Slum Upgradation: Key Strategies for Sustainable Urban Development

Indian cities run on the labour of people who often have nowhere formal to live. Conservative estimates place the number of people living in slums at around 65 million, and the World Bank has suggested that close to half the urban population occupies designated or informal settlements. The instinctive response of city authorities for decades was to clear these settlements and push residents to the outskirts. Slum upgradation flips that logic. Instead of demolition and displacement, it asks a simpler question: what if we improved the neighbourhood that already exists and brought it into the formal city? This post explains what slum upgradation means, why it matters for cities, and what separates the projects that transform neighbourhoods from those that stall on a file.

What slum upgradation actually means 🔗

Slum upgradation is the process of improving the physical, social, and legal conditions of an informal settlement without uprooting the people who live there. The defining feature is that it works in situ, meaning on the existing site, rather than relocating residents to distant housing complexes.

In practice, upgradation involves laying down the basic municipal infrastructure that most urban residents take for granted. According to research on Indian slums, this covers potable water, sanitation and toilets, waste collection, access roads, paved footpaths, storm drainage, electricity, and street lighting, alongside efforts to regularise land tenure and improve access to health, education, and transport. The work is incremental. Rather than one dramatic intervention, it is a series of investments that gradually turn a settlement into a functioning neighbourhood.

How it differs from redevelopment 🔗

Upgradation and redevelopment are often confused, but they rest on different assumptions. Redevelopment usually means demolishing existing structures and rebuilding, frequently as high-rise housing, which can displace communities during construction. Upgradation, by contrast, preserves social networks and respects the investments residents have already made in their own homes. This matters because slum dwellers are not passive occupants. Over years, they pour savings into building rooms, running small businesses, and establishing roots. An approach that recognises this minimises disruption and builds on existing community assets rather than erasing them.

Why upgradation matters for cities 🔗

The benefits of upgradation extend far beyond the settlement itself. When a slum is integrated into the city’s service network, the effects ripple through the entire urban ecosystem. The case for upgradation rests on several interlocking gains.

Better sanitation and public health 🔗

Open drains, shared or absent toilets, and irregular waste collection make slums breeding grounds for disease. Studies of upgradation in India have documented measurable improvement in water supply, latrine facilities, sewerage, drainage, and garbage disposal after intervention. Clean water and functioning sanitation reduce the burden of waterborne illness, which in turn lowers healthcare costs and lost workdays for some of the city’s poorest households. One of the most cited Indian examples is the community sanitation work in Mumbai, where an alliance of grassroots organisations designed, built, and managed toilet blocks that raised service quality and dignity, particularly for women and children.

Economic development 🔗

Improved living conditions free up time and energy that residents otherwise spend on daily survival. When basic needs are met, people can focus on income-generating activities rather than fetching water or managing the consequences of poor sanitation. Secure tenure plays a quiet but powerful role here. Once a household holds a recognised title, banks will accept the property as collateral, which opens the door to formal credit. Home-based enterprises such as tailoring units and small food businesses tend to expand once owners can plan beyond the next eviction notice. Dharavi in Mumbai illustrates the scale at stake: its pottery, leather, and recycling trades feed a thriving informal economy that contributes meaningfully to the city.

Reduced crime and stronger ties to the state 🔗

Dark lanes, absent policing, and disputed land create conditions in which petty crime and exploitation flourish. The change that comes with upgradation is partly physical and partly relational. When streets are lit, addresses become formal, and residents are recognised as citizens with documents, the relationship between the community and the state shifts. A formal address allows people to receive mail, register for services, and be counted. Crime reduction, improved well-being, and social inclusivity are consistently listed among the socio-economic reasons slum improvement is treated as a development priority.

The policy framework 🔗

Slum improvement is constitutionally a responsibility of urban local bodies, listed in the Twelfth Schedule of the Constitution. In practice, however, much of the policy direction has come from the central government through national missions.

From Rajiv Awas Yojana to PMAY-U 🔗

Launched in 2011, the Rajiv Awas Yojana aimed at creating “slum-free cities” through in-situ redevelopment, legal recognition of tenure, and affordable housing. Although it faced implementation challenges, it marked an important shift by recognising slum dwellers’ rights to the city rather than treating them as encroachers. This evolved into the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Urban (PMAY-U), launched by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs in June 2015 under the “Housing for All” mission. One vertical of PMAY-U was In-Situ Slum Redevelopment (ISSR), which used the land beneath a slum as a resource, drawing in private developers to build formal housing while bringing residents into the formal urban settlement. Notably, PMAY-U made a mandatory provision for the female head of the family to be the owner or co-owner of the house.

The ISSR experience also exposed the limits of the model. Of around 118 lakh houses sanctioned under PMAY-U, states proposed only about 2.95 lakh under the ISSR component, partly because of financial viability concerns and difficulty in getting land vacated. In response, PMAY-U 2.0 dropped the mandatory in-situ redevelopment requirement and gave states more flexible options, including letting eligible families build on land granted by the state. This reflects a broader lesson that no single model fits every settlement.

What makes upgradation succeed 🔗

Programmes look impressive on paper but frequently stumble in implementation. International evidence and India’s own experience point to a handful of factors that distinguish a transformed neighbourhood from a stalled project.

Community participation 🔗

This is the factor experts return to most often. As one assessment of global efforts put it, the participation of slum dwellers is the key to a successful upgrading programme. Participation cannot be token consultation. Residents need to be informed partners whose lives are directly shaped by the decisions made. The Dharavi Redevelopment Plan is a cautionary tale here. It initially had broad support, with roughly 70% of residents agreeing to the proposal, but it was repeatedly delayed because authorities did not consult families on unit sizes, eligibility cut-offs, or the fate of the home-based industries that power Dharavi’s economy. By contrast, the slum upgrading project in Ahmedabad succeeded partly because it brought together local government, the private sector, NGOs, and residents from the start.

Secure tenure 🔗

Without protection from eviction, residents have little incentive to invest in their homes. A comparative study of South East Asian cities found that some form of secure tenure was essential, alongside sustainable economic activity and strong governance. Tenure does not always require formal titling, which can be slow and unaffordable. Odisha’s JAGA Mission is widely cited as one of India’s most scalable approaches: it issued land-rights certificates across roughly 2,900 settlements, coupled with infrastructure upgrading and social development. Where tenure is secured, self-investment and access to finance tend to follow.

Political will and sustained financing 🔗

Upgradation cannot be a one-term project. New informal settlements form even as older ones improve, so the work demands continuity across electoral cycles. International programmes such as Thailand’s Baan Mankong and Brazil’s Favela-Bairro succeeded because they were large, state-sponsored initiatives that recognised the urban poor as rights-bearing citizens, which helped them avoid scattered one-off projects with limited lasting impact. The Cities Alliance has similarly emphasised dedicated financial mechanisms, such as urban poor development funds, to ensure replication and sustainability across a city rather than in isolated pockets.

Strong local institutions and governance 🔗

Even with funding and willing communities, weak institutions can derail a project. The South East Asian study highlighted the critical importance of governance and institutions, and noted that the post-upgrading phase, when maintenance and management matter most, is often the least successful. Indian best-practice reviews echo this, pointing to the need for credible surveys, clear eligibility cut-offs, and proper governance for operation and maintenance after handover, so that redeveloped settlements do not degrade into “vertical slums”.

A realistic goal 🔗

Slum upgradation is not a finished agenda, and treating it as one sets cities up for disappointment. With urban migration continuing, the realistic goal is not to eliminate slums in a single decade but to ensure that every settlement is on a continuous improvement path, with documented residents, working infrastructure, and a genuine stake in the formal city. That requires a fundamental shift in how authorities see informal settlements: not as problems to be cleared, but as neighbourhoods of urban citizens whose labour the city depends on.

What do you think? If you had to choose between in-situ upgradation of a settlement near your college and relocating residents to a new housing complex on the city’s outskirts, which would you back, and what conditions would you insist on to protect residents? And how much weight should community consent carry when private developers and city planners disagree with residents over a project’s design?

References

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8. https://pmay-urban.gov.in/about
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10. https://pmay-urban.gov.in/faq
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14. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197397512000987
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