The garland makers of a Delhi slum

It's quite startling when you come across the beauty of fresh flowers in a slum. 

There are more than 30 families here in this shanty town near the Sai Mandir.
It is a cottage industry, where people work with flowers.

Look closely at the street behind this lady. It has semi-permanent ramshackle structures. The houses are made of bricks, with asbestos for roofs. There is a man sleeping on a really narrow make-shift bench on the right.

A blue tarpaulin strung between the house and the street wall
provides shade and protection from rain.

A lot of things that more prosperous Dilliwallahs throw away are recycled by the slums. In the photo below, note the door which is made of recycled wood. Two pieces of waste plywood have been nailed together using other waste wood scrap pieces, to make one big door. Water is stored in buckets and recycled cans. There is a gunny-bag hanging on the left which once used to hold cement, but now is used as a container.

In the slum, recyling is a necessity, not a virtue.
The white floorboard which covers the gaping hole in the road
is probably an extra tile from a construction site.

And yet, despite the poverty, the people who work here have regular incomes not just for their basic needs, but also to go to the cinema, or to send children to school. One of the primary reasons is that there are multiple earning members in the  family, many of whom are women. 

Where the women earn money, the earnings go directly towards the
welfare of the family (instead of being squandered on drink).
In the Indian cultural context, the easiest way to prosperity is
if women can work in cottage industries, where they have more 
control over how to balance their work and family needs.

Finished product, ready for sale at the temple.
Marigolds are the most popular flowers in India used for prayer as well as decoration.

Here is a street view of the "main road" of this slum. It is twice the width of the side lanes. There are shops here, selling provisions and small daily needs items like tea, biscuits, soap and shampoo sachets. The branded FMCG companies have all learnt the importance of having small sachet sizes, starting at 5 rupees. Cycles and motor-cyles are parked here.

Electricity is probably being siphoned off from the electric pole you see in the far background. 
There are many dangling overhead cables, probably for  television and cable TV. 
Television is the main source of entertainment and information in almost all slums

One of the shops on this main street is a tailor. You can see the illegal wires that provide electricity for this shop. The tailor has an assistant, so it's not just a one-man show. Maybe they take jobs not just for the local slum, but also sub-jobs from other places.

Life in this part of Delhi is not easy, but to the people who live here, it is still better
than the conditions they have left behind in their villages when they migrated
to Delhi. Here at least, they can work and earn and hope for a better future.

Nobody really knows the size of Delhi's slum population. I wrote an article about it here, in case you want to read about the various types of slums in the city. Of the total population of about 20 million (National Capital Region), there's one scary estimate that says 52% live in slums. Another estimate says that Delhi's slum population is growing at a rate which is 4.5 times that of its non-slum population. 

Since I don't see these trends changing, I have come to the obvious conclusion: Slums are a fact of life in Indian cities, they are here to stay. A slum-dweller is not a beggar scrounging for dole; he or she is most often a migrant who has a job of some sort and is hoping for a better life in the city. We cannot wish away  migration. We are therefore faced with the problem of how to keep providing for all the new entrants who pour in every day. So far, the answer has been a less than satisfactory response from the planning authorities with haphazard "resettlement colonies". That isn't really working. Time for Delhi to think up some better answers.

After the Games - the slums of Delhi

The Delhi Commons Website has this humorous (and very apt) badge illustrating the state of Delhi in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games.

Anyone who has experienced the city's nightmarish traffic and dug-up roads for the past few years will tell you how very well this sketch represents what's happened in Delhi. Now that the games are upon us, I can only pray this effort was worth it.

To build all this infrastructure, over 400,000 migrant workers have made the capital their home (see photo series here). No one really knows what will become of these workers once the games are over. Some will go back, no doubt, to their villages. But I'm guessing many will stay back, adding to Delhi's slum population.

The exact size of Delhi's slum population is a bit of a hit-and-miss guess. Of the total population of about 20 million (National Capital Region), there's one scary estimate that says 52% live in slums. Another estimate says that Delhi's slum population is growing at a rate which is 4.5 times that of its non-slum population.

If this continues - with large scale additions such as the Games - we are soon going to see a city that is mostly slums.

Delhi Settlements Classification: Source Economic Survey of Delhi: 2001-2002

This table shows both slum as well as non-slum settlements in Delhi.

According to this table above, slums made up half of Delhi's population 10 years ago, and I can only imagine that it has gotten worse since then.

Delhi's slums are not a homogenous mass. Researchers, writers and government departments recognise that Delhi's slums are of different types:

• Jhuggi/Jhopri settlements - these account for the bulk of the slums in Delhi; they are illegal squatters on public or private land. The primary characteristic is that the houses are makeshift and 'kutcha', since they have no land rights and constantly fear eviction. Unlike Mumbai, where there are dense slum clusters like Dharavi, Delhi's jhuggi clusters are widely dispersed, and can be found near railways tracks, nullahs/streams, parks, river banks, and some roads. The typical squatter settlement has about 100 families; larger ones have upto 300. They are often organised along caste/community affiliations.

• Slum designated areas - Many of these are 'katras' in the walled city (Shahjahanabad, Old Delhi). The walled city was designed to hold 60,000 people, but it holds several times that number. These areas have been specifically notified under the Slum Areas Improvement and Clearance Act.

• Urban and Rural Villages - Delhi has several such zones; places that started out as villages but have gotten absorbed into the city as the limits of the city have grown. I have classified these under slums because conditions here are slum-like, with low incomes, poor access to water and sanitation, as well as low literacy levels. There are 135 such villages in Delhi; but not all are poor. The photo below is from Khirki Village, where this family lives in a broken down structure that is a remnant of a village home.

• Resettlement colonies - these are slum dwellers who have been resettled from their original location to new approved locations such as Trilokpuri, Kalyanpuri, Kichripur etc. Resettlement began in 1961 in Delhi. Earlier, it was easy to resettle slums, because prior to 1970, there were only about 40,000 slum households to be resettled. As the city's slum population has grown, resettlement has become impossible. But the existing resettlement colonies have better access to infrastructure than the slums; and with land rights secured, they have invested in improving their living conditions.

So much for the slums. Apart from slums, we have two more classifications that are very interesting:

• Unauthorised Colonies - These are not really slums, but they are illegal all the same. There are nearly 1700 colonies where agricultural or forest land has been grabbed illegally; and houses constructed and sold. Typically there is a mafia at work, which is in cahoots with the police and the authorities. These colonies create an unregulated demand for water and power; often borewells are illegally constructed and water tables in the adjoining areas are depleted. There's a whole section of the Delhi Department of Urban Development devoted to managing these colonies.

• Authorised Unauthorised Colonies - Several of the unauthorised colonies have now been "regularised" in populist moves, leading to this funny-sounding new category.

And then, *finally* we come to the Planned Colonies, which form about 25% of Delhi's population. This 25% then, represents the people of Delhi who live in places other than slums, urban/rural villages and illegal constructions. This 25% is made up of all the government babus, the middle and upper-middle class, as well as those living in upscale bungalows and big condominium apartments.

Scary, huh? To think that 75% of the city is either in a slum or in some other form of badly provisioned or illegal habitation? In all the "prettification" and "world-class-ification" leading up to the Games, this is a very sobering thought.