Slums And The Covid

About 50% of India’s more than 33000 cases of Covid-19 are located in essentially 12 major cities like Mumbai, Thane, New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Indore, Bhopal, Pune, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Chennai, Surat and Agra, which together account for almost 16000 cases in the country. Most of these cases are clustered around slums in these cities with Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Delhi particularly hit badly. Do slums breed viruses? What can be done about the slums?

Slums exist in almost every country. Even the most advanced in the contemporary world like the US have slums. Slum-dwellers need a helpful and supportive environment in which they and their fellow residents can improve their lives. Many governments, however, spend their energies in political one-upmanship rather than rewarding and encouraging these processes. The land is never made available, and the poor are either relocated to the margins or forced to live in dangerous or distant places. In the slums, we often see the emergence of parallel markets, middlemen and price gouging since services are not provided. The plight of the urban poor is worse. Their rights are not respected and are not treated as citizens. Every problem has a solution often in the same place but we seldom see them. No magic can remove the slums. We need to dump the failed policies, offer land, services, helpful regulations and support for real solutions to emerge.

A career in Mumbai is everyone’s dream for it provides several opportunities for a living. The coexistence of grandeur, splendour and glittering high-rises and gated communities, symbolising wealth and splendour that offer a life of comfort for the rich, comparable to any that is on offer in the world, along with disease, desperation and frustration in its slums which team all over the city is truly a study in contrast. Spread over 390 kilometres, the suburban railway carries more than 7.5 million commuters daily. That is a staggering 2.6 billion annually and is equivalent to the populations of both India and China put together. That the city offers everyone something to eat and hence make a living is admirable but a deep concern that it is bursting at the seams. 

Mumbai being the financial capital attracts people of all walks of life so much so that most of the business carried out in Mumbai are by people who travelled and then settled here. Be it, hotels or textiles or transport or metals or scrap or precious metals, whatever is bought and sold, has been by people coming from all over the country. Large infrastructure projects needed labour at the sites. They eventually created new settlements in the vicinities. All these in their wake, brought in people, largely daily wagers and contract labour from far off places, in hoards to service these markets. The urban planners for more than a hundred years conveniently turned a blind eye to the plight of this migrant labour. No one ever cared to know how and where these people lived as long as they delivered on daily chores. These have grown to monumental proportions.  

In fact, slums constitute 17% of urban households in India. Mumbai, unfortunately, has a 42% stake. Dharavi, one out of a multitude of slum clusters in Mumbai, is spread over just 2.1 sq. km with more than 700,000 living on it. That is a staggering density of over 277,136/km2, probably the largest in the world. Thirteen slum clusters like Gomtipur or Dhorwada in Ahmedabad or the 675 slum clusters in Delhi or numerous slum clusters of Thane are all examples of human apathy. Slums in Mumbai like in every other slum cluster, are extremely crowded, often with many people staying in a single room that lack even necessary amenities like private toilets and availability of clean water. Spread of Covid Virus, which is infectious and symptomatic that transmits from a person while experiencing symptoms, is easy in slum clusters. Should we not seriously look at these clusters in the country and seek an effective solution to de-congest them? Apart from being potential hotspots in times such as endured now, they are also potential crime spots. 

An innovative concept of using land as a resource and allowing incentive floor space index (FSI) in the form of tenements for sale in the open market, for cross-subsidization of the slum rehabilitation tenements which are to be provided free to the slum-dwellers is indeed a novel and noble scheme of the Government of Maharashtra. In fact, slum rehabilitation schemes in some form are operative since 2005. But are they working? A simple question would be if and when at all, all the slums would be replaced and their dwellers rehabilitated? 

Can our national and local policymakers dramatically change their policy responses because of the Covid induced urgency? The slum story is the same wherever they are. The biggest cause of badly managed slums is not rural-urban migration, nor people squatting on public land, nor poverty itself. The major factor is poor policy responses, and ill-informed, outdated regulations, all reinforced by a hostile and aggressive attitude to the urban and urbanizing poor. Often, the poor policy creates most slums furthering ensuring slums do not improve.

Majorly, urban growth takes place in existing cities, not new ones, and mostly in small and medium-sized cities. The governing and presiding form of planning is feet and facts on the ground, not colour-coded zones on the Master Plans. It is a fact that most city growth is informal, and development will be incremental as people improve their living conditions over time, as and when they can afford. 90% of employment is informal, too, with household enterprises being dominant. 

Problems of massive proportions need truly out of box solutions. There are multiple solutions to this vexed problem if one were to seek them. First, a simple backhand calculation shows that with a 50% utilisation of available space of 2 sq. km, the current population can be accommodated with the remaining 50% developed as multiple green zones. This, of course, will require about 1500 towers of 20 floors each to be built at a rough estimate of 36000 Cr of rupees. Obviously, this cannot be carved out of a Corporation budget of about 33000 Cr of Rupees. 

Anything offered free has negative returns. Offering these flats free to the tenants will be a colossal drain on the exchequer. If for example, they were to be offered at 50% of the market value the liability would come down to 18000 Cr. Further, an initial chaffing separating the legal tenant from the illegal will further bring down the liability. Raising this sum through public bonds and allowing FDI in infrastructure has several other advantages besides the collateral. Crowdfunding, Angel Investing, Bank Loans, Venture Capital can all be explored further. The number of jobs and employment opportunities that this exercise will create will even be sufficient to bring down the unemployment rate in the entire country by at least 2 percentage points. 

Second, 60% of the population can be located outside the city creating multiple satellite centres. With a surface transport that is as effective as it is in Mumbai, is this a non-doable? This again has the potential to create new town clusters and millions of employment opportunities. 

A similar model can rid the City of its other slum clusters. Our slums will not disappear because we do not want them or them being removed, but by being transformed. Over time, the shack becomes a house, the slum becomes a suburb. This is how citizenship and cities are built. Corona has been an eye-opener and has given us a great opportunity to transform our lives, our cities and our poor. Can we rise to the occasion so that no pandemic in future would ever be able to put us on the mat again?