Understanding Informal Settlements: Types and Characteristics

Walk through any major Indian city and you’ll notice two parallel worlds existing side by side. Gleaming high-rises and planned colonies coexist with dense clusters of self-built homes, narrow lanes, and improvised housing that doesn’t appear on any official master plan. These unplanned, organically grown neighbourhoods are called informal settlements, and they house a staggering share of the urban population. According to Census 2011, roughly 65 million people, or about 17.4% of urban households, live in slum conditions across the country, and this figure captures only one type of informality. Understanding what informal settlements are, how they form, and the many shapes they take is essential to grasping the reality of contemporary urban life.

What are informal settlements? 🔗

Informal settlements are residential areas that develop outside the framework of formal planning, land regulation, and building codes. The UN-Habitat defines them through three key features: inhabitants lack secure tenure over the land or dwelling they live in, neighbourhoods usually lack basic services and city infrastructure, and the housing may not comply with current planning or building regulations.

In the Indian context, scholars describe informal settlements as unplanned settlements set up illegally on public or private land in a haphazard manner without following norms or planning regulations. They emerge from a mismatch between rapid urban growth and the formal city’s ability to supply affordable, well-located housing. When low-income migrants and workers cannot access the planned city, they create their own.

Common characteristics 🔗

Despite huge variations, most informal settlements share a recognisable set of features. Housing is usually self-built and incremental, often starting with tin, tarpaulin, or salvaged materials and slowly upgrading to brick over years. Densities are extremely high, plot sizes are tiny, and lanes are narrow and irregular. Access to piped water, sewerage, solid waste collection, and legal electricity connections is partial or absent. Most importantly, residents do not hold formal land titles, which makes them vulnerable to eviction and shapes almost every aspect of their daily life.

At the same time, these neighbourhoods are economically vibrant. They host vast informal economies: tailoring units, recycling yards, food vendors, repair shops, and home-based manufacturing. A large share of residents work in the informal sector, providing the labour that keeps the formal city running.

Why informal settlements form 🔗

Informal settlements are not random accidents. They are produced by structural forces. Rural-urban migration is a major driver: people move to cities in search of work but find that formal housing is unaffordable. The planning system itself contributes by zoning insufficient land for low-income housing, setting minimum plot sizes and building standards that price the poor out, and treating informality as a problem to be cleared rather than a form of housing supply to be improved.

The result is what scholars have called “planned illegalities”, where the city’s own planning failures create the conditions in which informal settlements must emerge. In Delhi, for instance, fewer than a quarter of residents live in formally planned colonies; the rest live in settlements that evolved outside the master planning process.

Typology of informal settlements in India 🔗

Indian cities, especially Delhi, have produced one of the most detailed typologies of informal settlements anywhere. The Government of NCT of Delhi recognises eight different categories of settlements, of which only “planned colonies” are fully formal. The categories overlap across most large Indian cities, and each has distinct legal, physical, and social features.

Slums (notified, recognised, and identified) 🔗

“Slum” is an umbrella legal term. Under the Slum Areas (Improvement and Clearance) Act, 1956, state governments can formally notify an area as a slum based on conditions of dilapidation, overcrowding, and lack of sanitation. Notified slums have legal status and are eligible for a range of services and resettlement schemes. Census 2011 also captures “recognised” slums (declared by local bodies) and “identified” slums (clusters of at least 60-70 households in poor conditions that are not formally notified). The walled-city areas of Old Delhi, parts of central Mumbai, and old industrial zones contain many such legally notified slum pockets.

Jhuggi-Jhompri (JJ) clusters 🔗

Jhuggi-Jhompri clusters, popularly called JJCs, are perhaps the most visible form of informality. They are clusters of temporary or semi-permanent shelters, often built from tin, plastic sheets, salvaged wood, and tarpaulin. JJCs typically come up on public land owned by agencies such as the Delhi Development Authority, the Railways, or the CPWD, including roadsides, drains, railway margins, and pavements adjacent to construction sites or industrial areas.

Residents are usually recent migrants, daily-wage workers, and informal-sector employees. Tenure is the most tenuous of any category; JJCs are officially treated as encroachments and can be cleared at short notice. In Delhi, the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) maintains a list of recognised JJ clusters and implements policies for their rehabilitation, including the 2015 slum policy under which clusters that existed before January 2006 are protected from demolition without rehabilitation.

Resettlement colonies 🔗

Resettlement colonies are settlements created by the state to rehouse families evicted from JJ clusters and other slums. They are planned in the sense that the government lays out plots, often on a grid, and provides basic infrastructure. But they are typically located on the urban periphery, far from the workplaces and social networks of the relocated families.

Delhi’s largest resettlement effort came during the Emergency (1975-77), and the practice continues today through colonies such as Savda Ghevra and Madanpur Khadar. Madanpur Khadar was developed after a 2000 Supreme Court ruling and resettled thousands of families on small leasehold plots of 12.5 to 22 square metres. Residents build their own houses incrementally, and the colonies often re-develop slum-like conditions because infrastructure provision lags behind population growth and households remain economically vulnerable.

Unauthorised colonies 🔗

Unauthorised colonies (UACs) are residential areas built without planning permission, typically on land that is privately owned or zoned for non-residential uses such as agriculture. Unlike JJCs, residents have usually purchased their plots from a third party, often through a property dealer or a cooperative, and they hold informal documents like General Power of Attorney papers rather than formal titles.

This makes UACs an intermediate category: residents enjoy slightly more secure land tenure than those in JJ Clusters but are still not considered part of the planned city. Delhi has over 1,700 such colonies, home to a substantial share of the population. Successive governments have launched waves of “regularisation,” converting some of them into regularised unauthorised colonies with improved services and clearer legal status, though the process is slow and politically charged.

Pavement dwellers 🔗

Pavement dwellers represent the most extreme end of housing informality. These are families and individuals who live directly on footpaths, under flyovers, near railway stations, or in temporary shelters on roadsides. They have no enclosed dwelling and almost no privacy.

Because they are not part of any cluster, pavement dwellers are largely missed by official slum definitions and are therefore not counted by standard surveys. Mumbai has historically had a large pavement-dwelling population, much of it documented through the work of organisations such as SPARC (Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres). For pavement dwellers, even the limited protections available to slum residents – water connections, ration cards, eviction safeguards – are usually out of reach.

Urban villages 🔗

Urban villages are an unusual but important category. They are former rural villages that have been engulfed by the expanding city. In Delhi, the village habitation areas, called lal dora lands, were demarcated during British rule in 1908 and historically exempted from urban building byelaws to allow villagers to construct homes and run small businesses without municipal approvals.

When agricultural land around the village is acquired for planned urban development, the original abadi area becomes an “urban village.” Delhi alone has 362 lal dora villages, of which 135 have been classified as urban villages. Places such as Munirka, Mehrauli, Hauz Khas, Khirki, and Shahpur Jat began life as agricultural villages and are now dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods housing migrant workers, students, and small-scale enterprises. They are technically legal, but their narrow lanes, overhanging electrical wires, irregular construction, and weak service provision make them functionally similar to other informal settlements.

Squatter settlements and chawls 🔗

Other regional forms include the Mumbai chawl, a multi-storey tenement originally built for industrial workers, now often dilapidated and overcrowded; the bustee of Kolkata, with its distinctive thika-tenancy system; and the gunthewadis of Maharashtra and Akrama-Sakrama settlements of Karnataka, which correspond broadly to unauthorised developments. The terminology shifts, but the underlying logic is the same: housing produced by people who cannot access the formal market, on terms they negotiate with the city.

Why this typology matters 🔗

The differences between these categories are not just academic. They determine who gets access to water, electricity, ration cards, and political representation, and who is protected from eviction. A family in a notified slum can claim certain entitlements that a pavement dweller cannot. A resident of a regularised unauthorised colony has stronger tenure than one in a JJ cluster on railway land. The typology becomes a map of differentiated citizenship.

Implications for urban planning 🔗

For urban planners and policymakers, the typology forces a recognition that the “formal” city is actually the minority experience in most Indian metros. Approaches that treat informal settlements as temporary aberrations to be cleared have repeatedly failed. Scholars increasingly argue that informality is not a failure of planning but a generalised mode of urbanisation, in which the state itself uses tolerance, eviction, and selective regularisation as tools of urban governance.

Effective planning therefore has to move beyond the binary of legal versus illegal. It needs to provide adequate serviced land for low-income housing, recognise the value of mixed-use, high-density neighbourhoods, secure tenure for long-standing residents, and invest in in-situ upgrading of basic services. Schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Urban attempt to address some of these needs, but their reach and design are still limited compared with the scale of informality.

The lived reality behind the categories 🔗

Behind every category in this typology are people building lives, raising children, running businesses, and contributing to the urban economy. The construction worker in a JJ cluster, the tailor in an urban village, the recycler in a notified slum, the food vendor in an unauthorised colony – together, they form the backbone of the service and informal economy of every Indian city. Recognising this is the first step in moving from policies that treat informal settlements as eyesores to ones that treat them as a legitimate, if incomplete, form of urban housing.

What do you think? Should Indian cities continue to expand resettlement colonies on the periphery, or should planners focus on in-situ upgrading of existing informal settlements where people already live and work? And how would you redesign the master planning process so that the housing needs of low-income workers are built into the formal city from the start, rather than left to emerge as informality?

References

1. https://www.census2011.co.in/slums.php
2. https://unhabitat.org/sites/default/files/documents/2019-05/indicator_11.1.1_training_module_adequate_housing_and_slum_upgrading.pdf
3. https://planningtank.com/thesis-dissertation/informal-formal-settlements-indian-context
4. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/urbanisation/informal-and-unplanned-urbanisation-welcome-to-the-new-urban-india-95919
5. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/socp07/chapter/informal-settlements/
6. https://www.patrickheller.com/uploads/1/5/3/7/15377686/cities_of_delhi-overview.pdf
7. https://mycoordinates.org/jahan-jhuggi-wahan-makaan-in-situ-slum-rehabilitation/
8. https://planningtank.com/urbanisation/what-unauthorised-colonies-delhi-development-authority-dda
9. https://delhishelterboard.in/main/
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JJ_Colony_Madanpur_Khadar
11. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4746497/
12. https://citizenmatters.in/lives-in-lal-dora-lands-delhi-urban-villages/
13. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264275122000300
14. https://pmaymis.gov.in/