The Hindu : 1 billion people living in slums: UN report

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Sunday, Dec 28, 2003

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1 billion people living in slums: UN report

By Our Staff Correspondent

NEW DELHI Dec. 27. Close to one billion people live in slums across the world and this figure is expected to double by the year 2030.

According to a United Nations report on `The Challenge of Slums' brought out under the U.N. Human Settlement Programme, it meant that almost half of the world's urban population lived in slums or one in every six people was a slum dweller. This is the first ever attempt to assess and examine issues related to slums, particularly the factors that have led to the formation of these settlements and suggests ways to improve the lives of slum dwellers by scaling up participatory slum upgrading and poverty reduction programme.

The situation is worst in Asia, which is said to be home to almost half of the squatter population followed by the sub-Saharan Africa with the largest percentage of urban slum populace. In India, 607 towns have slums and the population living in slums is estimated to be 40,297,341, according to the data available in the Census of India, 2001.

Rapid urbanisation and worsening poverty globally are adding more numbers to slum population that shot up considerably by 332 million in the 1990s to reach 923 million at the turn of the century, the U.N. report says. "It is not just developing countries that are grappling with the issue. About 54 million people in the developed countries, too, live in slum-like conditions," it points out, adding that to fulfil the U.N.'s Millennium Declaration of significantly improving the lives of over 100 million slum dwellers by 2020, policies must go beyond traditional infrastructural approaches to create livelihoods.

Slums have been described in the report as poor areas lacking basic services or access to clean water, where houses are poorly built and overcrowded. "Slums represent the worst urban poverty and inequality. Yet, the world has resources, know-how and the power to reach the target established in the Millennium Declaration," says the United Nation Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, in his forward to the report, hoping that the findings would help in overcoming apathy and lack of political will that have been barriers to progress, and move ahead with the greater determination and knowledge to help the world's slum dwellers to attain lives of dignity, prosperity and peace.

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