The Bare Necessities

I tagged along with Adam Monday while he visited one of the 320 slums in Jaipur for his doctoral research.  There are no accessible roads for vehicles in the slum so we had to hike over a number of sand dunes to get to get there. A local standing with his camel ominously warned to look out for snakes, so I watched my feet as we struggled up the dunes.

Adam’s research combines statitistical analysis with ethnographic study to try and determine the power structure present within slums and why some slums develop at different rates than others even when they appear around the same time.

Slum dwellers are squatters, they have no property rights and therefore their future within such areas remains in a very uncertain position. The governing body that controls such lands plays a major role in their inhabitants' futures. Slums on municipal lands often have a better chance at becoming permanent settlements, with their residents eventually gaining property rights. Local politicians, in an attempt to garner votes often make such promises. When the slum is on municipal land, the local politician has the power to follow through. Slums on forest department land, like the one I visited with Adam, are at the mercy of the federal government.

Forest Department officials will often try to destroy such settlements before they can be developed. In an effort to avoid this fate, squatters will build their ad-hoc homes and settlements in the dead of night or during national holidays when they know forest officials will be off. Building materials vary greatly, consisting of anything that is available. Inhabitants utilized brick and sandbags to construct shelters and walls. The slum displayed a tremendous amount of human ingenuity. With no central planning committee settlements develop haphazardly, but local residents work to ensure some basic community needs are met. Adam explained some have even drawn up unofficial constitutions or ‘neighborhood associations’. Residents in the slum we visited had dug a small ditch that ran through the entire length of the slum to drain wastewater.

The conditions of the slum were what one would expect. Piles of garbage and human waste blanketed the hillsides just outside the areas where the slums structures were concentrated spilling over into the make shift dirt streets. Two boys worked in a cramped shop hand embroidering a tapestry they explained would fetch about four dollars once finished. Pantsless and shoeless toddlers wandered about. Clean water is scarce, sanitation non-existent and if a slum resident becomes sick or injured they must cope the best they can or be physically carried out as ambulances cannot gain access.

Everywhere we went children flocked to us, running from their homes and marbles games, laughing, smiling, saying hello and shaking our hands. Soon groups of as many as 10 children would be following us as we made our way through the places they call home. Their joy was amazing considering they had almost nothing, their life so difficult and uncertain at such a young age. It is a testament to their resiliency. There lives are so different from those of most children in America who enjoy a level of material well being monumentally greater. Yet, even in the general squalor and hopelessness I see in their surroundings, they maintain the curiosity, playfulness and general optimism we associate with youth. Children are children the world over, no matter their circumstance. It was both heart wrenching and inspiring at the same time.

When I look at things in the world I am usually skeptical. Things meant to pull at our heartstrings are often calculated for that effect. We’ve all seen the late nigh infomercials for agencies fighting world hunger, but I, like so many others, am so far removed from it in America that it’s difficult to really take to heart, difficult to fathom. It was right before my eyes on Monday, along with the realization that these places, peoples and circumstances are all too real.

In each slum there are local power brokers. These leaders may be determined through caste or religious affiliations or simply through their ability to inspire followers. While many slums tend to lean toward a certain religion or even caste, Muslims and Hindus of different castes often live side by side. We met one leader in the make shift courtyard of his small home, a Muslim man who said he made about 100 dollars a month working odd jobs. Unlike most homes in the slum, his had two-stories Unlike some local Islamic slum leaders, he has no official standing in India’s Constitution Party, He greeted us and his wife brought plastic lawn chairs for us to sit on. Soon we were offered cups of masala tea and we sipped the chai as Adam began interviewing the man in Hindi about life in the slums. As the conversation progressed more and more adults, both men and women, gathered to listen and occasionally weigh-in and voice their concerns about government officials and basic services like water, sanitation and electricity. The man explained that God is the only one who supports him in his endeavors.

Local leaders, like the one we met, keep obsessive collections of the copies of letters they send to politicians. They serve as proof that leaders are attempting to persuade government officials to remedy problems the slum’s inhabitants face. While some of these local power brokers do work to benefit the inhabitants of their slums, others use their position of power as leverage for personal gain. A rickshaw driver who also inhabited the slum leveled such a charge against the slum leader we talked to. The man was quite remarkable in that he spoke excellent English, which he said he picked up from shuttling tourists, like me, around for many years.

After we bid farewell to the slum leader the rickshaw driver invited us to his home, a one-room brick structure that was siphoning electricity, for tea. There he explained, in his excellent English, that he had to bite his tongue while we spoke to the local slum leader. He complained that the leader basically extorted him, requiring him to buy the land he settled on even though it was not the leader’s to sell. As Adam explained, no one living in the slum is actually a deeded landowner. The recourse if the rickshaw driver refused to pay was retaliation by the local mob under the leaders control.

Slum leaders’ relationships with official politicians are often contentious. Slum leaders may be given official positions within a political party if they consistently deliver the votes of their slums inhabitants to that party. India is a country with many regional political parties that enter into loose alliances with one of the several parties operating on the national scene.  While India’s Communist Party and moderate BSP party have enjoyed a measurable percentage of the votes recently, two parties still dominate on the national level. There is the BJP, which is a conservative Hindu party known for its hardline stance against Muslims, and the Indian National Congress, a socially liberal party. While official political parties want to do enough to improve the slums to garner support, they do not want them to fully develop, improve and disappear. That’s because slums provide a reliable mass vote bank politicians can tap into.

Slum dwellers futures are dark, or at least murky, not only because of the challenges their material deficiencies pose, but also because of the institutional barriers that make addressing these challenges all the more difficult.

The people’s hospitality, their willingness to offer Adam and I anything they could even though we were clearly outsiders, Westerners who wanted for little, was astounding. It made me truly want to help them out in the little way I could, but the enormity and complexity of their plight made where to start almost impossible to determine. Spending a very short time in their world was nothing short of an eye-opening experience, one that was hard to digest without a level of genuine sorrow. But it was hard to be completely sad, because the people living there didn’t seem to be. While knowing the level of their destitution and eager to improve their life they also seemed to adapt to their surroundings and refused to let them sap every bit of enjoyment or appreciation for life from them.

It was clear as we left the slum, residents gathering around, laughing and joking as they watched the two paper kites battle each other in the sky, that life is what you make of it in the absolute worst of times as in the best.