Just another slum?

This week’s visit to a slum helped me look at the life of a child and the other people residing there from a different angle. Even though this wasn’t a new experience as I have worked in a slum for some time but I tried looking at it from a more objective lens than an emotional one.

A slum as defined by the dictionary is ‘a heavily populated urban area characterized by substandard housing and squalor’. The image that comes to our mind when we think of a slum includes dingy houses, issues relating to sanitation, water, crime, illiteracy, poverty, etc. And this was true of the KS Garden slum that we visited. This slum like all others is built on encroached land of about 3.5 acres owned by a certain Kader Sharif and hence the name KS Garden slum. The land has been under his family for about a century and has been passed on generation to generation. The slum-dwellers have also been living here for a very long time with now their third generations growing up here. There are about 1200 families residing in the area but the census data states 800. The area is not visible unless one walks into the backside of Double Road in Lal Bagh.

The families are mostly Tamilian Hindus who are now converting to Christanity. Women primarily work as domestic helpers and the men as wage labourers. A few of them also work in the government sector. The community celebrates festivals such Ganesh Chaturthi by collecting donations from all the members. While on one side Ambedkar’s statue is set-up right where the slum begins as he is the symbol for rights for low communities, on another side, the Dalit community residing here is a huge vote bank for electoral parties.

Out of the many issues that the residents live with, the biggest one is of getting evicted as they do not hold any possession certificate for the land they are living on. One of the many things about KS Garden that disturbed as well were the fact that there were no toilets in the houses and there were only 20 community toilets catering to such a huge population. Besides this, there is a typical water shortage problem with the hand pumps drying up and a borewell supplying water. Also, there were no NGOs working in the slum to support the dwellers in any way. Earlier on there were a few NGOs such as Vimochana, etc. but they were there to only collect data or provide monetary help instead of conducting any concrete welfare work. Though there is presence of Self-Help Groups started by women. Education does not seem to be a major concern with presence of many private and government schools in the vicinity and we also heard the children speak in fluent English.

While interacting with Mr.Manohar, I heard that even if the residents are given a chance to move out of the slum, they’d rather stay here. But while interacting with a woman there, I heard the opposite. She was a mother of a 4 year old girl and wanted to move out to give her daughter a better life. She was learning English along with her daughter to support her, had taken up domestic work to match her child’s school hours and hoped that her child will get all the opportunities that children from affluent backgrounds get. What surprised was that she did not believe in the concept of religion but did believe in righteousness. This made her an outcast and she was being forced to convert to Christanity by her relatives. On being asked how this belief system of hers developed, she replied that she was working for a long time at a teacher’s house.

I also got the opportunity to speak to a ten year old girl who walked me around the slum. This little child lived with her grandparents and mother, as her father had passed away. Her grandfather was a drunkard and there were constant fights between him and her grandmother. Her mother worked to support the family. When I asked what did she prefer being at home or in school, she answered the latter. What she didn’t like about the area she lived in was lack of a place to play as she and her friends had to play on the road.

Walking around and meeting these few residents of the slum, made me think of a lot of things. I’m unsure as to who should take the responsibility of providing a better life to these individuals – the government, NGOs or the people themselves? Is there a better future for them? Is there something I as an individual can do to make their life better? Do the children living in slums really experience childhood or dealing with so many harsh realities snatches away the golden period of their lives? How does their environment (micro-, meso-, exo-systems) impact their self-belief and gives them hope to fight and continue with their education?

While Sonali Nag’s study on children living in poverty gave me an insight into their psychology, but interacting with the children made me realise there is hope and light at the end of tunnel but a lot is needed to be done.