India’s lockdown to slow the spread of the coronavirus is laying bare immense social inequalities in the country’s sprawling cities. The plight of migrant laborers has been especially alarming. Following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sudden announcement of a 21-day lockdown on March 24, migrant laborers have scrambled to return to their villages of origin in search of food and shelter, in many cases on foot.
Residents of India’s urban slums represent another population whose vulnerabilities have intensified during the lockdown. According to India’s 2011 census, 65 million people, or 17 percent of the country’s urban population, live in slum settlements. Broadly, these are low-income neighborhoods, with dense and unplanned housing, often weak or absent formal property rights, and marginalized access to basic public services, including public health systems. Most residents work in a vast, largely unregulated informal economy and depend on daily wages to support their families.
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What does social distancing — and the suspension of movement — mean for residents of India’s slum settlements? Here are some of the central challenges facing this segment of India’s population.
There are hard limits to social distancing in slum settlements
My research on the politics of public service provision in India’s urban slums points to several impediments to social distancing efforts, and threats to the daily well-being of residents under stay-at-home orders.
A basic problem is that many residents need to leave home to get their daily water. In the summer of 2015, Tariq Thachil and I conducted a survey of 2,199 residents across 110 slum settlements in the north Indian cities of Bhopal and Jaipur. We found that just 53 percent of respondents had water taps within their household. The remaining respondents used communal sources — shared taps, hand pumps and water tanks.
These patterns tend to funnel people together around water sources. And there’s an added problem: Intermittent water delivery can force residents to wait near shared taps for considerable amounts of time. Failing to wait can mean losing out on water for drinking and personal hygiene that day, so people tend to congregate in groups to fill their buckets.
A community leader in a Jaipur slum settlement described this challenge to me over the phone on April 5, noting the difficulty of social distancing: “We don’t have individual water taps so a tanker truck comes to supply water and crowds gather at that time. … There are places where water comes once or twice [a day]. In these areas social distancing is hard to manage.”
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One-third of our survey respondents also lacked a household toilet. These residents either relied on shared toilet complexes or made use of open spaces adjacent to their neighborhoods. For many residents, the need to leave one’s home to go to the bathroom, collect water and perform other essential tasks such as removing trash hampers social distancing efforts.
Crowded living conditions also means that in most slum settlements, keeping an adequate distance from others during the pandemic, within or outside one’s household, isn’t possible. Our survey found that the average household has six people, often living within just one or two small rooms.
India’s slum settlements are highly congested spaces, leaving little or no room among neighbors. Take, for example, Kathputli Nagar, a settlement in central Jaipur. About 4,000 people live in Kathputli Nagar, on a small, 28,000-square-meter plot of land. One- and two-room jhuggies (shanties) are tightly packed and linked by narrow alleyways that allow just a few people to stand shoulder to shoulder.
Slum settlements often house residents who have migrated from various states in India. The community leader in Jaipur, Rajasthan quoted above pointed out that his settlement has about 5,000 residents, most of whom have migrated from villages in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. He noted that many returned to their villages after the announcement of the lockdown, joining other vulnerable migrants in India who have struggled to return to their villages of origin in the past few weeks.
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Crowds are the usual way to solve collective problems
Social distancing measures also undercut the group-based strategies that residents of India’s slum settlements rely on to solve urgent, everyday problems, and demand public services.
Many settlements have either no access or only partial access to basic public infrastructure and services — paved roads, streetlights, sewers, storm drains, trash removal and piped water. And in those settlements that have managed to secure some of these goods and services, things break down. Electrical lines fall, water pipes crack, streets flood and drains become clogged with trash.
Residents typically address these threats to their well-being by making demands on the government, in groups. Such displays of “people power” let officials know a crowd of residents is ready to exercise their power as voters at the ballot box or protesters in the streets if their demands are not met.
Taking group action is particularly important in India’s slum settlements because government institutions are often dismissive with the poor. In this context, residents make persistent and loud demands on the government in groups, and muster what political influence they can to strengthen those demands. Under social distancing rules, these routine, face-to-face forms of political mobilization come to a grinding halt, depriving residents of a key tactic used to fight eviction and obtain services.
India’s coronavirus lockdown is likely to extend beyond the initial three-week period that was set to end Tuesday. In the weeks ahead, the need for group formation in India’s slum settlements — in both accessing and demanding public services, including government relief in the context of heightened economic distress — will likely take on mounting urgency.
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Adam Auerbach (@adam_m_auerbach) is assistant professor in the School of International Service at American University and author of Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums (Cambridge University Press, 2020).