Slum dwellers face the brunt of our pandemic situation
4 min read . Updated: 26 Aug 2020, 08:05 PM ISTBelt-tightening with pervasive uncertainty over livelihoods could result in wide-ranging desperation
Slum residents are having a hard time dealing with the ongoing pandemic situation. When India’s lockdown began, most of them in Bengaluru and Patna lost their sources of income. In May, Patna’s slum residents were making only 20% of their pre-pandemic incomes. In June, Bengaluru’s slum residents were forced to forgo nearly two-thirds of their former incomes. Up to 85% in Patna and 60% in Bengaluru cut back on food and other essentials.
Even four months later, in the first fortnight of August, 67% of slum residents in Patna, and 45% in Bengaluru, were yet to get their old jobs back or find new ones. Large numbers were still cutting back on food and other essentials.
Four successive months of foregone incomes have put most slum dwellers in dire livelihood situations. Residents from every slum neighbourhood we interviewed in both cities liquidated assets at least once during this period to make ends meet.
Some neighbourhoods received government assistance, especially subsidized rations, and occasionally cash assistance or free or subsidized gas cylinders, but this aid (and that from private sources, like cooked food) was mostly received in the early part of the pandemic, and more often in Bengaluru than in Patna. Even in the best of circumstances, however, stopgap relief is no substitute for sustainable livelihoods.
The longer lockdowns continue, the greater are the chances that millions of slum residents will become persistently poor. Testing, tracing and other assurance-producing mechanisms need to be stepped up so people can safely reunite with their jobs.
These are some of the results of phone surveys undertaken in the second half of August in 20 slums each of Patna and Bengaluru. Slums represent the fastest-growing type of residence cluster in India. According to the national census, 65 million people live in slums. But definitional differences muddy these calculations. UN-Habitat estimates that close to 110 million, more than half the population of some cities, live in slums.
Our group of researchers has been studying these and other slums since 2011, using a toolkit that includes high-resolution satellite images, intensive ground-truthing, household and key informant interviews, oral histories and official records. We study a wide variety of settlements to tide over definitional disputes, ranging from three-floor concrete structures to those that have the flimsiest homes—blue tarpaulins or grass thatch stretched over four poles—with progressively sturdier homes in between. Average education levels, asset holdings, and occupations vary widely across types of slums.
Volatility, however, is a shared characteristic. Nearly all slum residents, even those in concrete structures, have informal jobs (no written contract, no specified tenure, no health care or old-age benefits); most live in informal homes (with no clear title). Because their lives are risky, slum residents fall into poverty frequently. Sons follow fathers into similar occupations. Few people move upward in slums. Still, rising middle-class incomes in cities have led to swelling demand for security guards, maids, drivers, repairmen, delivery boys, etc., and slums have grown rapidly.
With the help of a research grant from the International Growth Centre, we are conducting six rounds of phone interviews between late-July and mid-October to examine how these precarious situations are being affected by the pandemic situation. In each round, we interview three key informants in each of 40 slums, an equal number in each city, selected to represent the range of slums. Nearly all these individuals have lived their entire lives in the same slum, illustrating another general truth: all but the flimsiest slums are home not to recent migrants, but to a settled population that has been in place for generations.
In comparison to livelihood situations, which are dire, covid-19-related deaths and infections have been contained successfully in slums of both cities, though the future risk cannot be ruled out. Just one covid-related death or illness was reported in all 20 Patna slums for the fortnight ending 7 August. Slums in Bengaluru reported many more cases during this fortnight than those in Patna, but these cases tended to be concentrated in particular locations. City-wide averages can be misleading: four of our 20 slums in Bengaluru account for more than 70% of all reported covid-related sicknesses in this fortnight. Just one slum accounts for two-thirds of all deaths in this period.
There is no shortage of essential commodities in either city. Slum residents in Patna do not report significant price increases. In Bengaluru, though, these are reported, most commonly in respect of milk, medicines, cooking oil and sugar.
Reassuringly, crime has fallen sharply even as the livelihoods situation has worsened. Uniformly, slum residents in both cities report that crime and insecurity are “much less than before" or “non-existent".
The tranquil situation sits atop an explosive mixture. Continued belt-tightening, with pervasive uncertainty and no clear plan for wider job recovery, can result, as it did earlier with rural migrants, in wide-ranging alienation. Migrants have a safety valve, however. They can return to their village homes. A slum resident has no alternative. The only home she knows is in the city. Emily Rains, Sujeet Kumar, Mansoor Mohammad and Selva Raj contributed to this article, the first of a three-part series.
Anirudh Krishna and Harlan Downs-Tepper are, respectively, the Edgar T. Thompson professor of public policy and political science at the Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, USA and a PhD student at the Sanford School.
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