Will Smart City Mission Lead To Eviction Of Slum Dwellers?

The Narendra Modi-led government is in the process of building smart cities across the country and raise the Indian cities to European standards. But, activists think that the government will have to evict a large population of slum dwellers to build central business districts (CBDs) and infrastructure for these districts including transportation.

In Bhubaneshwar, for example, the government plans to build an affordable housing project on a 985-acre land. Slum dwellers are against this and have started planning an agitation. According to the government estimates, slum dwellers have encroached upon nearly 25 per cent of this land. The government has assured that 5,273 households will get houses in and around this area though they would be temporarily relocated. However, slum dwellers do not trust this as they think there is much corruption in the process of identifying beneficiaries. Some of them claim that they have been living there for decades, and are still not in the list of beneficiaries.

In June, the municipal corporation in Himachal Pradesh's Dharamshala evicted nearly 1,500 migrant workers who live in slums, though they have been living there for many decades. The municipal corporation pulled down makeshift tenants despite the protests. Even though slum dwellers formed a human chain, the police removed them and about 300 families were displaced. In the pretext that they were being rehabilitated, slum dwellers were moved to a space where there was nothing. 

Such horrors are just the logical end result of seeing urbanisation as the goal, without understanding that it is a process. In any impoverished city, there will plenty of people who live in informal settlements. Slums exist when a city is prosperous enough to attract so many poor people but impoverished enough for decent housing to be beyond their reach. Every city in the world has gone through such a phase. There is nothing much the government can do to wipe out the problem overnight. In Delhi, the government had plans to use the existing land in unauthorised colonies as well as the existing dwelling units to provide homes for slum dwellers.

It may be true that nearly half of the people in some Indian cities live in slums because these cities are poor. Still, slums are proof that the market will find a way to provide housing for even the poorest. It may be true that such housing leaves much to be desired. But, that is the best that is possible, given the way things are. It is a miracle that low-income people are able to live in the core of Mumbai and Delhi where real estate is among the most expensive in the world. It is the market which makes this miracle possible. The market would not have been able to accomplish this without compromising on certain standards. This is inevitable.

The most the government can do is to allow such slums to exist and flourish and provide them with basic infrastructure. Informal settlements will disappear in the long run if people are free to renovate their houses or to sell them in the market. This has happened in many cities in the world, including Singapore. There is no good reason why that would not happen here if the government would allow slums to develop.