Urbanization accompanied by large scale migration leads to mushrooming slums. India's slum population will constitute roughly 9% of the total projected national population of 1.28 billion in 2017.

Driving factors

• A Higher and More Stable Income: Productive employment opportunities in an urban centre likely generate a higher and more consistent personal disposable income than in the place of origin – likely a rural, farming centre.
• Social Mobility for the Next Generation: Raising children in an urban environment creates a higher “option value” for the next generation. Typically, cities offers a wider choice of education and employment opportunities.
• Distress Migration: Political disturbances and inter-ethnic conflicts forces people away from their homes. People also migrate to urban areas in the aftermath of major natural disasters.
• No other option except slums: Poor migrant families are unable to afford decent housing and transportation cost which forces them to settle in slum areas in the city near to their work places.

Unique Facts

• Unprecedented Scale: No country has or is facing the issue of slums on the scale at which India is. By 2017, India is expected to have over 100 million people living in slums and another 10 million migrants moving to the cities each year.
• Political Clout Cuts Both Ways: India’s slum-dwellers are fully enfranchised and actively vote for national and local leaders who they feel will protect their
• interests. Slum-dwellers’ today know they represent a strong and highly influential vote and politicians know that delivering things of value to this constituency plays an important part in their ability to win their vote.
• No Control: Some other developing countries have more effective political tools to control urban migration. However, India’s democracy which assures the free movement of people throughout the country prevents any such controls from being even remotely feasible.

Strategies for Transformation

A viable solution to transform the slums would have to take a holistic view dealing with India’s larger macro challenges. Such a solution should include the following strategies:

• Rural Re-Visioning and Investment: There is need to create other cities as countermagnets so that the migration to major cities like Mumbai can be arrested. Infrastructure, employment opportunities and the overall quality of life in India’s small towns and rural areas should be improved.
• Industrial Revolution and Continued Development: The solution to slums is not to reverse industrialisation or to try and contain urbanisation, but indeed to press forward with it more aggressively so that businesses can afford to provide jobs to slum-dwellers and pay them a proper wage.
• Slum Architecture: Building high-quality, low-cost, multi-storied, diverse formats in the current slum areas such that these become integrated with the rest of the city.
• Sustainable Continuous Dynamic Infrastructure Provisioning: The government needs to create a framework for gradual and continuous upgrading of slum infrastructure.