Indian cities have evolved over several centuries without the necessary impetus of industrial growth. After India achieved political independence there has been a distinct policy imperative to encourage the development of industrial infrastructure, but this has not resulted till now in the transformation of urban systems. As cities have grown in size there has been a direct correlation between increasing population and degradation of environmental conditions. The brunt of this environmental decay has to be borne by the poor rural migrants whose ambitions of economic betterment in the city are denied by the realities of sub-human living conditions and lack of access to urban infrastructure.

The trends outlined above have resulted in a situation where 30 50 percent of our urban population now lives in slums and unauthorized settlements. The resultant load on city services makes for unmanageable living conditions for almost the entire urban population. In response to this situation there has been an increasing effort by government to eradicate slums and generally upgrade urban infrastructure. This has led to programmes for removal, resettlement, and rehabilitation of slum dwellers, mainly in the last 2 decades. The lessons learnt from these experiences have neither been systematically documented nor collated through scientific means. Isolated packages of data and policy prescriptions regarding the urban poor and their habitat have been accumulating and gathering dust on the shelves in offices of national and international development agencies as well as the growing number of voluntary agencies now working with the urban poor.

It is therefore proposed that a nodal agency be formed for making a holistic scientific study of the habitat of the urban poor, with a clear mandate of providing sustainable solutions which can inform the policy and processes of urban development in the country. Such an agency would necessarily employ the tools of information technology to configure a comprehensive picture of the problem, document the results of the significant attempts to finding solutions, network with the man agencies working on sectoral issues like social welfare including health and education, technological inputs relating to physical infrastructure including traffic and transportation as well as construction materials and practices, and cultural patterns which are indigenous and sustainable in an ancient society like ours. It would be necessary for the information processing activities to be supplemented by necessary for the information processing activities to be supplemented by prototypical exercise on-the-ground which would test and demonstrate workable ideas in practice.

An initiative has currently been taken by the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) to undertake one such demonstration project in New Delhi.