Characteristics of slum population in India

The slum population is a global phenomenon poses several challenges relating to the society, culture, economy, politics and environment. Increasing slum in the developing countries like India is a result of unplanned and haphazard way to urbanization. slum population has grown in most of the major cities of India and has posed serious threat to sustainable urban development.  The main objective of this paper is to investigate and mapped out the demographic, sociocultural and economic characteristics of slum population in India hence to reach formulate viable plans and policies for upgrading slums towards the well-being of the poor slum dwellers.

There is high density of population characterized by low general sex ratio, high child sex ratio, high growth rate of population, large share of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe population, low level of literacy, low income with high poverty, high work participation with large share of working population in informal sector of urban economy. The slum population in India was counted as 65.49 million during 2011 census spread over 2613 cities/ towns, which was 17.4 per cent of the urban population . The level of urbanization and the rate of urban expansion may not always be caused by the ‘pull’ of economic prosperity and opportunity in the cities; it is sometimes caused by the push from the rural areas due to significant changes in the agriculture practices effected by the use of mechanized farming techniques .