India Newspaper Articles-- The Telegraph, Calcutta, India

I decided that for this week I would read some newspaper articles from Calcutta, India. I just got excited about finally having it nailed down where I was going, so I thought because of that I would read something specific about the city of Calcutta and what is going on there currently that is related to the topic of this independent study project. I learned some really interesting things that supplemented what I have already read elsewhere.
From the article, “Slum dwellers’ rally on cards” from April 15 in “The Telegraph”, I learned about demands that the slum people are making in regards to their conditions. One thing that they are demanding is land “pattas”. I did some digging and I am not sure what a “patta” is, but after looking around I get the idea that maybe it is a grant of land that is used for agriculture. I know at least it is some sort of land grant, but may not necessarily be used for agriculture. It is interesting to me that these people are asking for grants of land especially in the city, because it seems like there would not be very much land to be had unless they moved. And, would they want to do that? This article also talked about slum people in general and their demographics. Evidently, there are about 220 slums in Calcutta most of which have been “built” over the past 70 years. This makes me wonder if the slums they are counting are concentrated mostly in a certain area of the city, or if they are spread all over. Finally, when talking about homeless people (do slum people consider themselves homeless?) in the United States, we often assume that they are unemployed. However, this article makes a point to say that these slum people usually do have jobs such as telephone or construction workers, vendors, rickshaw operators, or daily labor. This difference between American and Indian urban poor was very distinct and interesting to me.
It is also interesting to me that several of the articles referenced an effort to make a database of all the slum dwellers in the city. This seems like quite the endeavor to me. With all those not only homeless people, but slum dwellers as well, it seems that it would take a lot of centralized government power to organize and educate such a task. It also makes me realize that maybe these people are seen in a different light than in America cataloguing them shows concern for their wellbeing. However, one could also take this effort as dehumanizing the slum dwellers by making them a number instead of a person on level with any other citizen of Calcutta. Judging from my other readings, however, it seems that the homeless are not seen with such a stigma as in the United States, so I would tend to think that maybe this effort at a database is showing more concern for the people and wanting to help them than anything else.
Finally, another article spoke of how a slum area was defined. It says that slums “consist of clusters of hutmet comprising several rooms constructed with building materials where each room is inhabited by a family sharing a common latrine without arrangement for water supply, drains, disposal of solid waste and garbage within slum boundaries.” This is something that I had been curious about since beginning this study—how do you define poverty, or a slum? If course, this is not the only way to define it, but it is a clear-cut definition and that is something that I was not able to find previously.