By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jul 18 2000 (IPS)

A shanty town collapse that killed scores of residents in the overcrowded industrial metropolis of Mumbai has exposed the lack of a shelter policy for tens of millions of poor urban Indians.

That squatter colonies in India’s big cities are becoming death traps for lack of a firm resettlement policy was quite evident when a hillside tumbled down last week on a slum habitation in the Mumbai suburb of Ghatkopar.

For years, city authorities had distributed leaflets in Ghatkopar warning of possible landslides on the adjoining hills. But no attempt was made to move the people to a safer place. On the contrary, the slum population had grown over the years.

Governments are said to be wary of relocating slum dwellers for fear of losing the political support of people who make up a sizable chunk of the population of India’s metropolises.

More than five million people live in slums in Mumbai, nearly the same number in the eastern metropolis of Calcutta while the national capital is home to an estimated 600,000 slum families. According to the National Institute of Urban Affairs, nearly 30 million Indians will be living in urban slums in 2001.

But shanty town dwellers resist relocation because the new homes offered them do not meet their needs, point out critics of official policies for resettling slum residents.

The Ghatkopar disaster happened even as a controversy raged over a draft national slum policy prepared by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government.

The proposed guidelines advocated removal of all “untenable” slums but left the definition of untenability open to political expediency.

Putting this in practice, Urban Development Minister Jagmohan ordered bulldozers into some slum colonies in Delhi, asking residents to shift to new homes at sites suggested by the government.

Those resisting Jagmohan’s plans include former Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh. Singh and supporters of his Jan Chetna Manch (People’s Awareness Forum) have squatted before Jagmohan’s bulldozers demanding that slum dwellers be given tenurial rights to their existing homes.

However, slum dwellers have to choose between eviction and serious risks to health and life from unhygienic conditions in shanty towns that are prone to disease, fires, floods and landslides.

“Sadly, stopping evictions does not translate into decent housing – it is not eviction from squalid conditions that violates the right to decent housing but conditions which force people to settle in them in the first place,” said Gita Dewan Verma, a former consultant on housing issues to the government.

Open drainage sewers in the slums of Shakarpur in eastern Delhi were blamed for a rash of polio cases there last year, despite India’s much-acclaimed efforts to eradicate the disease from the country through an ambitious polio immunisation drive.

The slum colony of Wazirpur in northern Delhi, where the former prime minister stopped Jagmohan’s bulldozers, is situated perilously close to a railway line regularly used by goods trains loaded with highly inflammable material.

According to Verma, who works with the British Department for International Development, providing tenurial rights and houses on the same site is not always practical and could encourage encroachment on public land.

However, living conditions in resettlement colonies of former slum dwellers are no better than their original homes. Some 5,000 slum dwellers, who were moved recently on Jagmohan’s orders to Narela, 40 km east of Delhi’s city centre, are not happy with their new life.

“We have to spend at least half of what we earn commuting to our places of work in the city,” one of them, Mohamed Salim, was quoted as saying.

The relocation has disrupted the schooling of some 5,000 children who no longer have a school near their new homes. The only sign of a school in Narela is a signboard that says ‘site for school’, like another board which says ‘site for health care centre.’

Last year, some 6,000 slum households in the Indian capital were moved to similar resettlement sites.

Said Anil Laul, a town planner involved in resettlement work: “There is no paucity of funds or land. It is just that the will to work for the welfare of slum dwellers does not exist.”

He blamed authorities and politicians for creating the problem in the first place. “Slums do not come up overnight. In Delhi, slums take up 8,000 acres of land and have four million people living in them and this cannot have happened without the knowledge of the authorities,” he added.

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