Transforming Attitude to Slum Rehab - Need for a Paradigm Shift

Apart from food and clothes, housing is the basic necessity of humans, which not only protects them from the surrounding adverse conditions but also gives a sense of well-being and courage to develop further. The issues of providing housing for slum dwellers is not a challenge in the Indian context but throughout the world. Moreover, recent developments on the industrial and economic fronts have augmented the rates of migration. Besides, this migration is unidirectional, wherein people move from rural to urban areas. In the last few decades, this movement has always seen an upward trend adding enormous pressure on the receiving community as well as the governing bodies in the urban areas. Often, it has been witnessed that the people, especially belonging to the weaker sections end up in slums. However, the regular addition of people in the slums makes their life miserable. Since these people are part of society so they must be required to rehabilitate. Slum plays an important role in the metropolitan cities, they provide essential services to the urban system and much needed a labour force to fuel urban dynamism and they improve their chances of survival by whatever meagre income they receive in return. Needless to say that slums and the rest of the city has a symbiotic relationship. Recognizing this fact, slums are viewed as housing in improvement. It is indeed the issues of control, professional methods, attitudes and responsibilities that are most precisely debated among housing theorists and practitioners particularly in the case of complex social economic and political networks of informal settlement. Having known that there is a fundamental change of attitude that is an acceptance of the informal settlement as an inevitable feature of the process of city-building. So as a result slum rehabilitation become an important part of urban development. In metropolitan cities, there is a need to change the attitude of slum rehabilitation in the context of land scarcity