Deprivation, De humanization and Defective Urban Planning:
This article is a diagnostic study to find out why slums exist in the metropolitans and how can the slum problems be improved. This study was done with the help of participant observation and interviews. The slum problem in India is mostly found in metropolitan cities. The metropolitans attract the slums. The slum dwellers live in sub-human conditions and they are the victims of the exploitation of the wealthy upper class.
They are poor, and malnourished and these people live in an unhygienic atmosphere. They are over-populated, congested, and a sharp contrast to the urban malls and IT parks which are well-planned and prosperous. This study tries to find out the loopholes in urban planning. It also tries to compare a slum area with a mall. We also investigate the attitudes of the slum dwellers. How the slum population is neglected by the politicians and the bureaucrats who are on the lookout for power fulfillment and financial gains. In this paper census data has been used to compare the metropolitan cities and people living in the slums have been interviewed.
The slum areas suffer from a lack of education, diseases, parental negligence, superstition, anti-social activities, alcoholism, drug abuse, and lack of proper infrastructure. Many children have dropped out of their schools and do odd jobs to sustain their families. Girls are married at an early age. There has been a migratory pattern for the slum dwellers who have settled here from their villages. They mistrust the police and the government representatives. In the concluding part, some measures have been suggested to uplift the slums and solutions to overcome the slum problem in India.
Whenever we go by train from one city to another, the sight of the slums in the midst of the metropolitan provokes us to find out why do we have to face such a situation. We, who are city dwellers, like to stay in comfort and the whole purpose of doing a job and going to the office is that at the end of the day, we can rest in our homes.
This is in contrast with the situation of the slums which do not even have facilities for water pipes and sewage, no electricity, houses constructed out of straws and deprived of bricks, roofs not fixed, the pavements are slushy, and the smell of sewage is everywhere. Garbage is thrown everywhere and when the monsoons are on the whole slum area becomes muddy and water gets filled to the knee-caps (Mumbai). The condition in the metropolitans is very adverse.
Every metropolitan city has a slum area in it. Slum areas are the centers of deviancy and anti-social elements. It is usually the village folk who migrate from their villages and settle in the slums. If we compare the slum population city-wise we will find many similarities between them. Every city has a slum and all the slums have slum problems. The following is the table showing the latest data related to slums found in metropolitan areas with a population of more than one million.
From this data, two things can be generalized. The first is that the greater the size of the metropolitan, the greater the slum population. Secondly, the greater is the slum population the lesser is the sex ratio of that slum area. With this little information, we can deduce that the slums have their own problems like overcrowding and overpopulation. But what cannot be deduced are the menial and the degrading conditions in which the people are living. For that, a field visit to the slum area is a prerequisite.