Slum notes; 59 - Rani Bagh

As I’ve been saying that I’ll do for a while, I think it’s time to start posting my slum notes. These are notes I took on some of the slums we have been working in, that I was doing so that I remembered what was what. I’m basically hoping that this will be mildly educational for those interested in development or just urban poverty generally, as well as fun to look back on in a few years. And yeah, ok, it’s also because I’m doing these for work anyway and am too lazy to regularly post to this blog otherwise.

So what is a slum? There are lots of definitions, many of which don’t particularly apply to the Delhi context. However, when deciding which areas to work in, we wanted a rigorous way of establishing what was a poor/slum area, and what was not. Thus the previous RA came up with common 9 characteristics of Delhi slums, and we consider an area having at least 5 of these to be slummy enough. They are:

1. Domestic animals: we’re not talking dogs or cats, or heck, even cows (since they’re pretty much everywhere), but goats/chickens/pigs/donkeys that people raise in their homes, despite it being super urban. Turns out that baby goats are SUPER cute.
2. Open drains: A number of people have asked me how the portrayal in Slumdog Millionaire compares to actual Indian slums*. One thing the movie definitely misses is the smells. Some of these are delicious, like the scent of parathas being cooked on an open fire. But most of the time, they are less nice: most Delhi slums have open sewers running immediately outside of the houses, so it can get a tad smelly. I think my nose is now pretty much invulnerable to anything.
3. Few private in-home toilets: meaning that residents have to use the disgusting public toilets, or do their business out in the open
4. Bad or unpaved roads:
5. Hand pumps or tanker trucks to bring in water: one of the most tell-tale signs that you’ve entered a slum is seeing little kids hauling huge buckets of water from a hand pump to their house. It makes me REALLY appreciate the joys of running water.
6. Trash piles: see 3 on the smells. Garbage pick-up is usually not door to door, so it often accumulates outside houses
7. High density: I LOVE this. There’s always something going on with this many people in so small a space.
8. People doing domestic tasks outside: e.g. washing, cooking,
9. Unimproved brick or worse housing:

Rani Bagh (ward 53) – Shakur Basti
Population*: around 1500 households

General: Not all of Delhi is the typical built up city. As we bounced down a dirt road next to the railroad tracks, heading further and further into unpeopled forestry the likes of which I had not yet glimpsed in Delhi, I briefly began to wonder if my trustworthy project assistant had cracked from the hours we have him work and was planning to dump my body on the railroad tracks there. Putting that aside, it then began to feel like the start of a children’s fantasy novel, wherein children stumble upon a mystical goblin kingdom during an afternoon of exploring. To get to Rani Bagh, we moved to all dirt roads, between crossing four different railroad tracks: basically, it was as isolated as any slum I’ve seen, other than its proximity to the railroad.

Slum-iness: Quite High, this place meets practically all our criterion for a slum, though I would classify it as more of an urban village than a classic slum. For one, all of the houses were single story (classic slums tend to have at least two story houses, with the second layer usually built well after the first, and ladders to get up there). Farm animals were everywhere, including a cow that we played chicken with on the ride in and adorable piglets who kept running between my legs as we were doing surveying. While most other slums have many small businesses mixed in with the houses, this was almost entirely residential, with small children running around everywhere in mostly unclothed states. There were also huge fenced off areas of trash/crap that serve as the dump/pig stys.... but are right next to houses.

Favorite part: The feel of the area, with the animals and kids running around everywhere. Plus it was nice to feel like I was out of the city for a bit.