ands of the city. But as city developed, they became a part of urban agglomeration and caught attention of real estate hawks.
Housing shortages amounting to 24.7 million corresponds with about 40% of urban households. Almost 42.6 million or 15% of urban population live in slums. Ahmedabad has little below quarter (23%) of its population as slum-dwellers. In Mumbai, over 55% population live in slums. The irony is that this populace occupies only 8% of Mumbai’s total land. If half of the Mumbaikars manages to live in such a small area of land and solve their housing troubles themselves, do we still need to eye these lands for further economic equations? How about we grant these spaces to these dwellers? Security of tenure alone is good enough for people to invest their own resources and improve quality of housing. Studies indicate that even simply notifying slums receives defacto authorisation and that itself has encouraged very noticeable improvements. For example, compared to non-notified slums having two-third houses without toilets, notified ones are less than a third. Underground drainage, road and electricity are nearly double in notified slums, thereby improved quality of life and so on.
Authorising illegal constructions through penalty clause, condoning land grabs for parking spaces, building schools on open grounds or even putting up buildings on reclaimed natural resources are not a form of legalising and granting of city lands? Uprooting slums from their locale and rehabilitating them in far off, isolated places is unsuccessful as loss of social network, deprival of employment and economic base, mismatch between lifestyles and vertical building typologies, as well as severed transport links. Yet we continue to approach the same models over and over again. It is obvious that interest deep within is in freeing urban land for open market development rather than upgrading the slums. If we improve conditions of the slum in situ with infrastructure and amenities, these settlements would seize to be the squalid neighbourhoods as slums. They would emerge as affordable housing stock for millions through private sharing. They will not be a burden but rather a resource. Not a problem but a solution.