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Urbanisation and phenomenal growth of slums
FAHAD HASHMI
Human beings have been around for the last four million years, but human civilisation is only 10,000 years old. Claims of any civilisation to be older than that are scientifically untenable and are rejected by scientists. The reason is simple: agriculture is only ten to twelve thousand years old and no human civilisation is possible in the absence of food security that agriculture provides. In the long march of human progress, the Industrial Revolution was another landmark
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With this revolution rural folk started migrating in small numbers to cities where the new industries were located. In places outside Europe, the same phenomenon was repeated nearly 100 years ago. Till then, the world’s urban centres had barely five per cent of the total population.
Towards the end of 2007, we reached yet another milestone — when the urban population and rural population of the world are equal to each other. This has brought new economic opportunities and advantages to people who have migrated to cities and towns. But this has also created the phenomenal growth of slums all over the world.
According to demographers, nearly all population growth between 2000 and 2030 is expected in urban areas of the developing world. The U.N. Habitat’s Publication State of the World’s Cities 2006-20007 says one in every three urbanites lives in slums. Slums are areas in cities, where people do not have access to one or more of life’s basic necessities like clean water, sanitation, sufficient living space, durable housing or secure tenure that ensures freedom from forced eviction.
Reality of slums
These areas are in official terms, "illegal" or "informal." Slums are differently known in different countries and cities. "Hoods" of New York, "bidon vielles" of Abidjan, "jhopad patties" and "jj colonies" in Indian cities are some of the names by which slums are known. The worst part is that such area is found even in the developed world. When hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, in 2005 for the first time, the world came to know that abysmally poor and undeveloped areas existed even in the U.S. A bus driver in Somalia told a reporter that New Orleans looked like Mogadishu. That means one of the poorest cities in Africa was being compared to an area in one of the richest countries. We have statistics from World Watch, the global NGO dealing with environmental concerns. This Washington- based NGO says that some 27 per cent of children in Nairobi slums have diarrhoea compared with 19 per cent in rural Kenya. In Khartoum, slums are home to 80 per cent of the residents, 33 per cent people have diarrhoea compared to 29 per cent in rural Sudan. In Bangladesh, one in four slum dwellers has diarrhoea, twice the rural average.
Our slums do no better, although I do not have ready statistics to prove that. I am saying this on the basis of plain observation. Thus, we see that on some parameters these city areas are worse off than their rural counterparts. Insufficient toilets in slums are a major cause of this. Respiratory diseases like pneumonia are a permanent threat as they grow quickly in slum environment. Eighteen per cent of deaths of children under five are due to pneumonia, a disease that finds a favourable climate in slums.
World leaders met in 2000 at the U.N. and forged a charter called the Millennium Development Goals. Under this, by 2020 they pledged to improve the lives of 100 million slum dwellers worldwide, which was 10 per cent of the total slum population. Unless we take these commitments seriously and aim to address the quality of people’s lives, our development claims would be mere empty boasts.
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