The Slumdogs Blog

Homeless and parentless children often have few opportunities in adult life. A lack of education and community support predisposes them to society's least appealing jobs. Combine that with deliberate exploitation and they can be drawn into criminality and antisocial networks.

For young women, the sex trade can be a typical destination that is difficult to escape.  Enabling and supporting young women is a crucial goal for NGOs and governmental organisations. Slumdogs and Myriad Dreams is attempting to fund that crucial final stage of education that provides young women with skills and trades to enable them to provide for themselves. 

The Times of London has an interesting and moving portrait of the daily life of a prostitute, Laskar, in Calcutta . Link Here

Comment (1)

Urban poverty in India is often understood as a function of rural poverty. Poor people move to the cities: ipso facto there is now urban poverty. Such a formula stressed the need to address rural poverty as the essential nexus for all other forms of poverty.

The "India:Urban Poverty Report, 2009" suggests that this view is faulty and that much of the blame for urban poverty results from inadequate urbanisation strategies.

With 24% of India's urban population live in slum style accommodation although not all slum dwellers are living below the poverty line. According to the report they have been marginalised because of the poor city planning and poorer urban land management and legislation. Urban poverty in the context of India is not about only nutritional deficiency but deficiencies in the basic needs of housing water, sanitation, medical care, education, and opportunity for income generation.

As the authors of the report state, it "is not a report on the poor in urban areas but a report on the process of urbanisation in India keeping poverty at the centre of analysis".

The report found that urban workers were increasingly gravitating to the informal economic sector, even as the sector for informal economic activities was shrinking. The profile of the work in urban areas has slowly moved from the typical status of casual employment (which is paid on regular basis) to self-employment, which carries its own uncertainties. The urban poor is increasingly a street vendor, a rickshaw puller, a rag picker, a cleaner, a washerman, a load carrier or a domestic servant. Jobs which offer few extra opportunities, carried few ancillary benefits and from their self-employed status carried a constant risk of further impoverishment in the event of illness or changing economic circumstances.

The Report states that while the these workers contributed to the growth of cities, there was growing trend to marginalise the poor to the urban periphery, as they were increasingly seen as threat to civic existence and as slum clearances were promoted for the purposes of property speculation

 Interestingly, urban poverty was found to be most pronounced in smaller cities and towns rather than the major urban metros like Mumbai and Delhi where rates were typically at 10%. Access to resources and increased mobility benefited the larger metros. Likewise the report warns against emphasising urban strategies on the large urban metros at the expense of smaller and growing cities. Towns of 50000 inhabitants displayed the highest levels of urban poverty.

So, although the share of the urban poor in the wider urban population has fallen. The increasing pace of urbanisation and the changing face of urban employment means that the absolute number of urban poor has risen.

As many 81 million or 25.7 per cent people (latest data: 2004-05) subsist in urban areas on incomes that are below the poverty line. For this group some eighty per cent of their meagre income goes towards paying for food and energy, leaving very little for meeting the cost of living in an increasingly monetised society.

Comment (0)

Slums and their dwellings don't have many supporters among architects and urban planners, but now they have received the royal seal of approval from Brit ain's Prince Charles who declared that Dharavi's use of local materials, its walkable neighbourhoods, and mix of employment and housing add up to "an underlying intuitive grammar of design that is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to 'warehouse' the poor".

Viewers of Slumdog Millionaire will recall the scene where the boys return to Mumbai and overlook their old slum now swept away and replaced with high rise housing and the vibrant communal fabric is replaced with slabs of high rise buildings.

A number of reports are linking homelessness in developing cities with problems with overall urban planning strategy, a focus on western development styles and the replacement of local housing with often speculative projects funded by international investors building for property investors and the "burgeoning" middle class. 

Prince Charles is more famous for his aesthetic architectural attitude and less for the often sensitive engagement with the community urban approach of Alice Coleman that places more emphasis on overall community structure and less on the discreet building architecture. 

The redevelopment of Delhi and Mumbai has resulted in widespread destruction of pavement and slum dwellings without any concomitant commitment to build new communities. 

Prince Charles strictures will strike a chord with many who would like to see an urban planning paradigm that seeks to integrate slum dwellings into the overall urban plan rather than simply seeing them as stopgap solutions until such time as they can be torn down."I strongly believe that the west has much to learn from societies and places which, while sometimes poorer in material terms are infinitely richer in the ways in which they live and organise themselves as communities, It may be the case that in a few years' time such communities will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have a built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living."

With 50% of the world's population living in cities and that percentage expected to rise to 70% within 40 years, it is clear that a new approach to planning is going to be required and there is an increasing recognition that big concrete masterplans that strip slum communities from the centre of cities and relocate them to "garden city" peripheries are neither successful or satisfactory. 

Prince Charles comments reported in the Guardian

Comment (0)

It started with Alice Miles in the London Times describing the film as "poverty porn". Then Time Magazine claimed the film was "no hit" in India and finally Slate Magazine slated the film as well, scoffing at Director Boyle's "fairytale vision of squalid poverty," and writing that Boyle is guilty of "aestheticizing poverty." His attack is formal ("dissonant to the point of incoherence" is one of his catchy phrases) as well as a summation of other people's criticisms: the Indians don't like it as it does not portray the "real" India, ignores the middle-classes, it's not as good as Luis Bunuel (but then who is and isn't that a favourite criticism? Take a film nobody watches except for cineastes and accuse nothing else of matching it.)

Well, you can't have it both ways. Slumdog Millionaire is not a documentary although it takes as its subject matter themes that seem weighty. It is not based on fact although the incidents such as the religious riots are based on actual events. As a film it attempts to meld two narratives together - a social and romantic narrative to create a filmic experience that audiences can respond to. To accuse a film of "aestheticising poverty" is redundant: all films aestheticise their subject matter. It does not really deal with poverty so much as the escape from poverty. 

Importantly, the film is creating discourse and joins a body of films about India made by western writers and directors. This whole corpus romanticises and aestheticises India, but then so do Bollywood films. The few that don't such as the work of Ray create revulsion and incidents.

Go and see it. Decide for yourself.

see LA Times article

Slate Magazine

Comment (0)

Were the child actors in Slumdog Millionaire exploited, or as one article put it; is there a there there?

The production company claims that they were paid 3 times an average Indian salary for a month's work and that a trust fund has been set up for them that will supplement their income after 18 so long as they attend school - something which Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail (who play the youngest Latika and Salim) have never done. Both are from Mumbai slums similar to those depicted in Slumdog Millionaire.

The controversy seems to be as much as manifestation of press story mongering as genuine concern among the parents, both of whom seem to have rescinded their original stories of child exploitation.  The story gained traction in the London Telegraph newspaper who reported that the children's lives were even more precarious than they were before. The Telegraph reported:

"Azharuddin is in fact worse off than he was during filming: his family's illegal hut was demolished by the local authorities and he now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarpaulin with his father, who suffers from tuberculosis. "There is none of the money left. It was all spent on medicines to help me fight TB," Azharuddin's father, Mohammed Ismail, said. "We feel that the kids have been left behind by the film. They have told us there is a trust fund but we know nothing about it and have no guarantees."

What seems apparent is that the experience of making the film has changed the children's world and that the film makers are going to have to develop a more coherent and structured plan to help the childen adapt to the two lives that exist for them now - the slums and the glamour of the film. 

Comment (0)

India is uncomfortable with Slumdog Millionaire. Uncomfortable with the success and awards that the film is garnering. Uncomfortable that it portrays or reveals a side of India that Indians are increasingly out of touch with. Uncomfortable that it is not an Indian film but seems to capture a quality of India and Indian lives that staple bollywood fare largely ignores.

First it was "Big B"  (Amitach Bachan) railing against the film on his blog (how contemporary) then old style Bollywood producer Mahesh Bhatt declaring, "This isn't best or better than any of the cherishing films made by our filmmakers. Why should we get excited when it's not an Indian Film and even if it wins Oscars, it is of no use to India. It is a British Filmmaker's flick and he has accomplished his dreams roping in India's best personalities to work with. There were more films where actors like Anil Kapoor and Irrfan Khan had spelled their best works and yet went unrecognised. Moreover, the Oscars hadn't been plainly nominated for Indian Films for superior quality in the category of Foreign Films."

Some of this is plain jealousy and some of it the continued anxiety between the new go-go India of BMWs and Vogue India Magazine and the reality that for many Indians the economic boom has passed them by. Despite laws to the contrary, poor children remain vulnerable to exploitation and it is in the slums and on the edges of the slums that  such vulnerability if most keenly felt. 

It is not for nothing that a central theme of the film is money - its lack and the impact of its excess. The closing scene reflects three simultaneous images: one brother dying in a bath of money, the celebration of poor Indians at one of their number escaping poverty and the loneliness of the main character in the railway station ( a place where journeys start and stop).

The drivers of homelessness are many, but surely the preeminent among them is Money.

Comment (0)

Recent slum clearances in Delhi show how fragile the situation for homeless or slum dwellers is, and how thin the line between the two is.

Delhi is preparing for the Commonwealth Games in 2010 and wants to spruce up the city for visiting athletes and press, so planning officials have decided to rid the city of encroaching slums by bulldozing them down. 

The technique is to turn up with bulldozers and get to work quickly before locals can protest or stop them. The government certainly owns the land, but then governments own most of developing country land and then say that they need the land for new roads.

The city says it will build new apartments for the slum dwellers and is planning a hundred thousand new apartments. Problem is only 6000 are being built and at the present rate it will be years before they are completed. In the meantime, the newly homeless have to survive on wastelands.

Outsider often see slum dwellers as itinerant, but this is far from the case. Many have been inhabiting the same dwelling for twenty years and there has built around them a thriving and active community, tho one without planning permission.  

Many are poor certainly, but they also hold down jobs and provide stable upbringing for their children, as well as a stable enviroment for community life. The solutions to slums is not to start by knocking them down but to develop them.

There is an economic problem as well. Slum can often inhabit valuable real estate in the centre of town. The unholy alliance of city planning and property developers would like to see them transformed into glass boxes. Solution move the slum dwellers to new locations. Those new locations are too frequently on the edge of town and far distant from the jobs that inhabitants have. 

For children, the trauma of losing home can so easily descend into family breakdown. The bulldozers knock down more than homes.

Comment (0)