What is Slum Upgradation? Importance and Strategies in Indian Cities

India’s cities are growing faster than the infrastructure meant to support them. The result is visible in every metro and Tier-2 city: dense, self-built neighbourhoods that house workers, traders, and migrants but lack proper drainage, secure roofs, or legal land documents. According to data from the 2011 Census, roughly 35% of the urban population lives in slum-like conditions. Demolishing these settlements is neither humane nor practical. Slum upgradation offers a different path, one that works with residents rather than against them.

What is slum upgradation? 🔗

Slum upgradation is the process of improving the physical, social, and legal conditions of informal settlements without uprooting the people who live there. Instead of bulldozers and relocation, it relies on incremental investment in basic services, secure tenure, and integration with the surrounding city. The UN-Habitat and most policy literature describe upgradation as a package of improvements: potable water, sanitation, drainage, paved access roads, street lighting, electricity, waste collection, and regularisation of land rights, along with better access to schools, health services, and child care.

The key word here is in-situ, which means “in the original place”. Residents are not shifted to peripheral resettlement colonies far from their workplaces. Their homes, shops, and social networks stay intact while the neighbourhood is rebuilt around them. This is the central principle behind India’s In-situ Slum Redevelopment (ISSR) vertical under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Urban.

How it differs from clearance and relocation 🔗

Earlier decades of Indian urban policy leaned heavily on slum clearance. The assumption was that informal settlements were eyesores to be removed. Families were often shifted to distant resettlement sites with no jobs, weak transport links, and incomplete services. Many residents returned to inner-city slums within months because their livelihoods depended on proximity to markets, construction sites, and middle-class neighbourhoods that employed them as domestic workers, drivers, and vendors. Research from the National Institute of Urban Affairs notes that Indian slum policy gradually shifted from removal in the early decades to service provision and upgradation as the limits of clearance became obvious.

The three pillars of upgradation 🔗

Most successful upgradation programmes rest on three legs. The first is physical infrastructure: piped water, household toilets, sewerage, storm drains, internal lanes, and street lights. The second is tenure security, which means giving residents a legal document, whether a freehold title, leasehold, or a notified slum certificate, that protects them from arbitrary eviction. The third is social and economic integration: linking households to schools, primary health centres, ration shops, financial services, and skill training so the neighbourhood functions as a normal part of the city.

Why slum upgradation matters 🔗

The case for upgradation is both moral and economic. Slums are not failed communities; they are the unrecognised housing stock that keeps Indian cities working. Improving them produces gains that ripple far beyond the settlements themselves.

Better health and quality of life 🔗

Overcrowding, contaminated water, and poor drainage are the dominant causes of disease in informal settlements. Diarrhoeal infections, tuberculosis, dengue, and respiratory illness all spread faster where toilets are shared by hundreds of people and waste collects in open drains. A study published in Housing Studies on Indian slum improvement found measurable gains in basic service access between 2002 and 2012, with improvements in water supply and electricity acting as triggers for further upgrades in sanitation and housing quality. Better infrastructure cuts hospital visits, reduces child mortality, and lets women and girls move safely after dark, particularly when public toilets and street lighting are added.

Economic inclusion and asset creation 🔗

Tenure security is what turns a shack into an asset. Once a family knows it cannot be evicted, it begins to invest. Walls go from tarpaulin to brick, roofs from tin to concrete, and a single room may grow into two storeys with a small shop on the ground floor. This is why Odisha’s JAGA Mission, which has issued land-rights certificates to households in around 2,900 settlements, is cited as one of the most scalable models in the country. Secure tenure also opens the door to formal credit, since banks accept titled property as collateral. Home-based enterprises, from tailoring units to small food businesses, expand when owners can plan beyond the next eviction notice.

Reduced crime and stronger civic life 🔗

Dark lanes, absent policing, and disputed land create the conditions for petty crime and exploitation. When streets are lit, addresses are formal, and residents are recognised as citizens with documents, the relationship with the state changes. People register to vote, send children to school regularly, and participate in ward committees. Upgradation does not eliminate crime on its own, but it removes many of the structural triggers and gives residents a stake in protecting their neighbourhood.

City-wide benefits 🔗

Upgradation is also good urban economics. Slum settlements supply the labour for construction, transport, retail, and domestic work that middle-class households depend on. Healthier, better-housed workers are more productive. Integrated sanitation reduces the disease burden across the entire city, since pathogens do not respect class boundaries. And formalising land use lets municipal bodies plan transport, schools, and utilities accurately rather than ignoring large parts of their own population.

India’s major upgradation programmes 🔗

India has experimented with slum policy for over five decades, from the Environmental Improvement of Urban Slums scheme in the early 1970s to the present generation of schemes under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.

Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Urban 🔗

Launched in 2015 with the goal of Housing for All, PMAY-U has four verticals, of which In-situ Slum Redevelopment directly targets upgradation. Under ISSR, slum land is used as a resource: a private developer rehouses eligible slum dwellers in pucca flats on a portion of the same plot and is allowed to develop and sell the remaining land commercially. A central grant of ₹1 lakh per house supports the rehabilitation component. In 2024, the government launched PMAY-U 2.0, a five-year extension aiming to support one crore additional urban households with affordable and slum-redevelopment housing.

State-level slum rehabilitation schemes 🔗

Maharashtra runs one of the oldest dedicated programmes through its Slum Rehabilitation Authority. The state’s slum notification policy protects long-term residents whose tenure in a settlement can be traced back to a cut-off date, giving them legal protection from eviction. The Dharavi Redevelopment Plan, which divides Mumbai’s largest slum into sectors for phased rebuilding, is the most prominent and most debated example of this model.

Key factors for successful upgradation 🔗

Programmes look good on paper but often stumble in implementation. The international evidence and India’s own experience point to three factors that make the difference between a transformed neighbourhood and a stalled file.

Political commitment that lasts 🔗

Upgradation cannot be a one-term project. It needs continuity across election cycles, sustained budget lines, and senior officials willing to push through land-use changes, building permissions, and inter-departmental coordination. The IMPRI policy review notes that while PMAY-U sanctioned over 1.20 crore houses by 2023, the ISSR vertical reached only around 13% of its intended beneficiaries, largely because slum redevelopment requires sustained political will to navigate land disputes, developer negotiations, and resident objections. Without that backing, the easier verticals get delivered while slums remain at the bottom of the priority list.

Genuine community participation 🔗

The single most consistent finding across upgradation literature is that residents must be co-designers, not recipients. The original Dharavi Redevelopment Plan initially had broad support, with around 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 what would happen to the home-based industries that make Dharavi a billion-rupee economy. Successful examples like the SPARC-NSDF-Mahila Milan alliance in Mumbai, which scaled community-designed public toilets across the city, show what happens when residents lead the planning. People know which lanes flood first, which corners need lighting, and how to organise maintenance once the contractor leaves.

Sustained financial support and good design 🔗

Upgradation is capital-intensive in the short term but cheap compared with the lifetime cost of disease, lost productivity, and repeated demolition. Funding must cover not just construction but also maintenance, since drainage clogs, transformers fail, and titles need updating. The track record of PMAY-U also shows that high sanction figures do not automatically translate into occupied homes. Around 1.22 crore houses were sanctioned since 2015, but completion has lagged behind, with significant numbers still under construction or delayed. Reliable disbursal, transparent monitoring, and design that respects how residents actually use their homes, including ground-floor workshops, courtyards, and ventilation, are what convert money into outcomes.

Avoiding the “vertical slum” trap 🔗

One recurring criticism of high-rise rehab buildings is that they recreate slum conditions vertically. Lifts break, common areas deteriorate, and maintenance fees overwhelm low-income families. Design that keeps unit sizes adequate, prioritises natural light and cross-ventilation, and sets up resident-run housing societies with realistic maintenance subsidies for the first few years is essential. Otherwise, the new buildings simply become tomorrow’s distressed neighbourhoods.

The road ahead 🔗

Slum upgradation is not a finished agenda. With urban migration continuing, new informal settlements form even as older ones are upgraded. The realistic goal is not to eliminate slums in a single decade but to make sure every settlement is on a continuous improvement path, with documented residents, working infrastructure, and a stake in the formal city. That requires treating slum dwellers as urban citizens with rights, not problems to be cleared, and accepting that informal housing is the spine on which Indian cities run.

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

References

1. https://www.impriindia.com/insights/pradhan-mantri-awas-yojana-urban-pmayu/
2. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-5608-1_33
3. https://pmay-urban.gov.in/issr
4. https://niua.in/sites/default/files/2025-07/2024_1_Perspectives_Slum%20Development.pdf
5. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673037.2017.1291915
6. https://www.amulyacharan.com/2025/08/23/slum-rehabilitation-in-india-best-practices-and-new-challenges/
7. https://pmay-urban.gov.in/about
8. https://www.drishtiias.com/important-government-schemes/ministry-of-housing-and-urban-affairs-mouha/pradhan-mantri-awas-yojana-urban-pmay-u-2
9. https://hunterurbanreview.commons.gc.cuny.edu/dharavi-redevelopment/
10. https://doingsociology.org/2025/07/04/gentrification-and-redevelopment-in-dharavi-balancing-urban-transformation-with-community-preservation-aashish-gaur-and-natasha-mittal/
11. https://www.ibef.org/blogs/pradhan-mantri-awas-yojana-a-game-changer-for-urban-and-rural-housing