Slums And The Indian Middle Class

Former Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh has taken up the cudgels on behalf of some Delhi slum-dwellers in danger of being evicted from railway land. The immediate consequence is a setback to the railways' effort to raise additional resources through commercial development of a lot of their idle land in urban areas. Given the passenger fares policy of the railways, what's good for the railways is good for the poor too. Large sections of the middle class will doubt V P Singh's sincerity. He cannot help being a populist even in retirement, they will say. But his move could start a vigorous public debate on urban slums which would be entirely worthwhile. And as he has laid out his case in a newspaper article, his views can be examined to get the debate going.

 

V P Singh is right when he argues that neither allowing permanent squatting on government land not the bulldozer is the answer. He would like to "freeze" manpower demand within metros in the short term and "increase" effective demand in the rural areas in the long run. No one will quarrel with the long-term goal but rapid economic development in countries from South Korea to Mexico has inevitably been accompanied by rapid urbanisation. Freezing jobs in metros, assuming that were possible, still leaves unaddressed the problem of slums and squatting on government land in non-metro cities and towns. Even the planned city of Chandigarh has spawned numerous slums. A policy on ending slums should not leave such a city or Bhopal or Pune out of its ambit.

There will also be wide support for V P Singh's suggestion that the relocation policy for slum-dwellers should be transparent and unambiguously administered, particularly for registration of residency which qualifies a person for allotment of land elsewhere. For Delhi, he proposes that the government honour its commitment to give a bit of land to those who squatted before 1991, half of it to those who set up house, such as it is, between 1991 and 1998 and none at all to those who came in after 1998. The policy thus is to remove slums, relocate those within clear cutoff points and not allow fresh slums at all.

This is logically fine but the reality is that the soft Indian state is notoriously incapable of enforcing a decision not to allow slums in a given area. And if by some act of God, the police and municipalities do succeed in doing so, then it will only give rise to slums just outside of the municipal boundaries. Soon the logic of politics will ensure that these new slums are `regularised', their residents given ration cards and their names added to voters' lists. The only indeterminate will be questions like how long it will take for these slum dwellers to get power and water connections.

If there is one crucial flaw to V P Singh's arguments, then it is his obliviousness to economic and social realities. For example, is it feasible to freeze demand for manpower within cities? Even if it could be done, would it be fair to the poor of this country? It will merely axe out higher urban income opportunities to many rural poor. Sooner than we know it, the middle class will be up in arms against a policy that denies it affordable servants. The vision that comes to mind is an India in which the cities are truly islands, where washing machines and dishwashers proliferate and households come to routinely rely on ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat food. Nothing terribly wrong in this except that the deprivation outside the city gates will be greater.

There are two other impractical suggestions that V P Singh makes. He wants property developers to be forced to build low-income dwellings along with the other property they put out, learning a lesson from the British practice of building servants' quarters with bungalows. He has probably never heard of such servants quarters being taken on rent for very high sums by young middle class couples or bachelors. The even more absurd suggestion is to punish with imprisonment those slum-dwellers who sell the new dwellings that are allotted to them. This, coming in the context of Delhi which has perfected the fine art of buying and selling property on the basis of the power of attorney! If reasonably made, no matter how modest, flats are given to slum-dwellers next to middle class neighbourhoods, then soon most of their original allottees will have sold and gone off. This may not be such a bad thing and could be an ideal solution provided slums do not reappear, which of course will be almost impossible to ensure.

The fact is that under present Indian economic, social and political conditions slums are inevitable. Middle class people will need servants, out of sheer bad habit or because they cannot afford all the gadgets that a servant-free home must have. These jobs will be a boon for those who get them because otherwise they would be far worse off in villages. The salary such servants earn will allow them to live only in slums. To prevent such slums from coming up, the state can build low income housing, with light and water meters, and sell them for a token amount to those who would have lived in slums, fully aware that these will be resold.

The ideal situation will be if those who are allotted such cheap housing are encouraged to form co-operatives. These should charge a rent equivalent to what the slumlords would have charged, and use it to maintain the houses and neighbourhoods. But for this to work, community groups have to come up and wield the authority given to them by the community itself. NGOs can help set up these. In the absence of this, bulldozing slums or sitting in dharna before them to prevent them from being bulldozed will be of no use. Slums will be around until most Indians become prosperous and conscious enough to demand a minimum quality of life which can never be found in slums.