Slums, Dharavi and the sanitation missions

Detail

1. The divided Indian city

• India was still about 69 per cent rural in Census 2011. Its cities are growing fast, and they are much more divided inside than villages are.
• One end of the city: farmhouses and high-income areas. These have wide roads, street lights, parks, water and sewer lines, and private security.
• The other end of the city: slums, jhuggi-jhopri clusters (groups of huts built from mud, tin, plastic and scrap) and shanty colonies (rough homes put up on land the residents do not own).
• Why slums appear (cause → process → result):
• Rural people move to cities to find work.
• Rents and land prices are too high for them.
• So they settle on any empty land left over: low-lying flood land, drain and railway edges, and filled marshes. These are environmentally incompatible (unsafe or unsuitable for homes) and degraded sites.
• The result is crowded settlements that lack basic services.

2. Slum — definition and living conditions

• Slum: a residential area of "least choice". People live there because they cannot afford anything else. Most residents are migrants from rural areas.
• Housing and services:
• Old, broken-down (dilapidated) houses with poor hygiene and little air flow (ventilation)
• No safe drinking water, electricity or toilets
• Open defecation, meaning people have to relieve themselves in the open
• Unplanned drains, with dirty water standing in the lanes

• Narrow, overcrowded lanes, which are a fire and health risk

• Effects on residents (a chain of effects):

• Work: low-paid, high-risk jobs in the unorganised sector (work with no contract, no fixed wage and no social security), such as rag-picking, construction and domestic help.
• Health: undernourishment (too little food or the wrong kind of food) and frequent illness, such as diarrhoea, TB and malaria.
• Education: families cannot afford school, so children drop out or start work early.
• Social risks: drug abuse, alcoholism, crime, apathy (losing hope and interest) and social exclusion (being kept out of mainstream society).

3. Dharavi — a case study

Feature	Detail
Where	Central Mumbai, Maharashtra, on the west coast (Arabian Sea), about 19°N
Site	Land reclaimed from an arm of the sea, filled in with waste and garbage
Size	About 2.4 sq km; often called among Asia's largest slums
Source in NCERT	Extract from Jeremy Seabrook, In the Cities of the South (1996)

• Layout: one main "ninety-foot road", now narrowed to less than half that width. Many side lanes are too narrow even for a bicycle.
• Crowding: a family of up to twelve may live in one room. Garbage piles and rats are common.
• Economy: Dharavi is a busy production hub, not just a place to live.
• It makes ceramics and pottery, embroidery and zari (gold and silver thread work), leather goods, garments, metalwork, jewellery settings, and furniture for rich homes.
• Leather is tanned (treated) in buildings made of corrugated metal sheets.

• So Dharavi helps create Mumbai's wealth, even though its people live in poverty.

• Redevelopment: a project to rebuild Dharavi was awarded in 2022 and is now under way. It faces disputes over who is eligible for a new home and where people will be rehoused (verify current).

4. Census 2011 slum data

• Slum dwellers: about 6.5 crore people lived in slums in 2,613 towns, which was about one in six urban residents of those towns.
• Three Census categories:

Category	Meaning
Notified	Officially declared a slum by the state or UT government under a law
Recognised	Accepted as a slum by the local authority (for example, the municipality), but not yet notified under law
Identified	A crowded cluster of poorly built homes without proper water or sanitation, marked as a slum by the Census officials themselves

• Distribution: Maharashtra has the most slum dwellers of any state. Greater Mumbai, Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) and Kolkata (West Bengal) have high shares of slum population.

5. Housing response — PMAY-Urban

• PMAY-U (Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana–Urban) began in 2015 for "Housing for All". It included in-situ slum redevelopment, which means rebuilding homes on the same slum land so people are not moved away.
• PMAY-U 2.0 (Cabinet approval, August 2024) aims to build 1 crore houses for urban poor and middle-class families over five years. The investment is ₹10 lakh crore, with government help of ₹2.30 lakh crore [2].
• Slum dwellers and residents of slums and chawls (old one-room tenement blocks, common in Mumbai) are named as priority groups. So are safai karmis (sanitation workers), street vendors and artisans [2].
• Who is eligible: EWS (income up to ₹3 lakh a year), LIG (₹3–6 lakh) and MIG (₹6–9 lakh) families who do not own a pucca (permanent, solid) house anywhere in India [2].
• Four verticals (parts of the scheme) [2]:
• BLC (Beneficiary-Led Construction): help to build a house on the family's own land
• AHP (Affordable Housing in Partnership): houses built with states, cities or private builders
• ARH (Affordable Rental Housing): rental homes for migrants, industrial workers and working women. This directly targets the people who end up in slums.
• ISS (Interest Subsidy Scheme): a 4% interest subsidy on home loans up to ₹25 lakh

6. Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM)

• Swachh Bharat Mission: a national cleanliness and sanitation mission launched on 2 October 2014. It has an urban part (SBM-U) and a rural part (SBM-G). NCERT links it to a better life in urban slums, which suffer most from open defecation and waste.
• ODF (Open Defecation Free): a place where no one relieves themselves in the open and everyone uses a toilet.
• Phase I result: rural India was declared ODF on 2 October 2019, Gandhi's 150th birth anniversary. Rural sanitation coverage rose from 39% in 2014 to 100% in 2019 [3].
• Toilets built: over 12 crore household toilets (IHHLs) and 2.67 lakh Community Sanitary Complexes have been built since 2 October 2014 (as of 16 December 2025) [3].
• SBM-Urban 2.0 (from 2021): aims at garbage-free cities, which means collecting, separating and processing city waste, not just building toilets.

7. SBM (Grameen) Phase II and ODF Plus

• Period: 2020-21 to 2024-25. Central spending continues in 2025-26 [3]. Total outlay is over ₹1.40 lakh crore [3].
• ODF Plus: the next level after ODF. A village is ODF Plus when:
• toilets stay in use (ODF sustainability)
• solid waste (garbage) is managed
• liquid waste (greywater from kitchens and baths) is managed

• the village looks clean (visual cleanliness)

• Progress as of 16 December 2025 [3]:

• 4,89,526 villages declared ODF Plus (Model), which is over 83% of villages, and 4,15,915 of these verified
• 5.27 lakh villages have solid waste arrangements
• 5.41 lakh villages have liquid waste arrangements
• 5,300+ blocks have plastic waste management
• 970+ community biogas plants work under GOBARdhan (a scheme that turns cattle dung and farm waste into biogas and manure)

8. Swachh Survekshan

• Swachh Survekshan: an annual survey by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) since 2016. It ranks cities on cleanliness, waste handling and citizens' feedback.
• Indore (Madhya Pradesh) has been ranked the cleanest city every year since 2017.
• The top cities now compete in a separate Super Swachh League, so that other cities also get a chance to win the main ranking (verify current).

Prelims Hooks

• Dharavi is in Mumbai, Maharashtra. It stands on land reclaimed from the sea using waste and covers about 2.4 sq km. NCERT's extract is from Seabrook (1996).
• Census 2011 slum categories are notified, recognised and identified. Trap: "declared" or "registered" is not a Census category.
• Census 2011: about 6.5 crore slum dwellers in 2,613 towns. Maharashtra has the most.
• SBM launch date is 2 October 2014. Rural ODF declaration date is 2 October 2019.
• ODF Plus has four parts: ODF sustainability, solid waste management, liquid waste management and visual cleanliness. Trap: building new toilets alone is ODF, not ODF Plus.
• SBM-G Phase II period is 2020-21 to 2024-25. Over 83% of villages were ODF Plus (Model) by December 2025 [3].
• PMAY-U 2.0 (2024) targets 1 crore urban houses. Its four verticals are BLC, AHP, ARH and ISS [2].
• Indore has led Swachh Survekshan since 2017. The survey began in 2016.
• Zari is gold or silver thread embroidery, one of Dharavi's crafts.

Mains Points

• Causes of slums: rural-to-urban migration, high urban land prices and rents, too little affordable housing, and settlement on unsafe, degraded land. Slums are therefore a planning failure, not only a poverty problem. Dharavi shows that slums also supply cheap labour and goods to the formal city.
• Effects: poor sanitation and open defecation spread disease. Unorganised, high-risk work keeps people poor. Children drop out of school. Drug abuse, crime and social exclusion grow, so poverty passes from one generation to the next. These points answer NCERT's exercise question on slum problems.
• Policy responses: housing (PMAY-U, in-situ redevelopment, rental housing for migrants under PMAY-U 2.0 [2]); sanitation (SBM toilets, then ODF Plus waste management [3]); city competition (Swachh Survekshan). Limits: disputes over who is eligible for rehousing (Dharavi), toilets falling out of use, and data that still relies on Census 2011.
• Way forward: upgrade slums where they stand instead of evicting people, give secure land rights (pattas [2]), carry ODF Plus waste management into city slums, and count slums afresh in the next Census.