Revision summary
Slums are the residential face of informal urban labour. Effects include service deficit, disease, and insecure tenure. Women carry extra water and care costs. The formal city depends on this cheap labour. Politics oscillates between eviction and patronage, not yet full urban citizenship.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Growing slums are the housing form of India’s urban informal economy. Their effects are overcrowding, insecure tenure, cheap labour for the city, and a politics of vote versus eviction.
Body
Housing and services
- Slums concentrate people without title, water, and sanitation. The city extracts labour while delaying citizenship of space.
- Women and children carry the water and disease load, a feminization of urban poverty.
Labour and class
- Slums house construction, domestic, and vending workers that Breman placed in the informal market.
- They subsidise formal India with cheap services next to malls, a spatial disharmony Beteille would recognise in another key.
Health and stigma
- TB, undernutrition, and fire risk are ecological effects. Caste clusters inside slums can repeat village rank.
Politics
- Patron parties trade stay against demolition. Rights-based housing and in-situ upgrade are the alternative to treating slums as only a nuisance.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD MG[Rural migrant informal] --> SL[Slum] SL --> LB[Cheap city labour] SL --> HS[Health tenure deficit] SL --> VT[Vote eviction politics]
Conclusion
- Growing slums effect a dual city: growth on informal housing. The sociological task is tenure, services, and labour rights, not only clearance.
Quick related
Students also ask
-
Discuss the changing nature of the problems of working class in the informal sector of the economy.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2016 · Q6(b)). View answer →
-
Do slums exist because of illegal migrants only?
Most residents are Indian workers the city needs. Illegality of land is often the state’s planning failure.
-
Will more high-rises end slums?
Without affordable tenure and wages, high-rises relocate the poor to farther informal belts.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
More from this topic
Q7(c) · UPSC Mains 2026 · Sociology GS 2 · 10 marks · Solution
Examine the process of formalisation of informal sector to safeguard the interests of marginalised sections of the society
Industrialization and Urbanisation in India
• **Core Objective:** Formalising India's vast informal workforce integrates vulnerable groups into legal and institutional frameworks to secure their rights. • **Digital Tracking:** The e-Shram portal creates national databases and assigns Unique Account Numbers (UAN) to make unorganized workers visible for welfare delivery. • **Welfare Delivery:** Registration streamlines access to accident insurance, PM-SYM pensions, and direct benefit transfers. • **Wage Reforms:** Consolidating labour laws introduces universal statutory minimum wages and mandates formal appointment letters. • **Safety Standards:** New codes aim to improve occupational health and reduce the workplace exploitation of marginalised communities. • **Implementation Hurdles:** High compliance costs push micro-enterprises to stay informal, limiting the reach of safety nets. • **Social Realities:** Deep-rooted caste and class vulnerabilities among SC, ST, and OBC workers require more than just administrative registration to resolve.
Q6(b) · UPSC Mains 2025 · Sociology GS 2 · 20 marks · Solution
Discuss the trend of urbanization in India. Do you think that Industrialization is the only precondition of urbanization? Give you arguments
Industrialization and Urbanisation in India
India’s urbanisation is rising but remains metro-concentrated and full of census towns and slums. Kundu’s exclusionary urbanisation captures labour demand without inclusive housing. Tertiary growth, administrative history, transport and agrarian distress urbanise besides factories. Industrial belts exist and matter; they do not exhaust the trend. Policy that waits only for industry misses actually existing urban India.
Q5(e) · UPSC Mains 2025 · Sociology GS 2 · 10 marks · Solution
Do you think that law has been able to abolish child labour in India? Comment.
Industrialization and Urbanisation in India
The 1986 Act as amended in 2016 bans most child work under 14 but allows family-enterprise help. RTE adds a schooling right that is unevenly realised. Child labour persists in agriculture, kilns, domestic and home-based informal work. Poverty, caste occupations and weak inspection explain the gap between statute and practice. Law delegitimised the practice more than it abolished it.