Sunil Sethi: A field of study called 'slumology'

AL FRESCO

There is a new field of research emerging in the study of developing societies that, for practical purposes, could be called "slumology". It is backed by some alarming facts and figures put out in the UNDP's latest report. For the first time in the history of humankind, it says, there are more people living in urban areas than before and there may be as many as many as one billion people living in slums. More precise details are hard to come by, for the simple reason that "the criteria for a 'slum' are difficult to define on a universal basis, and partly because very few cities in the developing world collect reliable data".

But the tremors caused by this vast swathe of "invisible" humanity are felt everyday, whether in the modernisation of Mumbai airport, which has run into serious trouble because of surrounding slums, or this week's municipal election in Delhi, whose result will be chiefly decided by the city's slum-dwellers.

The chapter in the UNDP report is written by a witty and compassionate Roman, Pietro Garau, a member of the UN Millenium Project, and Director of the Centre for Urban Studies for Developing Countries at the University of Rome. According to a saying in his city, "Statistics is the science whereby if I eat two chickens and you eat none, we actually eat one each." The point Prof. Garau is making is the reason why most poverty studies deal with the rural poor is because it is imagined""perhaps not wrongly""that the urban poor, however pitiful their condition, are better off than the poor in the hinterland.

The lack of research on the urban poor in India is all the more glaring because Indian scholars can't wait to lay their hands on a new subject. Slumology should be the obvious one. In the admirable Oxford Companion to the Indian Economy, there are entries on everything, from patterns of urban migration to street vendors, but nothing on slums""even though Mumbai's Dharavi has proudly carried the tag of being Asia's largest for decades.

Gregory David Roberts, the Australian ex-convict and author of the bestselling novel Shantaram, which graphically describes slum life, told me recently that there are now foreign tour groups who specially jet into Mumbai to explore locations in his book. Mandatory stop number two after Leopold's cafe in Colaba, of course, is a day spent poking around the slums.

That's the trouble with slums""they do not necessarily imply the state's hopelessness in providing housing, sanitation and safe water to millions but are seen as symbols of human endurance, political power and romantically dangerous "hotspots". In such ways the pathetic can become picturesque. In percentage terms 43 per cent of city dwellers in the developing world live in slums and the percentage rises to 75 per cent in the least developed countries. Prof. Garau warns that the slum population of the world will grow by another 600 million in the next 20 years.

What is elementally ironic about the "poorest of the poor" in the cities as opposed to the poor elsewhere is that they co-exist with the richest people in the world. In a microcosm, slums are the most concentrated example of the North-South divide, a "south within the South". And although they provide prosperous city-dwellers a host of services and goods, there is a wall of indifference between the two classes. Slums receive few outsiders except professional politicians, emissaries of slumlords, NGOs and, well, yes, perhaps the odd tourist bus. The consequence, says the report, is that slums and their inhabitants become "invisible"""not only to other citizens but to government authorities.

Slums exist, and so be it. But perhaps the developing science of slumology will change that.