2001 to 2011: Are Mumbai's slums on the decline?

It is just possible that Mumbai’s slum content vis-a-vis the non slum or the genteel segment may be easing though the definitive, disaggregated numbers from the Census 2011 that are yet to be released. This is a chance since the household survey held prior to the 2001 and the 2011 surveys reveal a distinct drop in households categorised as slum households. A household is number of people or families under one roof. That particular household survey done as a precursor to the 2001 headcount showed that 52.2 per cent of all households were of slum dwellers, and the population in them added up to 54.2 percent of all Mumbai residents. The 2010 household survey showed this slice was only 41.3 percent. [caption id=“attachment_1180253” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Slums in the outskirts of Mumbai. Reuters.[/caption] By definition, since 1971 Census, a household is “a group of persons who commonly live together and would take their meals from a common kitchen unless the exigencies of work prevented any of them from doing so”. However, given that straight arithmetic does not work with such variable, it would be wrong to assume the decline in slum dwelling population’s numbers on a pro rata basis. If 52.2 percent slum households meant 54.2 percent of the population, 41.3 percent does not mean only as much of slum proportion. Did one slum household comprise more or less only one slum dweller in 2001? That would be odd because slums are teeming with at least five on an average living in about 100-120 sq ft. There is some mystery that needs to be cracked when the final numbers are out. A decline in numbers of such households should normally point to a decline in the total number of slum dwellers, unless the sizes of each family increased. Mumbai has generally seen male-led migration amongst the poor. Thereafter once the male earning number is settled, the families migrate as well. Mumbai’s space crunch has seen the death of joint families but in slums, a loft is rented out if the family itself does not need that space or requires a rental income. Multi-storeyed slums have come up, for instance in Bandra(East), rising up to four storeys, visible as you use the skywalk. If decline it indeed is, it is despite the one inescapable fact that governance efforts with regard to the slums in Mumbai have, by and large, been patchy. The distinct options have been three: One, preventing them; two, improving them; and three, replacing them. Prevention of slum settlements from forming has not worked at all, and if it did, it was mainly due to absence of spaces to colonise. If that worked, the Maharashtra Government wouldn’t have come up with a proposal last week that officials in whose jurisdiction they come up would be punished. Improvement of slums has remained at the level of some indifferent quality of paving the pathways, providing toilets of a kind which are less a convenience for the mornings than an inconvenience due to the stench, some nominal provision of water supply. But these are generally restricted to notified slums. Only slums on government or quasi-government lands including the civic lands, roads and sidewalks included are notified. If the slums are situated on privately owned lands they do not get notified as slums. This is even if they qualify for rehabilitation if of pre-1995 vintage. That is discrimination between slums. Slums, technically, are illegal regardless of who owned the land. If any improvements are done to the households – material used etc. – they are largely due to the effort of the residents and not the government. This is especially true if it is an ‘owned’ slum dwelling. That does by no means elevate them to a non-slum status because overcrowding, absence ventilation and essential services continue to plague them. It is possible that slum replacement could have been a factor in the likely reduction in slum population. However, this flies in the face of some official facts. As many as 1,327 slum rehabilitation projects across Mumbai remain on paper. As many as 300 developers have been served show-cause notices. Since the launch of the slum rehabilitation policy in 1996, only less than 200 have been taken up and completed though some are bogged down by issues like the coastal zone regulations. A rough estimate is that SRA projects have enabled some 76,000 families to move out of abysmal slum conditions. They cannot be the reason for a likely drop in slum population. The slum rehabilitation has never focussed on slum-dwellers seeking accommodation in non-slum housing. The need, or intent, to rehabilitate is tied up with the requirement of funding coming from developers who get to exploit additional floor space index (FSI) to subsidise the ‘free’ housing. At once, the concept changes to real estate exploitation, not benign social welfare. That is where issues of serious import emerge. If, when negotiating SRA projects, developers do not find them viable for exploiting the high cost FSI, it is put it on ice. The slum dwellers are cornered, and coupled with external market conditions, it leads to maximum windfall for the developer. The probability of a slide, however, may not be as much as the difference between the slum households as a proportions of the total city households between 2000 and 2010. Because, slumming is on the increase in every census town, and across India, is up by 25 per in a decade. Mumbai cannot be rapidly running in the opposite direction.