Slums exist in every country. Even US have them. Who does not know the Favelas of Brazil? The slum-dwellers need a supportive environment in which they can live and improve their lives. However, we see only political one-upmanship. Often, they are either relocated to the margins, or forced to live in dangerous or distant places. We often see the emergence of parallel markets, middlemen and price gouging since services are not provided. The plight of urban poor is worse. They are not even treated as citizens. No magic can remove the slums. We need to dump the failed policies, offer land, services, helpful regulations and support for real solutions to emerge.
About 50% of India’s more than 35000 cases of Covid-19, are located in essentially 12 major cities like Mumbai, Thane, New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Indore, Bhopal, Pune, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Chennai, Surat and Agra. Most of these cases are clustered around slums in these cities with Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Delhi particularly hit badly. Do slums breed viruses? What can be done about the slums?
Making a living in Mumbai is everyone’s dream for the opportunities it provides. The coexistence of grandeur, and glittering high-rises and gated communities, symbolising wealth and splendour, along with disease, desperation and frustration in its slums is a study in contrast. Spread over 390 kilometres, the suburban railway carries more than 7.5 million commuters daily. That is a staggering 2.6 billion annually, equivalent to the populations of both India and China put together. A consequence is that the city is bursting at the seams.
Mumbai being the financial capital, attracts people of all walks of life, so much so that most of the businesses carried out in Mumbai are by people who travelled and then settled here. Be it, hotels, textiles, transport, precious metals, other metals or scrap, whatever is bought and sold, has been by people coming from all over the country. Large infrastructure projects need labour at the sites, who then settle in the vicinities, largely daily wagers and contract labour from far off places. The urban planners for more than a hundred years, conveniently turned a blind eye to the plight of this migrant labour. No one ever cared to know how and where these people lived, as long as they delivered on daily chores.
Slums constitute 17% of urban households in India. Mumbai unfortunately has a 42% stake. Dharavi, one out of a multitude of slum clusters in Mumbai, is spread over just 2.1 sq. km with more than 700,000 living on it. Thirteen slum clusters like Gomtipur or Dhorwada in Ahmedabad, or the 675 slum clusters in Delhi or numerous slum clusters of Thane are all examples of human apathy. These clusters are extremely crowded, often with many people staying in a single room with no access to private toilets and clean water. Spread of Covid Virus, which is infectious and symptomatic that transmits from a person while experiencing symptoms, is easy in these clusters. Should we not seek an effective solution to de-congest them? Apart from being potential hotspots in times such as endured now, they are also potential crime spots.
An innovative concept of using land as a resource and allowing incentive FSI in the form of tenements for sale in the open market, for cross-subsidization of the slum rehabilitation tenements which are to be provided free to the slum-dwellers is indeed a novel and noble scheme of the Government of Maharashtra. But then, slum rehabilitation schemes in some form are operative since 2005. Are they working?
Can our national and local policy makers dramatically change their policy responses because of Covid induced urgency? The slum story is the same wherever they are. The biggest cause of badly managed slums is not rural-urban migration, nor people squatting on public land, nor poverty itself. Major factor is poor policy responses, and ill-informed, outdated regulations, all reinforced by a hostile and aggressive attitude to the urban and urbanizing poor. Often, poor policy creates most slums and ensure they do not improve.
Majorly, urban growth takes place in existing cities, not new ones, and mostly in small-and medium-sized cities. The governing and presiding form of planning must be practical and not color-coded zones on the Master Plans. Most cities growth is informal, and development incremental, as people improve their living conditions over time, as and when they can afford. Ninety percent of employment is informal, too, with household enterprises being dominant.
There are multiple solutions to this vexed problem if one were to seek them. First, a simple backhand calculation shows that a 50% utilisation of available space of 2 sq. km, can accommodate the current population with the remaining 50% developed as multiple green zones. This of course will require about 1500 towers of 20 floors each to be built at a rough estimate of 36000 Cr of rupees. Obviously, this cannot be carved out of a corporation budget of about 33000 Cr of Rupees.
Anything offered free has negative returns. Offering these flats free to the tenants will be a colossal drain on the exchequer. If for example, they were to be offered at 50% of the market value the liability would come down to 18000 Cr. Further, an initial chaffing separating the legal tenant from the illegal will further bring down the liability. Raising this sum through public bonds and allowing FDI in infrastructure has several other advantages besides the collateral. Crowdfunding, Angel Investing, Bank Loans, Venture Capital can all be explored further. The number of jobs and employment opportunities that this exercise will create will even be sufficient to bring down the unemployment rate in the entire country by at least 2 percentage points.
Second, 60% of the population can be located outside the city creating multiple satellite centres. With a surface transport that is as effective as it is in Mumbai, is this a non-doable? This can also create new town clusters and millions of employment opportunities.
Our slums will not disappear because we do not want them, but by being transformed. Over time, the shack becomes a house, the slum becomes a suburb. This is how citizenship and cities are built. Corona has been an eye opener and has given us a great opportunity to transform our lives, our cities and our poor. Can we rise to the occasion so that no pandemic in future would ever be able to put us on the mat again?