work there. Also, drainage system was poor. Moreover, there was large information asymmetry in the sense that many slum dwellers did not have information about many government programmes made for their benefit.
Another thing I noticed was that social capital is quite prevalent among poor. This in the form of kinship groups, whether by family, clan, tribe, caste, neighbourhood, religion. The poor invest a lot in maintaining their social capital because it serves as a safety net- a form of insurance in case adversity becomes more than normal. That is why one sees paradoxical situations where very poor households spend a fair amount of money, often taking a back breaking loan, for marriages and death feasts.
Most of the people living in normal societies see slums only in negative light. According to them slums disturb aura of their city and should be bulldozed and people be asked to return to their village. But, bulldozing is not a solution. To an extent media has been responsible to present only grim picture of slums where only diseases and criminals thrive. The truth is that advantages that we get from slums far outweigh the disadvantages. People living in slums provide invaluable service to other people residing in city. People living in slums are mainly Taxi drivers, vendors across street, maids in our houses, washer man, sweepers etc. We cannot imagine our life without them. The only grudge is that they are not provided with adequate infrastructure where they can thrive leaving their past behind. We usually forget that apart from providing their invaluable service to us, these slum dwellers are also service users. Let us not be staggered by the statistics that I presented above and conclude that since they cannot pay for the services they use, they are not provided basic facilities like drinking water, electricity, housing etc. That is so not true. Researchers have shown clearly that they can and are willing to pay for the services they use.
In conclusion, I would like to say that one has to look at every aspect of the life of a poor person to lift him out of poverty. If an NGO is focussing on providing livelihood, it cannot ignore health and education. So, the need of hour is Integrated Slum development Program. In India people have right to move wherever they want. So, it is not possible to stop formation of slums. The government should adopt an approach of in situ development. We all must keep one thing in mind that slums are a productive part of any city. They can do as good as a common people of the city.
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