"[S]lums are seen to be one of the most intractable problems of third world cities. We seem to have given up pretending to solve the problem and have resigned ourselves to merely coping with it. Underlying this perspective are the implicit assumptions of a laissez-faire society where those at the bottom of the heap are left to 'evolutionary elimination' so that those on top can carry 'progress' forward.
"If we would discard such social Darwinism for a different set of assumptions ... then slums are less the problem than the poor man's solution to the lack of urban housing...
"[S]lums are seen to be places festering with filth and fetid odours, unfit for human habitation. And so they must be demolished and eradicated, removed far away or hidden from sight. They are an eyesore that embarrasses us before our foreign tourists. [Slumdwellers] are dismissed as depraved, criminals, trespassers, a problem for the police, undeserving of our care. Here slums are perceived as an 'aesthetic' problem and the sensitivity to our foreign image allowed to outweight any civic concern for our fellow citizens.
"[But] how do we provide shelter for those whose labour is bought so cheap they are unable to afford conventional housing? This demands a more creative response than the bulldozer! ...
"But slums are illegal! Legality is a convenient stick which the sophisticated and privileged use to beat the simple and the disadvantaged. [W]e all know how building regulations, zoning laws, floor-space indices and the whole facade of legislation can be manipulated, changed and made flexible enough to 'legalize' powerful interests willing to pay a price. [A]lmost everyone who buys or rents conventional housing must pay for a large proportion of the transaction in 'black' money. Does not this make
almost all of us living in conventional houses, law-breakers? It may be dictated by the compulsions of the market, but is it any the less illegal than what the slumdweller does out of necessity? Where does the greater moral justification lie? ...
"The history of urban housing is one of deliberate and convenient neglect over decades. Compared to an annual need of 8 new dwellings per thousand population, only 1.8 are being built causing a spillover of excess population into slums...
"The annual housing need for the metropolis ... is estimated at 60,000 units. The Government agencies construct about 4000 units annually ... The contribution of the non-governmental sector has fluctuated around 12,000 units a year ... But these of course are quite out of reach for the ill organized poor. [figures from cited Government report].
"With the housing shortage escalating precipitously, more and more of the poor are forced to live in appalling conditions...
"[T]he share of [population] growth due to natural increase ... is steadily increasing. By 1961, nearly half the growth of the city was assigned to natural increase. [from cited report] [Note: I have a Municipal report that says natural growth accounted for nearly 75% of the city's growth by 1991].
"Yet there is an old and widespread misunderstanding ... that conjures up in the public imagination alarmist images of an encroaching tide, a flood...
"Obviously something must be done to control the distress migration from rural areas. The remedy lies in rapid rural development, not in an immediate urban exclusion. ...
"[T]he easiest way to decongest the city is not to redistribute people but employment, by changing the pattern of investment. Several of the city planners have recommended this, but the political will to implement it is lacking. ... Our many city plans have yielded precious little urban planning. The housing situation in our city illustrates this most aptly. For it touches on the most crucial resource of the city, urban land...
"The Government has had the power to acquire land for public purposes since the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. According to one study ... some 8000 hectares of vacant land [out of a total Greater Bombay area of 40,000 hectares] could be declared surplus and acquired...
"The direct economic returns on housing the urban poor are so low that neither the market nor even the Government are inclined to allocate available land for it. In spite of the dire human need for shelter, urban land lies vacant because there are larger profits waiting to be made with it in other ways...
"[M]iddle class stereotypes can be unsympathetic and harsh. Squatters are seen as unemployed parasites, criminals, depraved, without any drive to self-improvement. If they are given better housing, they sell it and go back to where they were. The assumption is that these people have neither the will nor ability to improve their lot and deservedly are where they are...
"The profile that emerges [from a cited slum census] presents a rather different picture ... In an average household of 4.38 persons, 1.47 were workers ... [S]lumdwellers were not very differently employed than the rest of the city population, except for markedly white-collar [professions] like financing, insurance, real estate and business services. A recent census of pavement dwellers covering 20,293 families ... showed [that] only 3 per cent of the families had no earning member...
"This data is far from supportive of the middle-class stereotypes ... Yet these persist because such stereotyping conveniently distances us from the social realities of the slumdwellers and from any moral responsibility for them...
"Throughout Bombay's history," writes [a cited urban affairs expert], "the incomes paid to the labour forces have been incapable of sustaining an adequate livelihood for most of those who worked."...
"Public housing was never a real priority with the Government ... As early as 1948, the Bombay Building Act enabled the Government to require housing for 40 percent of the labour force while sanctioning a new factory. But this was never implemented. However, the Bombay [Rent Control] Act of 1947 successfully protected tenancy interests [but] worked against the newcomers in search of shelter. [T]he urban poor are left to find their own shelter, where they are always under a threat of eviction when the space is required for more profitable purposes...
"Given their low level of income and savings, conventional housing [is] beyond the reach of the urban poor quite apart from the availability or the cost of land...
"The truth of the matter is this: in the intense competition for urban resources the poor must lose out, whether it be housing or land or labour, they are at the bottom of the heap even while their contribution to the city sustains those on top...
"For the poorest of the poor ... proximity to the sources of employment is a matter of survival ... The only security they want is one of employment. The only shelter they need is a place to sleep. No wonder they end up on our pavements. Leaving them there is to condemn them to a subhuman life. But moving them to the suburban periphery of the city is to separate them from their means of livelihood, which in effect is a denial of their right to live...
"Location, then, is critical for such people in any scheme for shelter [if they are evicted or their homes destroyed]. If no provision is made for access to employment ... then relocation will only be an inhuman and temporary measure, and they will inevitably drift back closer to their places of work ... After all they have little to lose but their jobs...
"The housing shortage has already crushed more than half the city's population into slums and squatter settlements. The poorest land on the pavements. The old middle class in the 20,000 dilapidated buildings, young couples ... new professionals coming into the city, all of these 'solid' middle-class citizens have no place to go either, as the housing squeeze is now reaching them...
And yet this class is so hostile to the ones below them in the class ladder ... There is a shrewd manipulation of people's perception that displaces their antagonism downwards rather than upwards ... Who are the puppeteers and who the puppets in this charade? ...
Unless we plan our urbanization as seriously as we do our industrialization, unless we meet the housing shortage with the same urgency with which we strove for self-sufficiency in food, the settlements and shelter in our cities will only be [a] man-made disaster."
Where do you think I found all this? In a report written after the recent spate of slum demolitions in Bombay? Good guess, but wrong. This is from Settlements and Shelter: Alternative Housing for the Urban Poor in Bombay, by Rudolf C Heredia for the Committee for the Right to Housing. The Committee was formed in the wake of massive demolitions of slums and evictions of the poor ... in 1985. Twenty years ago.
Twenty years, and how little has changed. Then, they said demolishing slums was the answer to the problem of mushrooming slums. What kind of answer, we know today: as we watch slums being bulldozed all over again all over my city.
Thank you for bearing with me.
4 comments:
I can think of very little to say about this report - mostly from a sense of totally crushing, albeit impoent, middle class guilt.
You do an excellent job.
Hi Dilip,
I have been following your writings for quite sometime now. You definitely have a v.different point of view than the sea of (middle-class) masses out there and you make your point very effectively.
I am(well, technically was) a Bombayite, and keenly follow all the city-news. Before reading your works, I was a confused soul, in the middle of opinions, wanting the slums to go, at the sametime, not v.sure how this prob could be solved. And I must admit, that you present a v.strong & logical case against the demolitions.
But there is still one question lingering in my mind. How do you think, this problem can be solved best by citizens groups(with/without govt intervention). Certainly there will be many others like you, who are on the same side. I say, with/without govt.intervention, because we all know "law is an ass" and govt is made of nincompoops. Relying on govt. to solve this problem is like waiting for end of this world. Isn't there any way, where like-minded people can come together, and do something at their own small level, just to prove that there is an alternative solution to this problem ? And then pressurize govt/civic agencies to reconsider their plans. If there is already something underway by NGOs/citizen groups in Bbay, on similar lines, I would be interested to know, and decide how best I can contribute to it.
May the tribe of thinkers like you increase.
"Evolutionary elimination" and "Social Darwinism" of those like Gurcharan Das and other free marketeers; "Newton's laws" of those like Narendra Modi. Misapplications of science abound!
To quote fron an old article in the Business Line: "In the new economic paradigm of dancing elephants, manufacturing consent involves engineering amnesia. Human beings have to swim against the tide to remember, but most of the time we do not even try."
You are forcing some of us to remember reports written decades ago. Great job, Dilip!
It appears that "Indian English-language writer" means "Sewer-Describer".
Of course doing an Excellent Job of inducing "Totally Crushing, Albeit Impotent, Middle Class Guilt". Ah! and its so nice to see it precedes a guilt-ridding, sin-washing, pilgrimage to - where else? The world Capital of Losers - the drink-sodden prostitute City of Noo Ohleans, Looeesianah. Of course, every Indian should aspire to such greatness - go try to rob beads off the drunken sluts at the "Mardi Gras" "celebration". Ooo!! So Suaaave! So "In-Thing". So "Sophisticated".
What next? The mud-wrestling contest in Oklahoma?
Please, someone, nominate Mr. DDSouza for the Noo Yoik Book-of-the-Month to join the all-time turd-record-holder, Pankaj Mishra.
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