Slums.

We city dwellers have quite strong opinions about them.

They are the cause of all criminal activity in our cities. They encroach on our roads, steal electricity from our wires, and illegally occupy land. They are ugly spots on our urban development. They are unhygienic and the source of much disease.

They must be rooted out, and demolished. The slum dwellers must be made to leave.

The recent governments have been increasingly efficient at doing just that. And we applaud their political will and efficiency. They are finally doing what we have been suggesting for years. Cleaning up the cities.

Eminent journalist P. Sainath pointed out in a recent seminar that in the last few months, the municipal corporation of Mumbai has demolished more dwellings in Mumbai slums than the Tsunami did along the coast of Tamil Nadu. 90000 homes had been demolished as of February 19th, 2005. The Delhi municipal corporation has also demolished over 1000 homes, many in the Trans-Yamuna area.

Finally, we have a reason to congratulate these municipal corporations. Our cities will now be better off, surely.

One question that we do not ask, since the answer is quite simple, is where will these millions who live in slums go, if they are destroyed. They need to go back from where they came. They need to go back to their villages.

But they left the villages because they could not support themselves in their villages. They could not support themselves in their villages because we stole their water. We stole their water so that we could have marble floors, and swimming pools and golf courses in our cities. But we mainly stole their water so that we could drink Coke and Pepsi.

Coke and Pepsi have drilled thousands of deep bore wells in large parts of India, including dry areas like the Deccan, often tapping into aquifers that cannot be replenished. They drain hundreds of thousands to millions of liters of water every day. Often, a government run unit treats the water for them. And they pay 4 paise per liter.

No where in India can an Indian buy water at 4 paise for a liter. Then these companies sell us this liquid packaged in 200 ml packets for Rs 5.

Meanwhile water tables have fallen by tens of feet, even in the Gangetic basin. The High Court of Kerala has passed an injunction that has stopped Coke form pumping water from certain sections of Kerala.

Meanwhile, the rural community does not have water to farm. The buying power of the agrarian community has fallen. They cannot buy basic food for themselves. They either migrate or die.

Sainath describes how there has been a subtle shift in migration. Subtle, but distinct enough.

In 1993, Sainath says, there was one bus from the region every week that went to Mumbai. Now there are over 40 public buses from one depot to Mumbai. Numerous more private buses also serve this route. Then there are other buses to other large cities. And these buses are always full as they drive towards large cities.

The bus accounts show that 80 percent of the revenue is generated in the trips to Mumbai. Clearly, people are fleeing.

In the past, some left rural parts of the country to get big jobs, make it big in the city. Now they are fleeing in hundreds and thousands, trying to get out of a region that is being increasingly made unsustainable, unable to support people.

In addition, various development projects have thrown people out of their homes. New Aluminium mines, power projects, dams have all displaced people. Mines that sometimes provide further development for our cities, but that often provide raw material to be exported cheap. And power projects to give us more electricity in our cities.

In the absence of any real rehabilitation efforts most of these people having been forced out their homes now move to cities as destitute where they can only live in much worse conditions in slums.

It is under these circumstances that people have moved in to slums. While in the 80s, people moving into cities found jobs in small mills and factories, there are no such jobs available any more. In fact, most of these mills have been closed. Most small mills in the Thane-Belapur area near Mumbai have been closed down. The same is true for Noida – the region that had a large concentration of small units near Delhi.

Most people moving in to these cities now work as domestic help, as daily wage earners, construction workers, part time laborers. They live in conditions often unfit for animals. And they are paid much below the minimum wage established by law.

They have come to the cities not because they like to live in such conditions. They have moved here because their water, their land, their means to live has been taken away from them. They have no choice. Except to die.

And they have been exercising that choice. Farmer suicides have gone up – thousands of farmers have committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and even Punjab.

It would be instructive, perhaps, for us to find out where people in the slums in our neighborhoods came from and what they did, before we throw them out of their homes again. It might tell us about the great sacrifices being made so that we may drink our Coke.

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