Shifting the environmental costs of economic growth onto India’s poor people

Poor people are being pushed out of India’s globalising major towns and cities. Market forces and state policies have forced large numbers of poor migrants to settle on the margins of urban areas. Disparities in provision of basic services have increased. Policymakers seem unaware of the problems with health, law and order that come with concentrating both poor people and polluting industries in urban peripheries.

For decades, Delhi and its surrounding towns and villages have attracted migrants from rural areas. Research from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India analyses patterns of growth in the National Capital Territory (NCT), the area within and around Delhi.

Despite official hostility, poor migrants managed to settle in low-lying areas, land near railway tracks and vacant plots where development projects did not start on time. Some poor people devised ways to stay in the slums of the central city.  They took advantage of competitive politics to obtain informal assurances against eviction and accessed water and electricity by maintaining relations with political leaders. Some slum dwellers benefited from new income opportunities and invested in improving their housing conditions, because they perceived an improvement in the security of their tenure.

In recent years, however, the situation has changed. Court orders favour landowning agencies and approve evictions of industries and slum colonies. This has destroyed the ‘security of tenure’. Social and political connections, informal assurances and the possession of semi-legal documents are no longer enough. Many industrial units have been closed, despite having approval from local officials and making substantial – formal and informal – payments to them.

The policy of excluding poor prospective migrants and existing residents from Delhi is working. The percentage of the urban population classified as poor is now only 7 percent, compared with the 22 percent national average for urban areas. Planning systems in cities have tried to ensure that powerful elite groups have a high standard of living, because they might otherwise move away and take their money and assets elsewhere.

The researcher describes how:

• Reduced migration into central Delhi has improved the female-male ratio but the opposite trend is happening on the city’s fringes, as single male migrants have been forced to find shelter in rural peripheries.
• Disruption to agriculture on the city’s outskirts has made it hard for poor women to find work.
• The labour market in central areas of Delhi has become ‘informally formalised’, with a decline in casual labour.
• Guidelines in Delhi’s master development plan have been violated, mostly in favour of the upper and middle classes.
• Little effort has been made to provide basic services and infrastructure to designated growth centres on the fringes of the NCT, although stipulations for this are made in the plan.
• Some industrialists are attracted to peripheral settlements where the environmental lobby is almost non-existent and planning legislation rarely enforced.

The researcher calls for action to halt ‘degenerated peripheralisation’ in the NCT and other mega-cities. To achieve this, the Indian government needs to:

• realise that shifting environmental burdens to poor people living on urban edges has long term costs
• acknowledge that denying people basic amenities creates an atmosphere of individual and group violence, and increases the risk of epidemics
• provide formal or informal tenure to urban poor people and not dislodge them from their economic activities
• ensure compliance with environmental controls in peripheral urban areas.

Source(s):
‘Dynamics of Growth and Process of Degenerated Peripheralization in Delhi: An analysis of socio-economic segmentation and differentiation in micro-environment’, by Amitabh Kundu in ‘Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges: From Local to Global and Back’ edited by Peter J. Marcotullio and Gordon McGranahan, Earthscan, December 2006 Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 11 December 2007

Further Information:
Amitabh Kundu
Centre for the Study of Regional Development
School of Social Sciences
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Mehrauli Road
New Delhi, 110067
India

Tel: +91 11 26742676
Fax: +91 11 26742586
Contact the contributor: amit0304@mail.jnu.ac.in

Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

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