Opinion - Letters to the Editor   

Urban slums

Urban slums have come to represent the un-acclaimed lifeline of a city ("Slums are cities of the future," July 3). It is slum dwellers who provide cheap labour for burgeoning industries around the cities, the handymen, the chaiwalas in offices, the rickshaw-pullers for the inner city areas, the domestic servants and security men for the flat-dwelling urban middle class. Most of the slum dwellers are rural folks forced out of their villages by insensitive agriculture policies. Our efforts at limiting slums should be mainly along two lines — invigorating our rural economy and providing basic amenities to the present slum dweller.

Jeevan Kuruvilla,
Vellore, T.N.

* * *

Studies have shown that slum dwellers in Kolkata's Belgachia and Mumbai's Dharavi are placed higher on life satisfaction index than their counterparts in the U.S. This may be because community living is part of Indian ethos. Rather than rooting out slums, governments should provide slum dwellers a good standard of living, hygiene, and education so that they become productive.

Pranav A. Dhingra,
New Delhi

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