How did slums survive during the lockdown?

 

The pandemic has shown that slums need sustained engagement between crises

Usually, when Adeel Kureshi contacts government officials, it is to demand paved roads, sewers, and streetlights for Pahari Nagar, a sprawling slum settlement in eastern Jaipur. This past April, though, Kureshi was seeing to more pressing needs—making sure residents have enough food and fuel during the raging coronavirus pandemic and stringent lockdown. Kureshi, an informal leader and resident of Pahari Nagar, told us over the phone: “I have tried to make a list of households who are the rozkamane vale, roz khane vale. If they don’t work for one day they will go hungry. So I made sure they got supplies…”

Six hundred kilometers away in Bhopal, Om Prasad, another slum leader, was scrambling to ensure residents were keeping the settlement clean and understood how easily the virus can jump from person to person. “The first thing I did [following the lockdown’s announcement] is get the settlement cleaned. The second thing was to build awareness about how the disease can spread between neighbours.”

India’s slums received substantial media attention for being potential coronavirus hotspots. Journalists note that slum communities are especially vulnerable to the spread of the virus, and the economic consequences of restrictive mitigation strategies. Slum residents are susceptible given most work in the informal sector and live in crowded conditions, often with inadequate access to essential public services like water and sanitation.

Despite widespread concerns, we have little systematic information from slum residents about their pandemic-time experiences. Most reporting has focused on conversations with residents in ‘famous’ slums in megacities like Dharavi in Mumbai. These city-sized slums are unrepresentative of most settlements, which are smaller and in less metropolitan cities.Media accounts also tend to render settlements as uniformly vulnerable and helplessly passive in the face of the pandemic.These portrayals ignore significant variation across slums in their levels of infrastructural development, and neglect the internal structures of self-governance through which these communities solve problems during ‘normal times’.

To better understand how slum residents were affected by the lockdown and pandemic, we conducted a phone survey with 321 slum leaders across 79 slums in Jaipur and Bhopal, at the height of the lockdown in April and May 2020. To our knowledge this is the first such effort to canvas these important leaders during the pandemic. What did we find?

First, our survey demonstrated that slum leaders are not idly watching the virus spread and economic distress deepen.Roughly six in ten leaders contacted a local politician during the lockdown to request assistance. However, the focus of their lobbying efforts shifted dramatically from ‘normal’ times. 91% of requests during the lockdown were for food rations, instead of more usual demands for public infrastructure. This reorientation makes sense given leaders estimated the average household in their settlement had only enough savings to survive for 24 days.This shift in focus highlights a hidden cost of the pandemic—a reduction in the time leaders have to address pre-existing deficiencies in basic public services.

Second, pre-pandemic disparities in infrastructural development also shape the extent to which residents can abide by public health guidelines. 39% of the 1594 households we surveyed across the same 79 settlements in 2015 lack domestic water taps. Accessing water requires them to congregate at communal sources like public taps and truck-fed tanks, where intermittency in water supply creates uncertainty that forces long waits. Slum leaders in settlements with sparser household connections are nearly twice as likely to report public water sources as a problem for social distancing than leaders in settlements with more widespread connectivity. As Vikram, a slum leader in Jaipur told us, “people understand it is dangerous to come to a crowded place for water, but they have to do it.” Approaching‘slums’ as a homogenous category misses how disparities across settlements matter during the crisis.

Third, slum leaders are not uniform in their ability to help residents. We asked leaders to enumerate any relief schemes that had been initiated or expanded during the lockdown that slum residents might benefit from. 47% of leaders correctly identified zero or 1 scheme, while 25.5% of leaders correctly identified 3 or more schemes. Slum leaders also varied in their reported ability to get requested assistance from politicians. Two key factors underpinned their influence with city leaders: education and their embeddedness in political party networks. In prior, pre-pandemic research, we found these exact traits corresponded with effectiveness in everyday problem-solving. Leaders who were effective before the pandemic remained more effective during it.

Public health experts have called for community-driven solutions to slow transmission and soften the economic blow of containment measures. In India’s slums, such participatory efforts will encounter informal leaders like Kureshi, Om Prasad, and Vikram. Our findings reveal active forms of leadership even in the most underserved areas of India’s cities. However, we also document that slum leaders are deeply dependent on party networks, and that nine in ten are men. These traits inevitably bias the types of residents that leaders are most likely to hear and help. Rather than flatten and simplify slum communities, participatory efforts must recognize these complexities within them.A small silver lining to the pandemic has been in rendering visible the Indian state’s inadequate understanding of important urban communities, ranging from circular migrants to slum residents. Acting on this realization requires more than calls for making cities inclusive. It requires sustained engagement between crises, not a flurry of recognition during them.

Adam Auerbach is an assistant professor in the School of International Service, American University and author of Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Tariq Thachil is an associate professor of Political Science, and Madan Lal Sobti Chair of Contemporary India, and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.

Source: Hindustan Times, 14/12/20

Legitimise informal rental agreements in slums

For slum housing policies to be truly inclusive, the State must recognise diverse tenurial arrangements

Following in the footsteps of Odisha, the government of Tamil Nadu in January drafted a housing policy that emphasises leveraging technology for conducting accurate spatial surveys of slums. The Odisha government’s policy has been lauded for providing a clear roadmap towards granting land titles to slum dwellers. However, it does not take into account the different tenural types in slums and risks excluding some of the most vulnerable groups — tenant slum households. For Tamil Nadu, and other states formulating housing policies, it is critical to recognise the importance of rental arrangements.

New migrants in a city prefer to rent. When migrants belong to low-income groups, they usually find a shelter in the city’s slums thanks to kinship and other social networks. Renting is also a preferred choice for those who cannot afford the time and money spent on long commutes to the place of work. Therefore, an informal system of thriving rental markets has emerged in India’s slums. According to the 2011 Census of India, 26% of slum households lived in rented accommodation. In the city of Mumbai, 24% of slum households are tenants. In Bangalore and Chennai, rental households constitute 46% and 45% of slum households respectively.

Rental agreements between tenants and landlords are either oral or written on paper having no legal validity. Rental payments are often made in cash and tenants are not provided proofs of payment. With no system of law and framework for dispute resolution to undergird rental agreements, both tenants and landlords face a very high degree of risk and uncertainty. To an extent, private ordering of different types has emerged to mitigate risks. Tenants are afforded some protection against unfair evictions and landlords can expect some guarantee of regular payments due to informal modes of contract enforcement. Often, tenants and landlords belong to the same community or might be related, which creates a degree of trust as well as a need to maintain a good reputation in the community. In some cases, slumlords or local leaders act as enforcers in case of disputes or reneging of contracts.

This existing system is inadequate and far from efficient. There is anecdotal evidence showing that tenants may be asked to vacate their homes at short notice and that their homes are not properly maintained by landlords. Once the duration of negotiated rent ends, increases in rents are often very high. This is partly to dissuade tenants from staying for too long and claiming some sort of de facto ownership. A potential cause for this is the high degree of insecurity landlords face in renting out their premises due to the general nature of informal ownership tenure. A 2001 paper by Sunil Kumar of London School of Economics and Political Science finds that in Surat, when tax officials visited, landlords would remove partitions in the house separating themselves and the tenants and report that the tenants were relatives living with them temporarily. In Dharavi, during a slum census being conducted by Mashal, a Pune-based NGO, surveyors reported that landlords did not allow them to speak with tenants — who often resided in lofts above their homes — due to fear among landlords that tenants may become eligible for benefits or even ownership rights.

Reforms for improving the situation have to be designed carefully so that the incentives they create do not lead to a complete breakdown of private ordering or drive rental markets further underground. Rent control-like regulations will be too onerous and will quickly and effectively thwart supply. The ideal reform is providing a foundation of clear property rights in the form of tenure security upon which the transactions and contracts can be built. Tenure security can be of different types, ranging from full property rights to the dwelling — and, therefore, freedom to develop, rent or sell — to partial rights that guarantee protection of slum dwellers against eviction for occupying public or private land and provide eligibility for basic amenities and services.

The benefits to landlords from tenure security that recognises their right to rent are obvious. The risks they face from illegally renting out will dissipate. Since landlords often themselves live in slums and have low incomes, earnings from rent are an important revenue source and help smoothen consumption. But this policy is equally beneficial for tenants, who can expect better condition of dwellings and getting access to basic amenities. A 2017 study of slums in Pune by Shohei Nakamura of the World Bank provides empirical evidence to show that tenants are willing to pay a premium for living in slums that have been granted tenure security in order to get the aforementioned benefits. Therefore, for slum housing policies to be truly inclusive, they must recognise diverse tenurial arrangements instead of assuming a single type, that is, ownership, and legitimise informal rental arrangements. State governments that wish to create housing solutions for the poor cannot afford to overlook and undermine the solutions the poor have found for themselves.

Vaidehi Tandel is Junior Fellow at IDFC Institute, Mumbai

Source: Hindustan Times, 12/02/2019