As cities grow, the poor and the disaster-stricken are induced to move from their villages, but the shortage of legal and affordable housing in cities pushes them into squatter settlements with no basic services. While India may be urbanizing more slowly than other emerging economies, in absolute numbers there are 377 million people in its cities. Of these, 93 million are slum dwellers, according to the 2011 Census of India report on Rural Urban Distribution of Population.
Slums in India are usually squatter settlements on public lands, and slum dwellers’ livelihoods are mostly informal, and therein lies the root of urban vulnerability. Slum dwellers occupy public lands along drains, ditches, railway tracks, roads, riverbeds, etc. that are affordable and close to work areas. Housing in these settlements is formally procured through an informal land market operative in the respective slums. House owners get documents to prove the sale, and that may be seen as providing protection from eviction or to get state compensation, although these house titles are not legal. Slum dwellers’ houses serve as collateral or investment to be sold in an emergency or given away in dowry.
Informal work can be exploitative. In slums, it pits the poor against the police, local bureaucrats, and foot soldiers of local bodies, who have to be bribed regularly. For informal workers, especially women, it is difficult to obtain a formal proof of identity. Proof of identify is often needed to access state subsidies and entitlements (e.g., housing, rations, school books, health care) or to open a bank account and get low-cost credit.
Given their inability to formally establish their identity, provide documented proof of housing ownership or rentals, the poor are condemned to live with low levels of services (e.g. water, toilets, sewage systems, waste bins, schools, and health services). The water supply in slums is mostly unreliable, provided by way of common stand posts or tankers. Families close to municipal pipelines often breach them, lowering pipes into pits, or use manual pumps to improve the water pressure. They also pay local plumbers to extend “galli” (street) connections by puncturing municipal pipes, bringing water into or close to their homes. In some settlements, small private vendors pipe groundwater supplies drawn up through bore wells and sell water at a premium. Because the water sold through such arrangements is usually of poor quality and untreated, slum dwellers often suffer from chronic water-borne illnesses. It has been estimated that those affected pay over Rs.500 (US$10) per month on medical care; additionally, they miss work and earn even less as a result of the illness.
Formal connections to water are typically not extended to slums because of their land status. Even when the state offers formal connections, slum dwellers lack the documentation (formal proof of residence) or the money needed to access them. In Bhubaneswar City, while the state agreed to lower the cost of connecting to the system, households were asked to provide a “Below Poverty Line” state card and an architect-approved housing certificate. To bypass these conditions, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), with the assistance of Centre for Urban and Regional Excellence (CURE), negotiated with the water service agency to accept a common slum survey map with connections to all households, and enabled households to access micro-finance. In Agra and Delhi, CURE organized groups of poor women to set up water treatment plants and kiosks with a home delivery system that enables access to potable drinking water at affordable rates, ensuring water security. Families are encouraged to install rainwater-harvesting structures, with overflows used to recharge the groundwater. The waste from the reverse osmosis treatment is also recycled for flushing or irrigating parks and fields.
Slums usually have no toilets, sewerage, drains, or solid waste collection services; hence, the sanitation conditions in slums are quite poor. Waste from homes is thrown into alleys and parks or drains, causing wastewater to spill onto the streets and stagnate. Some households build pits outside their homes and manually transport the wastewater to nearby drains. Some households cover or block the drains to prevent stagnation in front of their homes, interrupting the smooth flow of wastewater.
Slums are usually excluded from networks of underground sewerage because the state fears this will raise a demand from slum dwellers for regularization/formalization of settlements. Legal, technical, and engineering difficulties in providing sanitation infrastructure inside slums are often cited for lower standards adopted for these areas (e.g., open and shallow drains are used instead of covered and closed systems, and community toilets proliferate instead of private toilets).
Communal toilets do not have water, are dirty, and cost money to use, so some poor families build small pit latrines at home. Women manually clean these every day and keep the pits covered the rest of the time. Families with more money build toilets but since there is no infrastructure to connect to, they discharge directly onto the street or into city drains, water bodies, or open plots, generating unhygienic conditions for all. Greater tenure security and lower fear of eviction would encourage more households to invest in toilets. In the Savda Ghevra resettlement colony, CURE is enabling households to build personal toilets in small spaces by creating access to common septic tanks, credit, recycled wastewater for flushing and technical knowhow.
Surviving slums is a challenge. Greater provision of infrastructure, however, gives people the confidence to upgrade their own houses. A Decentralized Waste Water Treatment System on a city drain, built by CURE in partnership with the people of Agra, has not only triggered development of high-quality housing in one settlement, but has been recognized by the state as an opportunity to connect slums to city networks — a win-win solution.
Contributed by Dr. Renu Khosla, Director, Centre for Urban and Regional Excellence (CURE), India
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