Slums and SC intervention

The issue of slums in India needs a carefully thought-out solution, to preserve human rights.

 Slums and SC intervention

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• The story: Millions from lower-income groups from rural areas who come to cities for a secure livelihood, hardly earn enough to eek out a decent standard of living. So most are forced to put up in slums and shanties of ‘jhuggi jhopdi clusters’. The Supreme Court has ordered forced eviction of many households settled around the railway land in Delhi. The court has tasked the railways, the Delhi government and the central government to instead come up with a comprehensive housing plan for these households.
• Human rights challenge: The Supreme Court ordered the removal of about 48,000 slum dwellings situated along railway tracks in Delhi within three months, and to ensure compliance of its order, it has stopped any court from passing an order of stay against such removal. The action was taken after the failed attempt of the Special Task Force to remove these Jhuggies as they were present within the security zone of the Railways. Although these Bastis (slums) cover less than 0.6% of total land area, and 3.4% of residential land in the 2021 Delhi Master Plan, they support possibly upto 30% of the city’s population.
• Slums: These are highly populated urban residential areas consisting mostly of closely packed, decrepit housing units in a situation of deteriorated or incomplete infrastructure, inhabited primarily by impoverished persons. More than 1 billion people live in slums and informal settlements globally. As much as 50-80% of employment is informal in developing cities, from street vendors to minibus drivers to migrant workers. Many of these families are surviving day-to-day lives by living in dense neighborhoods with unreliable and often shared access to basic services like water, sanitation and electricity.
• Indian slums: Between 152-216 million (17.4% of urban households) people in India live in dense informal housing, or slums. The World Resources Institute (WRI)'s World Resources Report documented how one slum in Bangalore is 12 times denser than the city average, housing 1,40,000 people per square kilometer. In Mumbai,While more than 70% of slum dwellers queued up for water delivered by tanker trucks every few days, the amount of water these households could access was far below the World Health Organization (WHO)’s recommendation of 50 liters per day in non-emergency situations.
• Delhi slums: Lalbagh, Delhi’s largest slum has a population of more than 3 lakhs and is spread over an area of just one kilometer. A sizable proportion of slums (37.2%) in Delhi have no toilet facility and people use open spaces for the purpose. Delhi, already suffering from a housing shortage, needs to build and upgrade around 4.8 million houses by 2022, to house a third of its population that lives in substandard housing.
• Affordable housing: It is not just housing units that are affordable but also the possibility of employment and affordable mobility. It is linked to admission for children in local schools, employers’ homes that domestic workers can walk to, arrangements for child-care with known neighbours, and streets that vendors and rickshaw drivers have mastered as markets. The notion of ‘jahan jhuggi, waha makan’ should be pursued.

1. Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Urban: In-situ Rehabilitation of the existing slum dwellers should be taken and accomplished in a mission mode under the PM- Awas Yojana- Urban.
2. Reducing the Urban Rural Gap: In order to prevent the migration of a large population from rural to urban areas, job opportunities and other amenities should be provided in the rural areas a well. Schemes such as PURA Initiative and Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission (SPMRM) offer as a way forward towards these goals.

 

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