Poverty in the Metropolitan Cities of India

Abstract

This study focusses on poverty in India’s large metropolitan cities — its incidence, causes, and its ugly face which is evident in the deprivation, filth, squalor and disease in the slums of these cities in which the great majority of the poor live. Rapid growth of economic activities and of population in the cities in the post-war period has been parallelled by proliferation of slums, located on the outskirts of the cities, on any available vacant land within them and even along the pavements of roads. The extremes of metropolitan poverty and human degradation are represented, however, not by the slum dwellers but by the pavement dwellers, whose numbers are in the tens of thousands in Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta and who live, reproduce and die without ever having a roof over their heads.