India's 8.8 million households are in urban slums

New Delhi, Dec 24 (IANS) An estimated 8.8 million Indian households are in urban slums that are overcrowded and lack basic hygiene and sanitation facilities, government data showed Tuesday.

According to the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data, 38 percent of slum households of urban India are in Maharashtra.

The second highest number of slum households are in Andhra Pradesh that accounts for 18 percent of the total national figure.

A total of 33,510 slums were estimated to be present in the urban areas of India. About 41 percent of these were notified and 59 percent non-notified, NSSO said in a statement.

Maharashtra, with an estimated 7,723 slums, accounted for about 23 percent of all slums in urban India, followed by Andhra Pradesh, accounting for 13.5 percent, and West Bengal, which had a share of about 12 percent, according to official data collected between July to December 2012.

Slums are part of urban environment and they are identified by the presence of features of living conditions that are undesirable viz. overcrowding, lack of hygiene and sanitation, inadequacy of drinking water, and poor construction.

Any compact settlement of at least 20 households with a collection of poorly built tenements, mostly of temporary nature, crowded together, usually with inadequate sanitary and drinking water facilities in unhygienic conditions, was considered a slum for the survey, NSSO said.

Such a settlement, if not a notified slum, was called a non-notified slum.

Both notified slums i.e. areas notified as slums by the concerned municipalities, corporations, local bodies or development authorities and other slums were covered in the survey, it said.

"An estimated 8.8 million households lived in urban slums, about 5.6 million in notified and 3.2 million in non-notified slums," the NSSO said.

The notified slums formed 41 percent of all slums but housed 63 percent of all slum-dwelling households in India.

At the all-India level, the average slum size was estimated at 263 households. The average notified slum had 404 households and the average non-notified slum had only 165 households.

About 56 percent of slums are in the million-plus cities.