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)

Economic and educational reforms in India have not dented the prevalence of child marriages, fuelling risks of multiple unwanted pregnancies, their termination and sterilisations, according to a new study led by an Indian- American. Anita Raj, associate professor of social and Behavioral sciences at Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and her colleagues found that nearly half of adult Indian women aged 20 to 24 married before the legal age of 18.

These child marriages were significantly associated with poor fertility outcomes, such as unwanted and terminated pregnancies, repeat childbirths in less than 24 months, and increased sterilisation rates. "These results suggest that neither recent progress in economic and women's development, nor existing policy or programmatic efforts to prevent child marriage and promote maternal and child health, have been sufficient to reduce the prevalence of child marriage in India to that of most other developing nations," wrote Raj and colleagues. The study found that 44.5 percent of women aged 22 to 24 were married before age 18.  More than one in five - 22.6 percent - were married before age 16, while 2.6 percent were married before age 13.

India raised the legal age for marriage to 18 in 1978. In the past 15 years, national policy efforts have been developed to increase educational and economic opportunities for girls and women, reduce child marriage and expand family-planning support.

The authors said that while there had been a slight reduction - five percent - in the rate of child marriage compared with national data from 1998-99, the continued prevalence of the practice and its association with poor fertility outcomes highlights "the crucial need for increased family-planning interventions tailored to married adolescents".  The study found that women who married younger than 18 were significantly more likely to report no contraceptive use before their first childbirth than were those who married as adults. Nearly half - 48.4 percent - of women who were married as children reported giving birth before they turned 18. Women married as children also were more likely to have had repeat childbirths in less than 24 months and to have had three or more childbirths, than those married as adults.

Child marriage also was associated with an increased prevalence of unwanted pregnancies and an increased prevalence of pregnancy termination, defined as miscarriage, abortion or stillbirth, said a Boston University release. The study found sterilisation rates were higher for women married as children than for those married as adults - 19.5 percent, compared to 4.6 percent. Overall, more than one in eight women, or 13.4 percent, had been sterilised. Of those not sterilised, more than three-quarters reported no present contraception use, the research found.

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)