Spare a thought for the urban poor

The World Urban Forum that got underway in Vancouver on Monday comes at a time when the world is on the brink of historic demographic changes.

The World Urban Forum that got underway in Vancouver on Monday comes at a time when the world is on the brink of historic demographic changes. In 2007, for the first time in history, more people will begin to live in cities than in villages. More pertinently for India, the UN Habitat Report released on the occasion predicts that Mumbai and New Delhi, both already ‘mega-cities’ with populations above 10 million, will become ‘meta-cities’ housing 20 million people by 2020. Less evident but equally worrisome is the fact that a large proportion of the rural-to-urban migration in India, as elsewhere in the developing world, will take place in smaller cities and towns, which are even more inadequately equipped to handle the influx.

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As all of us know, the average inhabitant of these urban areas struggles to get basic facilities like water, electricity, health, education and public transport every day. Increased migration to cities will put much greater pressure on urban infrastructure. To take the example of Delhi, its demand for power, already outstripping supply, is set to grow by nearly 5 per cent each year for the next decade. There is already a gap of 150 million litres between the quantity of water demanded by and supplied to Delhi. This infrastructure gap exists across India, with some 25 per cent urban dwellers being without electricity, 23 per cent without access to toilets and 37 per cent without potable water in their dwellings. Even more worrying is the growth of slums, which often exist right next to sleek malls and multiplexes. It reflects poorly on ‘India Shining’ that Mumbai, one of the most dynamic economic centres of the country, is home to one of the largest slums in the world, which houses more people than Norway. Studies have shown that slum-dwellers often live in worse conditions than villagers. Lack of water, sanitation and health facilities, and exposure to pollution makes them most susceptible to health hazards.

Our cities are engines of sustained growth, as the Prime Minister aptly put it while announcing the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission last year. It’s time we paid more attention to their condition.