Life between the city and the village: Scaling analysis of service access in Indian urban slums

The emergence of India as an urbanized nation is one of the most significant socioeconomic and political processes of the 21st century. An essential feature of India’s urbanization has been the growth and persistence of slums in its fast-developing cities. Whether living conditions in Indian slums constitute a path to human development or a poverty trap to much of their population is therefore an issue of vital importance. Here, we analyse data from the Census of India using the framework of urban scaling to systematically characterize the relative properties of Indian urban slums, focusing on attributes of neighborhoods such as access to basic services like water, sanitation, and electricity. We find that slums in larger cities attract more migrants and offer, on average, higher levels of service access than those in smaller cities. We posit that these outcomes are a consequence of both agglomeration effects in larger cities and sub-linear scaling of infrastructure as predicted by urban scaling theory. We also find consistent under-performance in service access in slums, in comparison with non-slum neighborhoods in the same cities. However, urban slums, on average, offer greater access to services than rural areas. This situation, which we quantify systematically, may help explain why larger Indian cities have remained attractive to rural populations in terms of living standards, beyond the need for an economic income premium. Finally, based on the analysis of scaling residuals, we construct a nationwide urban geography of slums, essentially finding that public service delivery in the slums of northern, central, and eastern Indian cities is, on average, poorer than slums in cities of southern and western India. Overall, these findings suggest that urban policy needs to confront two distinct kinds of urban inequity – across neighbourhoods within cities, and across city scales and levels of development.