Karnataka - Bangalore

There is another life beyond glossy brochures

— Photo: Sampath Kumar G.P.

Deplorable: The Census report of 2001 indicates that 38.7 per cent of urban poor in the State live in houses with a single room.

Bangalore: Kishan and members of his extended family live on a small piece unoccupied land right next to the traffic junction near the railway underbridge at the end of Miller’s Road. Blue plastic sheets thrown over wooden pegs make up the homes of these itinerant doll sellers from Kota district in Rajasthan.

Getting a pot of water to drink or answering a nature’s call are daily ordeals for them. In addition, they also face constant threats of eviction by government agencies. “Tell me where we should live?” asks Kishan. “We are never in one place for more than a month in any case. Ham yahan mehal thodi hi bana denge (We are hardly going to build a castle here.).” His wife adds that her children went to a “tent school” run by the government while in Marathahalli from where they were evicted earlier.

Urban poverty is so ubiquitous that one hardly needs statistics to see that the poor in the burgeoning city of Bangalore live a precarious and uncertain existence without access to the most basic needs such as clean drinking water, sanitation and liveable housing.

The official statistics do not give a complete picture of urban deprivation. The Census report of 2001 indicates that 38.7 per cent of urban poor in Karnataka live in houses made up of a single room. According to a survey by the National Literacy Mission, sponsored by Bangalore City Literacy Committee, there are 778 slums in Bangalore city alone, accounting for about 26 per cent of the population. The City Development Plan prepared under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), however, pegs the numbers at a more modest 542. Of them only 218 are declared as slums by Karnataka Slum Clearance Board (KSCB).

However, there are no reliable statistics of the floating, migrant population of Bangalore that constitutes the poorest sections — people like Kishan and lakhs of others. According to one estimate, migrant construction workers alone constitute 15 lakh of the city’s population.

The observations of the Human Development Report 2005 on the Bangalore-centric employment growth and changing patters of employment throws some light on the trajectory of city’s expansion. It says: “Bangalore is supporting a large number of Information Technology-based industries, which generate high-end, skill-based employment. There has been a significant increase in marginal employment in Bangalore as well, mainly due to construction activities. There is a large influx of migrant unskilled labourers to Bangalore resulting in the high growth of marginal workers.” National Urban Housing and Habitat Policy, 2007, adds that the number of marginal workers has seen a staggering 360 per cent raise between 1991 and 2001 and wage employment is being progressively replaced by sub-contracting.

Needless to say that a stark contrast in living conditions — high-end luxury apartments with 24-hour water and power supply as opposed to virtual hell holes where the makeshift roof on the head can be blown off any time — is the hallmark of the city’s landscape.

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