Privatisation made slums poorer, says new book

Bengaluru is high on growth and low on poverty alleviation. A book lays bare this contradiction

Bengaluru, described as a city of IT and startups and gardens and good weather, is also a city of growing inequalities, says a new book.

Author Supriya RoyChowdhury argues that Bengaluru’s meteoric rise as the Silicon Valley of India has largely bypassed the lives of the urban poor.

A visiting professor of urban and mobility studies at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, she talks about her book, City of Shadows – Slums and Informal Work in Bangalore.

Why do you call Bengaluru a city of shadows?

In most cities, slums are typically tucked away in underprivileged neighbourhoods, whereas in Bengaluru, we find them hugging commercial hubs like Lalbagh and upscale residential areas like Koramangala. So that’s shadow, a metaphor to capture this contradiction.

The other aspect of light and darkness can be found in labour-intensive export industries like garments. They offer employment to a large army of women from rural and semi-rural areas, but if you scratch the surface, you find they are exploited in terms of wages and social security – 25% don’t even get minimum wages. And they work under a very coercive atmosphere on the shop floor.

The divide between urban rich and poor is everywhere. Why did you focus on Bengaluru?

Bengaluru is a telling example of what globalisation can do to a city in terms of expansion of wealth and providing opportunities to the middle class but also leaving out large sections of people behind.

Bengaluru’s rise as the Silicon Valley brought in a new model of development. While the growth of IT was led by the private sector, the state pumped in huge investments to support sectors like biotechnology. This new model signalled the decline of the old model that had made the city the seat of large public sector companies (like HMT, BHEL and BEL). The closure and partial closure of many PSUs has had a tremendous impact on the city’s lower-middle class, which would depend on the state for health benefits, education and employment for the next generation.

Similarly, the decline of the small-scale industries, ancillary to the PSUs, led to significant job losses. Now, the share of manufacturing employment is lower in Bengaluru (21.3%) as compared to urban India (24.3%).

There has, of course, been a spill-over effect and people have found jobs in malls, hotels and security firms but that is predominantly an informal space, marked by vulnerability and precarity, which came to the fore during the pandemic.

Is Bengaluru’s urban poverty a result of privatisation?

I won’t say that. Slums have existed in the inner part of the city for 70-80 years, inhabited by people from Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh who came in search of work. But privatisation, I would say, has intensified poverty in these slums. It has led to a loss of jobs and economic security for this section, which can’t look towards the state for employment. They remain tied to traditional sectors, like head-load bearing, waste picking, street vending. I call them the old poor in the book. Many households in the old slums have made the transition to the city’s new economy, mostly in lower-rung services. Their incomes are higher, obviously, but there is an edge of insecurity as well as a lack of occupational mobility. The new poor, on the other hand, comprise the recent migrants, who live on the periphery of our cities, in non-notified slums, and work largely in the construction sector.

Are the old poor and the new poor in conflict?

They are called so mainly on their spatial division. There’s not much contrast in their struggles otherwise.

Have social policies failed them?

Under The Building And Other Construction Workers’ Welfare Cess Act, 1996, the workers are promised insurance, pension and monetary compensation in case of death or accident. These can be claimed by registered construction workers only, and after they have worked for three years. But, in reality, only 10% of the construction workers in Karnataka are registered and a large majority are seasonal labourers. So both the writing and implementation of the law is problematic.

Or, take the Chief Minister's Kaushalya Karnataka Yojane. There is a huge gap between the skills training it offers and what the target population wants. An average youth in these slums wants to go to office and do computer-related work but the programme is pushing them into retail jobs and beauty parlours.

What is the larger implication of urban disparity?

Children don’t have access to the education and skills that help them join the private sector and become part of the city’s growth story in the future.

Ground reality

- At 21%, Karnataka’s poverty ratio is highest in the south and close to the national average.
- Poverty reduction in urban Karnataka has been sluggish when compared to rural Karnataka – 18.9% versus 32% between 1993–94 and 2011–12.
- Urban Karnataka’s poverty decline is behind states like Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.
- Employment in Bengaluru is dominated by the services sector (73.25%) while manufacturing accounts only for 21.3%.

(City of Shadows – Slums and Informal Work in Bangalore, Cambridge University Press, Rs680, available on Amazon.in)