From the 90’s onwards, the central government as well as state governments have initiated a large number of urban poverty related measures. The new focus on urban poverty was possibly a response to a number of emerging factors. While the effects of globalisation in rural areas are significant – seen through certain obvious manifestations such as farmers’ suicides, loss of agricultural land and so on – the linking of globalisation, poverty and escalating inequities is seen more sharply in urban areas. In cities the expansion of wealth and opportunities, through globalisation, for the middle and upper classes has occurred in a conspicuous manner.

Globalisation has offered no significant opportunities for the urban lower classes. There has been a certain coalescence of the visibility of urban poverty and its perceived linkages with the processes of globalisation, civil society activism around these issues, and an increasingly resounding critique – again occurring mainly in urban spaces – of globalisation.

Provisional data relating to slums in the 2001 census throw some interesting light on the issue of urban poverty in general, and slums in particular. Nearly 28 million persons lived in slums in 1981, accounting for 17.5 per cent of the urban population. The estimates for 1991 were 45.7 million slum dwellers accounting for 21.5 per cent of the population. According to the 2001 census, there are 40.6 million persons living in slums in 607 towns and cities, and they account for 22.8 per cent of the population in these cities.

In Karnataka, the question of urban poverty has gained some centrality in recent years.

During 1973-74 and 1993-94, the proportion of population below the poverty line declined from 54 per cent to 33 per cent in Karnataka against a decline from 55 per cent to 36 per cent at the national level. In rural Karnataka the decline is from 55 per cent to 30 per cent and in urban areas from 53 per cent to 40 per cent. Thus, poverty reduction seems to be more pronounced in rural areas.

The number declined from 12.8 million to 9.6 million in rural areas whereas it increased from 4.2  to 6 million in urban areas. This pattern continued over the next decade. Thus, in Karnataka the poverty ratio in 1999-2000 stood at 17.38 per cent in rural areas, and 25.25 per cent in urban areas.

Karnataka’s achievements in recording high rates of economic growth from the 90’s onwards is well known. The disquieting features of this process have of course been that economic growth has not translated into jobs in the manufacturing sector, the gradual decline of employment in the public sector which had indeed provided the mainstay of growth of cities like Bangalore, large number of closures in the Small Scale Industries sector, and the emergence of casual, or contract work.

While the rapid development of the service sector is pointed out as an important area of increasing employment, the unfortunate fact is that low end, unskilled or semi skilled workers in the services sector are poorly paid, inadequately regulated, and provided no rights to social security, either from employers or from the government. Thus globalisation has created new pockets of urban deprivation.

Bangalore has experienced an exponential growth of slums in the decade of the 90’s, from 440 slums in 1991 with a population of 1.12 million, to 763 slums in 1998-99, with a population of 2.2 million, about 20 per cent of the population. The most recent data, from the 2001 census, lists 733 slums in Bangalore. According to the Slum Clearance Board, there are 2491 Slum Areas in Karnataka, with a population of about 30.46 lakhs, which is 17.02 per cent  of the state’s population.

The primary thrust of urban poverty programmes of the Karnataka government have been to improve living conditions, availability of basic amenities for slum dwellers. With little focus on employment, livelihood and wage related issues, the basic amenities approach itself flounders on inadequate state funds, indifferent implementation, and so on.

But, whether or not the physical improvement of living spaces could have an impact on the basic situation of poverty, or whether such physical improvement can be sustained in a context where there is no perceptible improvement in employment opportunities and in income, these are important questions which have somehow not featured in policy discussions on urban poverty. 

Civil society activism, too, has centred around project related activities relating to slum improvement. Such activity frequently has a single-theme focus – water supply, or sanitation, or schools – rarely looking at slum development as a comprehensive issue, closely related to broader questions of employment and earnings, and therefore to the question of the economic developmental model being pursued.

Both at the level of urban welfare policies, and of activism around the urban poor, there is a certain disconnect from broader economic policy issues which underlie poverty of the urban underclass.
(The writer is professor, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore.)