Braving crime and health hazards, women are the most affected in urban resettlement sites
After getting relocated from neighbourhoods where they have lived their entire lives, women in resettlement colonies struggle to start from scratch, battling high crime rates, lack of sanitation, and poor employment opportunities.
In Chennai’s Perumbakkam slum resettlement, women chat over tea about how their marriages amount to anything but protection.
“We are all married, but alone when it comes down to protecting ourselves and our families. There’s little our husbands can do here to keep us safe here,” M Priya, a young mother of two boys—a toddler and a 12-year-old, tells HerStory.
The resettlement colony houses close to 1 lakh people, or 20,000 families, who take up 190 blocks constructed by the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB) to relocate them from over 60 slums.
With school interrupted, crumbling family systems and poverty, teenage and adolescent boys have little to hold on to except the anger and confusion of displacement. This had led almost every young man between the ages of 16 and 30 in these colonies to take to crime: catcalling, petty thefts, drug wars, mugging, and at times, even murder.
Urban slum dwellers often spend their entire lives in and around the place where they were born, cultivating friendships and finding community in their friends and neighbours. When they are suddenly relocated, their lives are upended and their jobs—usually passed on in the family—are disrupted.
“Strangers from slums across the city suddenly find their homes stacked over each other. Our youth get disillusioned in a setting like this where we must build our lives from scratch, and in order to survive, we must first look out for ourselves,” says M Sandhya, who has been living in TNSCB’s Semmancheri resettlement colony for the last seven years.
Within these crumbling systems, women are hit the hardest.
A 2018 study conducted by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities explores how women’s household practices radically changed after rehabilitation in Mumbai’s slums. Cleaning, entertainment and childrearing practices moved from outdoors to indoors due to the lack of accessible outdoor spaces. This means higher energy intensity, reduced social interaction, and loss of women’s social capital.
Several houses struggle with seepage of sewage due to poor piping, crumbling bathrooms with no windows, and open dumping and defecation sites.
The study also revealed that high maintenance and energy costs in slum rehabilitation housings due to poor designs leave households struggling with basic needs. Women often try to absorb the extra costs by compromising on comfort, education, and training, and are forced to look for employment, often in the informal economy and on top of their caring responsibilities. Such situations put these women in a poverty trap, restraining them from entering the formal labour market.
Sandhya’s mother has been working as a house help all her life. Before relocating to Semmancheri from her slum in Kotturpuram, Chennai, she used to work for households that had known her for years and trusted her. This translated to job security, benefits, a minimum monthly salary of Rs 20,000, and ready help during crises. “My mother brought me up, educated me and got me married without having to borrow a single penny,” says Sandhya.
In their new neighbourhood, her mother puts in eight hours of work as a house help and doesn’t get paid more than Rs 10,000 a month. While there are scores of gated communities mushrooming on the IT belt of Old Mahabalipuram Road, resettlement colonies have earned a reputation for being breeding grounds for crime, which adversely impacts employment opportunities for its residents.
“We get paid poorly but are made to feel grateful that we have a job to begin with. So, there is no chance of a raise,” says T Kousalya, mother of two children who also lives in Semmancheri.
With alcohol and substance abuse high among boys and men, the women have to take the responsibility of generating income.
Law and order crisis
Extensive research points out that overcrowding and economic disparities in these colonies lead to a spurt in crimes.
In 2022, after studying five slums in Delhi, voluntary organisation Shakti Shalini revealed that 89% of the children in marginalised families with a known history of gender-based violence witnessed arguments between their parents or clashes in their one-room homes while growing up.
After studying Indian women slum dwellers’ experiences, a group of health and social work professors from Maharashtra concluded that the prevalence of violence against women in slums ranged from 15% to 59.3%. Top risk factors included husbands’ alcohol abuse, women justifying violence, low education rates of both women and men, dowry, age difference between the spouses, and termination of pregnancy.
Resettlement sites exacerbate this violence.
“Young men have literally terrorised the colonies,” says a project coordinator of Information and Resource Centre for Deprived Urban Communities (IRCDUC), a Chennai-based organisation. Also, a resident of one of the city’s resettlement colonies, she says the police almost always never pay heed to their complaints, and worst, stealthily expose the complainants to the men whom they report for money.
“They call both parties for a settlement and show our written complaints to them. And since we all live in the same colony, once these men know who we are, they avenge us by damaging our husbands’ autorickshaws, harassing our children or us, and stealing our property. One of the reasons we don’t involve our husbands is because we fear for their safety. In many ways, we are on our own,” she says.
Suja Devi, Sub-Inspector at a local police station, however, says she has ensured every complaint has been taken seriously and close to 100 awareness sessions have been conducted in the community against child abuse, substance use and women’s safety. “There is no question of settlement. We find that most children are abused by others their age or older than them. This is where our sensitisation of the community comes in,” she says.
Health and safety hazards
Several houses struggle with leaking sewage due to poor piping, crumbling bathrooms with no windows, and open dumping and defecation sites that lead to health concerns.
Some bathrooms at the Perumbakkam resettlement site have no windows, leaving women and children at risk all day.
In some colonies, the primary health centres (PHCs) have doctors only till 4 pm, and temporary staff nurses often have to clock in 24 hours at a stretch to attend to cases of violence and attempted suicides. Also, women have to travel a few kilometres to a government hospital for deliveries as PHCs are often underequipped.
Community leaders of IRCDUC conducted a safety mapping of the resettlement colony at Perumbakkam to capture the perception of the women in the settlements. They identified that several lanes had no streetlights, and turned into dark spots where drugs and alcohol were freely peddled and consumed, and verbal abuse, stalking and threats were common. Women and children are dependent on the men to venture out at noon and late evenings.
"There are no outposts in areas where women and children constantly face abusive situations,” says social activist and policy researcher Vanessa Peter, who is also the Founder of IRCDUC. “After we submitted our first report on the Perumbakkam settlement in January 2023, the police outpost became functional, police patrolling was increased, and streetlights were installed and repaired in some locations.”
“We plan to set up a Centre for Women and Children in Perumbakkam to enhance safety inside the settlement. Safety audits will be conducted periodically to monitor the situation and a support group will be formed for aggrieved women and children to access justice,” she says.
Edited by Kanishk Singh