Sanjeev Sanyal: Villages that live in our cities

How India's urban villages are evolving and adapting to modernity

As our cities have expanded over the years, they have absorbed the surrounding agricultural lands. In some cases, the old villages too have been swept away. However, in most cases, the old villages survive despite being engulfed by the expanding urban sprawl. Scattered across modern Indian cities, there remain enclaves where the contours of the old villages can be clearly discerned decades after the surrounding farmlands were converted into offices, roads, houses and shops. In some ways, this is a distinctive aspect of Indian civilisation — the ability to allow the past to live in the present. Yet, these urban villages have dramatically changed with the times. Despite being ignored by civic authorities, they play an important role in the evolving social and economic life of Indian cities.

Changing with the times
There are urban villages in most Indian cities, often tucked away behind a modern building complex. They make their presence felt in many different ways — as the source of vagrant cattle, as homes to armies of informal workers, as the place to visit if one wants to buy bathroom tiles or electricals. Many of these villages have been newly absorbed into the urban fabric but some are old and have been embedded in the city for generations. In Mumbai, the old villages of Bandra and Walkeshwar retain strong vestiges of their origins despite being located at the heart of a throbbing megalopolis.

For the purposes of this article, I will limit myself to Delhi’s experience, although the story can be easily generalised. According to architect Ranjit Sabikhi, there are 106 villages within the city-state. They are many more in the wider metropolitan area if one includes Noida and Gurgaon. My studies suggest that, in general, these villages go through the following cycle:

• The farmers sell their land to the government or to a developer. Some of them fritter away their newly acquired wealth but most redeploy it in businesses that leverage the emerging urban landscape — transportation, labour contracting, supply of construction material and so on. Some of the more prosperous villagers buy themselves new homes and move out. However, they all usually retain their houses in the old village settlement. This settlement, dubbed as a lal dora area, is exempt from usual municipal and building codes. The former farmers use the exemption to build a mishmash of buildings with little regard for safety or ventilation. These become home to construction workers and other service providers who move into the area. Thus, the village turns into a slum with the old villagers as slum-lords. 
   
• After about a decade, construction work in that particular area begins to wind down. The construction workers drift away to other sites. New migrants move in — security guards, maids, drivers and other people who work in the newly built urban space. The commercial establishments too go through a parallel transformation. The shops selling construction material and hardware are steadily replaced by shops selling mobile phones, street food, car parts and so on. For the first time, we see private and, occasionally public, investment in amenities such as common toilets. As the migrants become more permanent, they bring in their families from their ancestral villages. This leads to an interesting supply-side response — the “English Medium” school! In my experience, language is seen by the poor as the single most important tool for social climbing. Nathupur in Gurgaon is example of a village that is currently moving from the first stage to the second stage. Next door, the village of Sikandarpur is slowly shifting to the next stage. 
   
• After another 10 to 15 years, the village goes through yet another transformation. By this time, the surrounding area is well-settled and open agricultural fields are a distant memory. We now see students, salesmen and small businessmen move into the village. Some of them may be the newly educated children of migrants but they are now a higher social class. The old villagers still continue to be the dominant owners of the land but they now begin to invest in improving their individual properties in order to elicit higher rents (after all, they now have a location advantage in the middle of the growing city). In many instances, the owners have become politically important enough to lobby for public investment in basic drainage and sanitation. In my experience, public transport connections have a strong positive effect on the economic dynamism of the slum. The shops upgrade themselves and the old street-food sellers become cheap restaurants. An “Aggarwal Sweets” is almost obligatory in the larger settlements. 
   
• The final stage in the process of transformation is that the old village gentrifies. This can happen in a number of ways. Since the early nineties, Hauz Khas village has become a warren of boutique shops, art galleries and trendy restaurants. Mahipalpur, near the international airport, has seen an explosion of cheap hotels in the last decade. Similarly, Shahpur Jat has become home to a numerous small offices and designer workshops. In many cases, the old villagers have encashed their real estate and the ownership pattern has become much more mixed. The areas now grapple with the problems of prosperity such as inadequate parking.

What can we learn?
The evolution of urban villages reminds us that Indian slums are not places of hopelessness but are often industrious and changing ecosystems. The process of evolution has a big positive impact on the economic and social development of both the old villagers as well as new migrants. However, there are two important learnings. First, public investment in the “commons” speeds up the development process. Amenities such as common toilets, public transport and drainage can have an important impact on the quality of life of residents as well as attract new economic opportunities. Second, the process of adaptation depends on decades of steady investment by the owners. This is only possible because private property rights are clear. This is why the same process of evolution does not easily take root in squatter slums. Policy-makers must take these into account as they plan interventions aimed at making India “slum-free”.

The author is president of The Sustainable Planet Institute