Slums in India- Census 2001

For the first time in 2001 Census data was collected for slums. Slum data was collected for cities/towns having 50,000 population or more based on 1991 census. Slum population for States/Uts is reported in this table. According to this population of slums all over India is 40,297,341 (40 million) from the 607 cities/towns reporting slums. This comes to ~4% of total Indian population (assuming Indian population of 1000 million). More interestingly it comes to ~22% of the total population of these cities (178,393,941).

This means that almost quater of Indian cities live in slums. And sadly 5,531,062 (5 million) of this population are young children (0-6 age group).

The numbers for the richest state in India, Maharashtra are even worse. Almost 32% of the state's population live in slums. And > 5 million (5,823,510 to be precise) are in the financial capital of India, Mumbai. About 49% of Mumbai's population live in slums. Slums are described by some people as places where the village folks wont even think about keeping their animals. And even then we see such a large urban population in slums. Wonder why??. The answer is simple if you try to think about it. I am not going to tell that here. Rather than people migrating to urban centers shouldnt it be the other way around. Shouldnt we have ruralization ?

Increasing share of GDP from Urban centers

In India , about 29% of GDP was conrtibuted by urban sector in 1950-51 and since then it has increased to 55% in 1990-91 and has passed the 60% mark by 2001. Thus, a little more than quater of the population generates more than half of the country's total GDP. But there is a large inequality of distribution of resources especially income in the urban centers. This is one of the reasons for origin of slums. Figure below shows data of slum population vs total population in the four metros of India.