Urbanization and Exclusion: A Study on Indian Slums

ABSTRACT

The processes of modern urbanization across the Global South have generated an intense debate. While mainstream researchers view it as largely inclusive and advocating for slum development, critics argue that this process has an inherent tendency to displace slum. Given this perspective, the authors show that there is, in fact, a change in the location of Indian slums and the slum population from city centers to city fringes, where fringes are found to be significantly and consistently unprivileged in terms of an array of infrastructural facilities in and around the slums. This paper also argues that the typical process of urbanization and increasing urban inequality is inducing this changing location of slums. The analyses indicate a forced relocation of the slum population away from the city centers towards an inferior standard of living on the city fringes. This paper uses Indian slum-level data for 2001–2012, undertakes various advanced statistical analyses, and presents a basic theoretical framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Slum location
• exclusionary urbanization
• urban inequality
• slum infrastructure
• center–fringe inequality

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Professor Cheng Enfu, Dr Wang Zhen, and the two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their valuable comments, suggestions, and support. The authors are also grateful to Harsha Tiwary, Ridhee Ghosh, and Pallabi Seth for help in editing and getting appropriate data. Lastly, the first author thanks Dr Sudakshina Gupta, the discussant of this paper presented at the Department of Economics, University of Calcutta, in 2018. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One interesting fact is that the number of slums in India decreased from 51,688 in 2002 to 33,510 in 2012 (NSSO 2003a, 2014), but the slum population increased from 42.5 million to 65.5 million during that period. During this period the slum/urban population share increased from 14% to 17%. This may reveal that the existing slums are becoming bigger, with a migrated population, and at the same time that small slums are amalgamating to become bigger slums. This tendency may imply that the inner city slums are getting relocated to the periphery, because larger slums may not be accommodated within the main city area.

2 Vision Mumbai is a plan submitted by Mckinsey & Company for restructuring and redeveloping Mumbai to make it an international city (Government of Maharashtra 2004). According to one researcher (Roy 2013), these kinds of plans and policy programmes (such as RAY slum-free-city-planning) generally result in the eviction of many slum residents from inner-city spaces towards the fringes and precarious conditions.

3 Although this analysis deals with Indian states, it could have larger implications. Many of the Indian states are very large, having distinctly different languages and various other socio-economic traits. Many are even larger than most of the countries of the world. If we rank Indian states in terms of total population and hypothetically consider them as independent countries, they would take the following positions: Uttar Pradesh (5th), Maharashtra (11th), Bihar (12th), and West Bengal (13th).

4 Here, urban per capita Net State Domestic Product (NSDP) has been estimated by multiplying per capita NSDP with the ratio of total urban to rural consumption expenditure.

5 Pucca is an Indian word. It means concrete/brick made.

6 Semi-pucca means a combination of concrete/brick and temporary materials.

7 Serviceable katcha defines houses made of mud but which are serviceable.

8 Open-pucca defines drains that are concrete but uncovered.

9 Very few outliers have been detected through box plots, and those data points have been excluded during analysis both in the line diagrams and correlations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Somenath Ghosh

Somenath Ghosh is pursuing a PhD in Economics at the Department of Economics and Politics, Visva-Bharati University, India, under the supervision of Professor Saumya Chakrabarti. He currently works as Assistant Manager at Lutheran World Services India. He has published articles in titles such as Journal of Urban and Regional Analysis, Social Sciences and Humanities Open, and others. He has also authored a chapter in a book entitled Social, Health, and Environmental Infrastructures for Economic Growth published by IGI Global.

Saumya Chakrabarti

Saumya Chakrabarti is Professor of Economics at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India. He has also taught at St. Xavier’s College, University of Calcutta, and Presidency University. He has been a visiting fellow at Brown University, USA. At present, he is Head of the Department of Economics and Politics, Visva-Bharati University. He was Honorary Director of the Agro-Economic Research Centre (Government of India), Santiniketan. He has published in journals such as the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Review of Radical Political Economics, Economic and Labour Relations Review, Economic and Political Weekly, Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics, and Indian Journal of Labour Economics, among others, and has written books published by Prentice Hall and Oxford University Press. He has travelled across several countries of the Global South and North and has regularly contributed to popular journals and vernacular dailies.