People in slums will continue to lead a life of misery unless concerted efforts are made I by the powers-that-be and voluntary groups I to raise their standard of living by improving the environment around their dwellings, says MADHURA SWAMINATHAN, of the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research, r Bombay.
WOMEN are often the worst affected by deprivations in respect of living conditions. Among other reasons, it is because women usually spend longer hours in the home environment than men, because they are generally responsible for ensuring the availability of basic necessities such as water for their households. Living in a degraded environment can take a heavy toll on the health and well-being of women.
In Bombay today, over one-half of the people live in slums or are homeless; they live in run-down tenements and huts, on pavements, by the side of railway tracks, under bridges, and in other spaces available to them. The homeless and slum-dwellers of Bombay live in conditions of terrible poverty, squalor and deprivation.
Certain aspects of poverty and deprivation among Bombay's homeless and slum population are not captU3 ed satisfactorily .by standard measures of income poverty. Specifically, the homeless and slum householders are deprived of proper housing, they lack access to clean water and hygienic systems of waste disposal (including the sanitary disposal of faeces) and, in general, live in polluted and degraded environments not suited for human habitation.
Many of these deprivations of the homeless and slum dwellers are deprivations in respect of public goods. An optimal level of public goods cannot be provided by individual or private action. Public provisioning has a major role to play in the supply of public goods and, hence, in the eradication of poverty in Bombay.
There are very few estimates of income-poverty for the city of Bombay. In 1983, based on data from the National Sample Survey (NSS) on consumer expenditure and the Dandekar-Rath income-norm of Rs. 22.50 per person per month at 1960-61 prices for urban India, 16 per cent of Bombay's population fell below the income-poverty line. Data from a mega city survey conducted by the International Labour Office showed that in 1980, 15.7 per cent of Bombay’s population was below an income-poverty line. More recently a survey of 8.047 households in the Bombay Metropolitan Region conducted by the Operations Research Group (ORG) in 1989, found that 27 per cent of households had an income that was less than Rs 1290 a year (at 1991 prices), the income level used as a cut-off to identify poverty in 1989.
There are three estimates of income-poverty among slum households in the city. first, data from a census of slum households conductedin 1976 showed that 40 per cent of slum dwellers had income below the poverty line. Secondly, 30 per cent of slum households and 55 per cent of the homeless had income below the official poverty line, according to a survey of 2,000 homeless and slum households conducted by Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 1977-78. thirdly the ORG survey estimated that 45 per cent of slum households in Bombay had income below the poverty line in 1989. in ORG’s survey if 1492 pavement dwellers, 70 per cent reported a household income below the income-poverty line.
While the incidence of income-poverty, using official norms and data from the National Sample Survey, is lower in Bombay than in other urban areas of India, there is not doubt that in respect of income and consumer expenditure, on average, people who are homeless or live in hutments are subsequently worse off than the rest of the population. Further, the data on incomes and expenditure also indicates substantial economic differentiation among slum-dwellers and homeless persons.
There are two main reasons why standard measures of income-poverty are inadequate measures of poverty and deprivation.
First, the poverty lines generally used are unsatisfactory measures even of income-poverty. The income norm recommended by the Planning Commission, for example, is an estimate of the income or expenditure level at which the expenditure on food consumption meets a specified minimum calorific requirement. There has been hardly any discussion of whether the corresponding expenditure on non-food items is adequate or even of what constitutes a minimum non-food requirement.
Secondly when economic development involves increasing the opportunities of individuals to develop their full potential as human beings, the goals of development are unrealisable when people live in environments that are degraded and defiled. People living in slums and the homeless are the worst affected by the insufficiency and poor quality of water, by inadequacies of drainage, sanitation and household waste removal facilities and, in general, by unhealthy living and working environments.
Here are some illustrations of the living conditions of the homeless and the slum dwellers of Bombay and the effects of degraded environments on their well-being.
A dwelling on the pavements of central Bombay, is typically a small space enclosed on two sides by gunny sacks or old saris and covered on top by sack-cloth, old sheets of plastic or occasionally, tarpaulin and held up by a few wooden rods. The front of the dwelling, or a part of it, is open, unprotected and faces the gutter. Shelter in slum settlements is more varied and ranges from mud-and-thatch structures to cement-and-brick rooms, typically with roofs of asbestos. Dwellings made of inferior material do not protect against cold or heat; they are open to dust, rain, insects and rodents.
In Bombay, slum-dwellers and the homeless account for over 50 percent of the city's population but they occupy only six per cent of the city’s land area. In these circumstances, people live in cramped, over-crowded and unventilated dwellings. It is not surprising then that a large number of micro-organisms, and disease vectors are present in homes in overcrowded settlements. Indoor air pollution and dampness are important factors m the occurrence and spread of respiratory infections. There is evidence to suggest that mortality due to respiratory diseases is increasing faster than that due to diarrhoeal diseases in Bombay.
Slums are located in areas that are not fit for human habitation, for instance, in low-level areas, on hill sides, on marshy land, near garbage dumps and under high tension wires. Slums in low-level areas collect stagnant water, slums on slopes are seriously affected by landslips in the monsoon. In many low-level coastal areas such as Mankhud in the north-east of Bmbay, where land has been allocated by Municipal Corporation for resettling homeless households, the high tide causes flooding and when it recedes it leaves behind all kinds of toxic waste, including animal carcases.
The use of slum shelters as workplaces can become a major health hazard. In Dharavi,the7;liugeslum settlement in central Bombay there are about 400 leather processing units, which are a major source of air and water pollution. In a survey of a community that lives in the leather processing area, it was observed that waste water flowing in open drains contained hair, worms and chemical and other effluents, including acids discharged after the cleaning of hides.
Under these environmental condition, the storage of food is difficult and the possibility of contamination high. Slum-dwellers have less protection and hence are hit hard by industrial pollution that the rest of the population (for example, the dwellings have poor ventilation). Noise pollution is very high in certain locations, as for example, among people living close to the suburban railway tracks. In such locations, doctors have recorded cases of neurosis caused by unbearable levels of noise.
Water, according to the World Health Organisation, “is a primary medium for the transmission of diseases, the most important of which are typhoid, cholera, hepatitis, poliomyelitis, dysentery, amoebiasis, and infection by intestinal protozoa.” In a recent survey of 540 households in Santosh Nagar, a slum settlement that is considered by the Bombay Municipal Corporation to be “well-provided” in terms of infrastructure, we found that 14 per cent of households dew drinking water from wells of varying depth. When water from some of these wells were sent for bacteriological examination, the test showed that the water was not fit for drinking. The levels of bacteria and coliform bacilli were very high and much above permitted levels. Even when water is not contaminated at the source the low levels of hygiene and high levels of environmental pollution can lead quickly to contamination during transport, collection and storage.
Moreover, where water is available, there are shortages and queues. Insufficiency of water makes it difficult to maintain reasonable standards of personal hygiene. According to a census of notified slums, undertaken in 1981, there were on average 203 users for every tap in the slum settlements surveyed in Bombay, and in some settlements there were as many as 8,600 users for every tap.
A study of homeless households in central Bombay showed that most families consumed about 15 litres per person per day (the Government of India's norm is 125-200 litres of water per person per day). Women from these households had to get up early, at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., and spend the next few hours collecting water, for the daily needs of their fami'ly. Moreover, as is well-documented, slum-dwellers pay more than other city residents for water and other services.
One of the biggest health hazards of slum life comes from the fact that slums lack systems of disposal of excreta, sewage, water from washing and bathing and solid wastes. In particular, the disposal of human waste is a major environmental and health problem in all slums. A census of 619 notified slums in Bombay, undertaken by the Census of India in 1981, found that there were no toilets in 174 settlements. Further, on average, one toilet was shared by 98 persons. In 1985, in Dharavi, there were 800 toilet seats for a population of six lakhs and of these, as many as 570 were not in working condition.
The lack of sanitation is a critical problem for women their health suffers from the lack of hygienic facilities and they are particularly affected by the absence of privacy. When women have to defecate in the open, they leave their homes between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.
The nutritional status of children living in slum comnunities is deplorable. According to the National Comnission on Urbanisation, 85 per cent of children between the ages of zero and six living in urban slums in India are malnourished. In a survey of children below the age of five in a Bombay slum in 1993, we found that 83 per cent of boys and 38 per cent of girls were moderately undernourished and another 28 per cent of boys and 34 per cent of girls were severely undernourished on the basis of a weight-for-age index. There was a clear gender difference in the incidence of under nutrition.
This short account of the environmental conditions in slums illustrates the ways in which deprivations of homeless persons and slum-dwellers go beyond deprivation in incomes. Many studies of slum communities have noted the lack of an association between incomes and aspects of living standards such as the availability of toilets and drinking water. A weak link between the level of income and the quality of housing is also noted. Within slum settlements, the relationship between incomes and illness can also be weak as small increases in incomes cannot secure improvements in the living environment.
A feature of the environmental deprivations identified here is that they are in the nature of public goods. Public goods are those that are non-excludable and non-rival in consumption. Public goods are usually characterised by externalities (that is, individual consumption or production has social costs or benefits) and economies of scale in production. To take an example, open defecation is a health hazard with large negative externalities. To put it differently, all those living in an area with open toilets are affected by the germs and insect vectors in the environment (even those with toilets in their homes).
It, is clear that increases in private incomes, specifically, small and: gradual rises in incomes, and individual actions alone cannot improve living conditions. A rise in private income, unless so large as to allow the individual to move to another environment, is not sufficient to eliminate these deprivations. Public action, that is, action by governments and organised groups and communities, is necessary ,to improve the environment in which people live and, m general, to raise their standard of living.