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Welcome to the IVM Podcast Network.
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Once there was a boy in a slum.
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You'd think he was a bum because he was a boy in a slum, but his mind was burning as
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the earth was turning and the world was churning and in the center of it stood this boy in
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A social activist came to the slum and said to the boy, you're looking glum.
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Why do you look so sad or the slum must be so bad?
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It really makes me mad.
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I wish I could send you back to where you're from.
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This amused the boy from the slum.
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He said, I gotta say you're pretty dumb.
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The reason I came here was I prefer it to there.
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That life I could not bear and this I do declare that I will beat only to my own drum.
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Once a posh kid met the boy from the slum, he said, you slum dwellers, you're all scum.
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With a smile and not a frown, a boy looked him up and down and said, good afternoon.
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You're trapped in your cocoon.
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Now this may astound you, confuse you and confound you, but look, there's an invisible
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Your independence is just for show.
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You need me more than you know.
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Right now I'm just a boy in a slum, but you don't know what I could become.
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Welcome to the scene and the unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host Amit Varma.
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Welcome to the scene and the unseen, my weekly show on the scene and unseen effects of public
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My subject for today is slums.
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Now slums in India are both demonized and deified.
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On the one hand, people look down on them as centers of filth and squalor and eyesore
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On the other hand, they're praised as hotbeds of innovation and entrepreneurship.
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Beyond these two simplistic notions, both of which are true, lies a much more fundamental
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role that a slum plays in a city.
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To shed light on this, I have with me on the show Pawan Srinath, a policy analyst at the
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Takshashila Institution in Bangalore and a frequent guest on the show.
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Welcome to the show, Pawan.
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Thank you for having me back.
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Pawan, tell me something about slums.
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So typically slums have been seen in India as a blot on the urban landscape, right?
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So there are these things that shouldn't exist, they're aberrations and anomalies, right?
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At best people look at them as these hubs of poverty and inequality, right?
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And you know, if pushed to say what are good things about a slum, someone might say, you
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know, at least they're a source of cheap labor, they're the reason why labor costs are kept
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That's pretty much what people think about a slum.
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And in recent times, there's also the move away from one extreme of demonizing it to
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the other extreme of deifying it, saying that look at Dharavi, it's such a hub of entrepreneurship
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and innovation and so on and so forth.
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So what is happening now is, you know, you're making a virtue out of a necessity, right?
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These are things that exist, they were long denigrated, so now let's put them on a pedestal.
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The reality of what a slum does is it allows for entry into cities at every single price
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You as a person, you can have 10 rupees in your pocket, you can have 10,000 rupees in
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You are now able to come into an Indian city and somehow struggle and start off.
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The struggle is still immense.
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But remember that we are still India, India has slums because we have freedom of movement
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in this country and that's a powerful force.
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You look at some place like China, where you have a residence system called Hukou, right?
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So you have half or a third of urban residents who are illegal, right?
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You don't even have basic rights.
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In India, we don't have that.
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Obviously, access to basic services and so on is still very limited.
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But you have the freedom to go where you want.
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So you have the freedom to take a personal sacrifice, be crazy enough to give up a life
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back home and move to a city, struggle, you know, have, take a hit on health, on dignity
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So that, you know, you can give your next generation a slightly better chance at prosperity.
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And it's interesting, we tend to be so condescending about people who live in slums and, oh, look
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But it's important to note that all of them prefer being in a slum to being back wherever
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You have far more movement of people from villages to slums and cities, rather than
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from slums to villages, which, you know, if you look at the Gandhian view of the idyllic
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village life, that's sort of what you'd expect.
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So what you're really saying is that slums therefore have that social good that they
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Anyone can come into a city at any point in time and you have a place where you can go
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and stay and where you can then, that's a base for your struggles.
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How does this impact the policy thinking behind slums?
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Like over time, because of these different views that we have of slums, you will often
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have the elite sort of proposing that we need to do away with slums, that look at the extremes
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of wealth that you see, that someone's flying into Bombay airport and the first thing you
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see is the slums and we need to do something about that.
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And their other argument is that slums form a board bank from politicians who benefit
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from keeping poor people in slums, making sure they stay poor in slums.
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So there's a status quo in the provision of services, especially because, you know, supposing
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you don't have piped water supply in a slum, the person who's bringing a truck over, you
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know, a water tanker over, can visibly show patronage, right, as doing good for members
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But while that is there, the old idea in India was get your slums cleared out of the city.
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So you had slum clearance boards and the idea was you get rid of the area, get rid of the
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people, maybe provide housing in some corner of the city outside where real estate costs
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Completely uprooting people from the local economic livelihoods that they were in, the
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economy that they were a part of.
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Thankfully that thinking is slowly dying.
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At least now people are talking about in-situ development, right?
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So why is it slowly dying?
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What have people learned?
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So one of the things people have learned is, look, people, unless they have jobs, they
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have no business in a city, you know, I mean, people come to the city for jobs.
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So in the act of giving them better housing and better amenities, if you're killing the
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jobs, then you're not helping anyone.
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Because people are more politically empowered, even in slums today, that they've been able
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Having said that, so now the idea is let's do redevelopment within the site.
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And this is better than the alternative, but even this has a lot of problems.
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You're still thinking about slums from a land, property rights, titling type of a regime.
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Rather than this point of how do you allow people to come into a city at every single
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So the idea is access and an entry point rather than, okay, here are people who are already
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sort of living here informally.
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So let's formalize how they're living, give them some land, give them some property so
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If you have in-situ development of a slum and what was a slum instead, you have apartment
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blocks, a cheap apartment blocks for the people stay.
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That immediately drives the price up, right?
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And therefore the cheap access that say someone coming from a village to the slum had no longer
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It exists to somewhat the same extent, you know, so supposing that you were members in
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a particular slum and then the slum was redeveloped, more housing was added, right?
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So now you might own some of this or you might have a lease over some of this.
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You might want to give this away as a, for rent to someone else.
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So you might go live somewhere else.
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And so if a new person is getting access to that room, so maybe something like this fundamentally
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better constructed and a better quality of life.
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It would be more expensive.
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It will be the guy with a hundred rupees in his pocket who could have come and just landed
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up in a slum, won't be able to do so.
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So good cities try to develop things where even if you're just coming in for a week,
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are there places where you can go to, where you can stay for this just a week?
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And the place is, you know, good enough for you to live a week and sort of manage, but
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bad enough that you want to leave as soon as you have the ability to, right?
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So if you look at olden days in India, more powerful communities and cast groupings and
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others had, you know, their own choultries and what in Canada we call chatras in various
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cities where the idea is that if you're a young boy of that community who goes into
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that city, you have a natural place to land up before you find a college or a place of
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So now this was self-provided by communities and obviously this was far from perfect, right?
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But that is the spirit of, so if you're a young job seeker from, I don't know, from
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rural Maharashtra, from Marathwada, you're coming to Dharavi to find a job.
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Is there a place where you can do so?
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Is there a permanent place where you can maybe live for a week, you can get access to what
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kind of jobs that exist and then you sort of move in and integrate with Mumbai's economy,
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So you don't have enough such state-provisioned entry access points.
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And if the state in India really wants to care about the right to equity, right?
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What you're really talking about is access, right?
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So the state does have a role to play in this.
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The question is what do we really do about it?
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And perhaps a role is just getting out of the way and letting whatever situations spring
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up organically just sort of...
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I mean, society still needs to provide for a lot of it.
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Our cities need to care for their migrants, right?
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Our cities are designed in a way such that if you're the 11 millionth person who walks
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into Bangalore, the values and the norms and the systems of Bangalore don't impose themselves
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So you've come from a village, you will drive the way you might have driven in a village.
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But Bangalore, you have to follow different rules now, right?
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You go to New York, this is the standard example that every Indian cribs about.
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Oh, you go to a foreign city, you stop littering.
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And oh, we Indians are hypocrites, when we go abroad, we don't litter.
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No, we Indians are human beings, right?
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So we go to those cities and we conform to the behavior expected in those cities.
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Indian cities are terrible at imposing this on people.
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No one in New York comes up to you and bullies you into not littering, right?
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You just don't do it because that's the norm.
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I think if Indian cities can establish these norms better, and this is again a society
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in action, you know, in concert with the government, and you allow for better access at every price
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point, I think our cities will be far healthier.
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Yeah, this reminds me, I went to New York a year and a half back and I stayed with a
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So I went out driving with him and in the middle of the night, he screamed at me because
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And there was absolutely no one there and it's like my muscle memory told me just keep
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But anyway, leaving that aside, so I just want to try summing up the seen and unseen
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effects of the different kinds of interventions with slums.
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So just correct me or elaborate if required.
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Intervention number one is you remove the slum from the city and you take it outside
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and the seen effect is that there is no longer that eyesore of the slum in the city.
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But the unseen effect would be that all the people who came there came there for as cheap
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labor, for example, they were maid servants or watchmen or whatever.
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And now those jobs have a supply problem because these people have been moved out of the city
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and there is therefore a mismatch which the market had otherwise corrected for.
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The slum was essentially the response of the market that grew organically because it was
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So that's the unseen effect that you're killing this.
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And the other intervention is that you do in situ development, where again, the scene
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effect is the same that look, it's not an ugly slum, it's a proper building is respectable,
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better quality of life for the people who stay there.
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But the unseen effect is that it affects the fact that slums earlier are typically, if
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you have a hundred bucks in your pocket or whatever you come and you manage and you do
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Jugaar and that is affected to some extent, maybe not completely, but it's affected to
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Because the people who live in those slums now don't want to go anywhere.
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So what was a temporary place of shelter, what was a place in transit?
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Suddenly you endowed someone with rights over that.
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Now they don't want to move.
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So maybe the answer there is now open up a new slum.
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So even here, I just want to add that one of the developments that has happened is smaller
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such settlements, instead of having a big apartment complex, take a small plot of land,
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build five stories over there, so you house, I don't know, 50 people, but you do many more
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The idea being that jobs, especially low end service jobs in Indian cities are very, very
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You need to be close by and you also need to be able to search for other such gigs nearby.
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Now with the coming of app based businesses and so on, the distance and the proximity
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is weakening, but still not at the scale that India really needs.
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So those things are still important, but what I'd say is they're still not addressing the
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How do you have more points in the city where people can come in at every single price point?
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And there's also the broader philosophical question of urban planning itself, that do
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you let a city grow organically or do you have to sort of try and plan it and make it
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more efficient and make, you know, all of that.
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And so what are the sort of trade-offs involved and what are the lessons we can learn about
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that from the interventions that have taken place with regard to slums over the last few
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I'd say, I'd talk about slums, but cities in general, there's a false dichotomy that's
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sort of portrayed to you, that one, there's this grand vision and a grand plan that the
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government lays down and then people and businesses follow like automatons, you know, according
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to the grand central plan, which enough people have debunked.
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The other extreme is that it's all organic, all chaotic, anything happens and it's like
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Change happens at the fringe, not at the center.
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Spontaneous order, yes.
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Spontaneous order, except, you know, cities have so many people trying to do so many very
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different things at the same time, the simplest being getting from different starting points
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going to different ending points, right?
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And this causes congestion, it causes pollution, it causes chaos.
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Now the reason that this is a false dichotomy is that the government always knows when and
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where development is happening, be it building registrations, be it electricity connections,
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infrastructure supply connections, you know, business licenses.
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So government always has a handle that, hey, you know, here's where real estate is heating
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up, here is where more businesses are opening up and so on.
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And that has been properly gamed by those who can play that game.
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So the standard refrain in Bangalore is, oh, we had no idea Bangalore would grow so rapidly.
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No, you had a clue month on month, day on day where what was happening, right?
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So if around electronic city in Bangalore, you had more businesses coming up, people
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knew that this is where the action was happening.
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This is where the big apartments were coming up.
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So maybe this is where the slums are also coming up.
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What do you mean is the data was there and people should have known, but did people know?
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Those who could profit from it knew and did profit from it.
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I mean, cities in India are a real estate game, right?
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I mean, the values appreciate and then someone seeks a rent off of it.
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So that enough rent has been sought, right?
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So people know, except it's a standard sort of hand-wringing excuse that government officials
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So I think what planning should be is responsive.
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Paul Romer, the economist, had this idea that the single biggest element of planning in
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a city for a government is acquisition of land.
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Supposing you know that the city is going to expand in a particular direction, go leap
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ahead of time and buy a piece of land somewhere.
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That can be a bus station tomorrow.
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That can be a railway station tomorrow, a metro hub, something, right?
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Good cities have worked where public sector agencies and city governments have created
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land banks for themselves, which they've acquired intelligently.
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They've compensated people well and then deployed these assets well much later.
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Because if you haven't bought a plan ahead of time and private parties have bought all
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of it, that's your single biggest problem in defining a city.
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The fundamental problem with a city is that any of the choices that you and I make with
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how our housing is done, how our layouts are done, we have locked ourselves in for 70 to
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So in terms of liberty, that's your trade-off, right?
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The action that you take impinges on the liberty of people to five generations below you.
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So historically, which would be the cities in the world that have most, that have come
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closest to achieving this balance?
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I'd say it's not a static thing.
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Clearly cities like New York are well planned now.
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The city of London is something that has completely reinvented itself time and again.
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And cities had this thing, they had fire, they had pestilence, they had plague, war,
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all these reasons where you had destruction happening and new things coming out after
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Indian cities have the burden of growing up under a nuclear umbrella, right?
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We have not had war ruin our cities in the last hundred years.
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But we've not had a chance to rebuild any of our cities as a result of it.
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Most modern European cities today are modern because they got rebuilt 50, 60 years ago.
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So are you saying that kind of modernity is impossible for cities like Bombay and Bangalore?
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Doing redevelopment of a city that's already broken is extra hard.
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The political economy is that much tougher.
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That's why governments also find it easier to build a city in the desert, right?
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So you look at these great plans on the Delhi-Mumbai infrastructure corridor, Jiffy Pop cities
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springing out of the desert.
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Who knows where the people are, where the water is, nothing but the road will build
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and then the city will come, right?
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So it's hard, but we have to do it.
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I mean, it's not impossible.
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And to go back to the issue of slums and to sort of wind up the episode, the scene effects
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of slums is that A, they're dirty, very poor standard of living, they're an eyesore on
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And the other scene effect is that they're hotbeds for entrepreneurship and there's so
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much energy and jogar happening in slums.
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And the unseen effect which you pointed out is that slums are necessary for the evolution
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of a city because they are where poor migrants who don't have resources can actually enter
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the city and contribute to its economy and become part of it.
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So given this unseen effect, which hasn't really struck me before this, how would you
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say policymakers should look at slums differently?
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I think they should be looking at slums not as regions, but as access points.
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And these access points change from time to time.
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An old slum becomes gentrified, the people who are living there have now become permanent
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So the mix of new entrants to current residents changes.
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So slums are access points, they're not black spots, they're not hubs of bad infrastructure,
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they're just entry points into the cities.
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So the old Indian cities of the fortified cities had the darwazas, right?
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You have the Ajmer darwaza and the Kashmir gate and so on.
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Slums are the real gates into the cities.
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That's how policymakers should be thinking about them.
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So all around you, when you go out on the streets, there are unseen gates.
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Pawan, thanks so much for being on the show.
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One person's slum is another person's window of opportunity.
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If you want to check out some of Pawan's writing, do go over to the online magazine, Pragati
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Pawan is a contributing writer there and I'm the editor.
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Also check out my blog, India Uncut at indianucut.com and follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma.
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It's Verma with an A, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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And if you enjoyed the guitar at the start of the show, that was my producer, Josh Thomas.
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Until next week then, ciao.
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Next week on The Scene in the Unseen, Amit Verma will be talking to Pranay Kottesthani
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about China's growing presence in Asia.
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For more, go to sceneunseen.in.
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If you enjoyed listening to The Scene in the Unseen, check out another great show by IVM
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podcast, Made in India, hosted by my friend May Thomas, where every week she profiles
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up and coming independent Indian bands.
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Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
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This is your captain speaking.
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Sorry to say, but there's been a slight delay due to the apocalypse having suddenly begun.
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As you can see, there's death, destruction and chaos taking place all around us.
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But don't you worry, food and drinks will be served shortly.
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And I would recommend checking out IVM Podcasts to get some of your favorite Indian podcasts.
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We'll keep you going till this whole thing blows over.
