Face of urban poverty

The ‘India: Urban Poverty Report, 2009’, prepared with the support of the United Nations Development Programme has certain revealing facts. According to the study, an estimated 23.7 per cent of the urban population was living in slums amid squalor, crime, disease and tension.

The key finding of this report is that poverty in Indian cities is not an overflow of the poverty in villages but has happened because of the faulty nature of urbanisation.

This is mainly due to poor city planning, urban land management and legislation. The distinct character of urban poverty is that it was not about only nutritional deficiency but deficiencies in the basic needs of housing, water, sanitation, medical care, education, and opportunity for income generation.

The report finds that urban workers were being increasingly pushed into the informal sector, even as the space for informal economic activities was gradually shrinking. And within the informal sector, the profile of the work in urban areas has moved from wage-employment to selfemployment, which carries its own uncertainties.

So the urban poor was increasingly a street vendor, a rickshaw puller, a rag picker, a cleaner, a washerman, a load carrier or a domestic servant. While these workers contributed to the growth of cities, there was a growing trend to push them to the urban periphery, as they were increasingly seen as threat to the ‘Globalcity’ dreams! In the event, though the share of poor in urban population had fallen, because of the increasing pace of urbanisation and the changing face of urban employment, the absolute number of urban poor had risen. As many as 81 million or 25.7 per cent people (2004-05) subsist in urban areas on incomes that are below the poverty line. Eighty per cent of their meagre income goes towards paying for food and energy, leaving very little for meeting the cost of living in an increasingly monetised society.

The Human Development Report commissioned recently for Mumbai, India’s largest metropolis and ‘commercial capital’, only confirms this urban distress.

Despite having the highest per capita income in the country (Rs 65,361), over 1.2 million ‘Mumbaikars’ earn less than Rs 591 per month. More than half of Mumbai’s population lives in sub-human conditions in shanties, but the land the slums are situated on comprises just six per cent of the city’s total land area.

This, in a city where posh apartments are routinely sold for anywhere between Rs 10 to Rs 25 crore and an Ambani brother builds a Rs 800 crore super-luxury mansion! For Chennai, India’s fourth largest metropolis, there is no authentic survey or report on the ‘face of urban poverty’. The Second Master Plan, notified in September 2008, says only this: “Below Poverty Line population during 1999-2000 in Chennai City, Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur were 9.58%, 1 3 . 2 % a n d 19.18% respectively.” But the comparative figures for homelessness, the worst form of urban poverty and deprivation, tells a different tale. In 2001, the total urban homeless population was 7,78,599 and Tamil Nadu had a high 7.3% compared to Delhi at 3.1% and Bihar 1.6%. Extreme poverty topped the list of reasons why people came to the streets with the highest being 73.75% in Chennai. The situation may be worse now! While so, Chennai’s Master Plan makes only a cursory reference to the city’s economic base as having shifted from trade and commerce to administration, then to manufacturing and now to services like Information Technology, IT Enabling Service and Business Process Outsourcing.

There was no in-depth study, analysis and evaluation of the city’s economy and the extent of poverty. This is conceded in the Master Plan document itself, which is now calling for such a study that is yet to commence! Chennai has a Master Plan for land management, regulation, resource allocation, infrastructure investments and urban basic services that has been drafted without an understanding of the city’s economy and its most vulnerable population.

Adverse effects of the Liberalisation- Privatisation-Globalisation agenda, perceived as the root cause of ‘urbanisation of poverty’ has not been studied and factored into the Master Plan or any other development initiatives in Chennai. This is leading to extremely skewed investment and resource allocation, which invariably works against the poor. Is this the government’s way of ‘prioritising the poor’? ‘Inclusive development’ is the slogan being shouted from every platform.

The question is how can development be inclusive if the decision-makers do not even know whom and what to include?