“Goals of human development cannot be realised if the people, in this case one half of the city, live in an environment which is polluted, degraded and dehumanizing,” states the Human Development Report compiled by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation with the help of United Nations Development Programme.

It points out that 54.1 per cent of the population lives in slums. What’s more, 97 per cent of these Mumbaiites have never attempted to move out of the slums, indicating “stagnation in personal economic status”.

According to the ward-wise break-up of the slum and non-slum population as of 2001, S ward in the eastern suburbs, comprising Bhandup, Nahur, Vikhroli and Kanjurmarg, has the highest concentration of slum dwellers at 85.8 per cent. It is followed by L ward (Kurla) with 84.7 per cent, H/East ward (Santacruz, Mahim) with 78.8 per cent and M/East (Govandi, Mankhurd) with 77.5 per cent.

In other eastern suburban wards the slum population varies between 60 and 70 per cent except in Ward T, which shows the lowest concentration at 33 per cent.

Wards of the western suburbs have a lower proportion of slums dwellers. P/North has 64 per cent, R/South 55 per cent and R/C Ward has 34 per cent. The lowest concentration is in Wards B, D and E, ranging between 10 and 13 per cent.

The disparity in slum and non-slum population has exposed another of Mumbai’s peculiar problems: housing. Since 1961, the number of households has always been more than the houses occupied. This difference widened incredibly during 1991-2001, when houses were 169,603 short of households, indicating that the realty sector, though active, has not managed to address the problem. Homeless households have increased decade by decade, the mean size going up, from 1.9 in 1971, to 2.0 in 1981, 2.3 in 1991, and 3.3 in 2001.

“The gap between housing and households has increased tremendously even after 2001 and has gone up to 12 lakh. The gap needs to be filled by more housing projects for slums and low-income groups. There is a need for large-scale investment in these sectors and developers apart from being given FSI incentives should be attracted by tax exemptions,” said Mohan Deshmukh, former president of the Maharashtra Chamber of Housing Industry.

Slum dwellers face a number of problems in acquiring basic amenities: water, electricity and even toilets: only 44 per cent of households in the city have access to latrines. “If residents tolerate the conditions in which they live, it is out of sheer helplessness, mainly emerging from economic reasons,” the report states.

The report calls for holistic development instead of a “patchy, incidental treatment” to mainstream them into a city to which they contribute. It calls also for a “workable widely acceptable model emerges to the satisfaction of the slum-dwellers for replication across the city sooner or later”.