Mumbai: Mumbai is a city of extreme contrasts. Despite having the highest per capita income in the country (Rs 65,361), more than 1.2 million people, or a little under 10% of its population, earn less than Rs 20 a day. This, in a city where plush apartments are routinely sold for between Rs 10 crore and Rs 25 crore.
    The damning revelation comes in the Human Development Report commissioned for the BMC and partly funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
    According to the report, more than half of Mumbai’s population lives in sub-human conditions in shanties, but the land that slums are situated on comprises just 6% of the city’s total land area. “Is there justification to continue calling this city, once the London of the east, the Urbs Prima in India? Given the levels of deprivation and the size of the deprived population, it would be natural to ask, ‘Whose city is Mumbai, anyway?’,’’ the report says caustically.
    Amidst the glitz and the dollar billionaires that the city houses, the urban poverty is glaring. The official statistics, according to the report, reveal a dismal picture. At least 12.17 lakh people, or close to 10% of Mumbai’s population, earn an income of less than Rs 591 per month. Slum dwellers form 54% of city’s population
Mumbai: The city’s per capita income was twice the country’s average of Rs 29,382 in 2006-07, but that does not seem to have made any positive impression on the lives of Mumbai’s poor, a study commissioned for the BMC and partly funded by the UNDP has revealed.
    “However, these levels do not reveal the wide disparities in incomes across the city where both extreme wealth and absolute poverty are visible without having to look for it. Mumbai is much riddled with urban poverty even as it is home to overwhelmingly rich people,’’ it said.
    Although in 1998 it was reported that the poverty was much low at only 8.5% and much below the national and state urban averages, a baseline survey of 16,000 slum households by the MMRDA for its Mumbai Urban Transport Project told a different story: with an average monthly household income of Rs 2,978, 40% of them were below the poverty line. “These various sets of statistics at different points of time do indicate that Mumbai is beset with poverty, even if the precise extent remains to be determined,’’ it said.
    “The per capita incomes hide a sombre picture of huge disparities. There are people who are very rich, the rich, the middleclass, the poor and the very poor because most Indian cities are, as much as Indian society itself is, without inclusive growth,’’ it observed.
    Another interesting fact that the report has thrown up is the presence of slums in Mumbai—about 54% of the population comprises slum dwellers. “And the relevant dimension is the area they together occupy—just 6% of all land in Mumbai, explaining the horrific levels of congestion,’’ it said.
    According to the study, “Those who do not live in the slums, numerically nearly half, rarely, if ever, even consider walking through them. This, despite the fact that the city is directly or indirectly dependent on the slums for its supply of services and cheap goods. Slum dwellers are integral to the city and yet the city is aloof to their needs. Those living in slums have contact with, and continual access to, the non-slum areas where less than a half of Mumbai’s population lives. Thus, slums are manifestations of deep structural poverty.’’
MUDDLED FIGURES
    Aggregate statistics hide deep inequalities and gloss over concentrations of harsh poverty. Figures on urban poverty are imprecise and often underestimated because many aspects of poverty are simply not measured. Surveys either fail to consider the specificity of urban conditions (for instance, the inability to grow or forage for food, higher monetary cost of non-food needs, higher incidence of homelessness, harassment, eviction or arrest in their “illegal’’ homes or livelihoods), or present incomplete information (for instance, by not measuring the adequacy of sanitation facilities).
    (Source: UNFPA, State of the World Population Report, 2007)