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Urban Poverty Essay, Research Paper

Poverty is defined as the deprivation with reference to socially accepted norms. Historically poverty has been a rural phenomenon. In the past cities for the most part housed society?s elite whereas the poor were secluded to the rural areas. The industrial revolution saw a shift in this trend. People began to migrate to the great cities of the world in large numbers. Poverty that was once considered a rural phenomenon increasingly became an urban reality. Recent estimates reveal that by 2015, the poorest cities will house three-quarters of the world population.

The poorest cities of the world lie in the developing world, in third world countries. African and Asian cities will continue to grow in population faster than the rest of the world, and as a result house more of the worlds poor. These cities lack sufficient housing, piped water, sewage, public transportation, schools, police protection, health care facilities, and other necessary amenities of urban life.

Poverty though, is by no means exclusively a problem facing the third world. Inner cities in several of the worlds developed nations such as the United States of America and Great Britain, face poverty and poverty related problems. It is worth noting though that people living in these conditions handle poverty in a markedly different manner. In this paper I will attempt to compare the poverty faced by people living in third world cities with the poverty faced by people in cities of the developed world. More specifically I will compare poverty faced by people living in the Indian city of Bombay with that of people living in the poor parts of New York City. The reason I have picked these two cities in particular is because of their similarities in size and population. Before I start to compare the two cities, it is very important to get a hand on how these cities came about form a historical and social perspective, for that in a sense defines the outlook of the people living in the two cities.

Bombay is located on the Western coast of India. The city is now officially known as Mumbai. It originally consisted of seven islands, namely Colaba, Mazagon, Old Woman?s Island, Wadala, Mahim, Parel and Matunga-Sion. This group of islands, which have since been joined together by a series of reclamations, formed part of the Kingdom of Ashoka, a famous Indian Emperor. The islands were passed into the hands of various Hindu rulers until 1343. In that year, the Mohammedans of Gujerat took possession and the Kings of that province ruled for the next two centuries. In 1534 the Portuguese, who already possessed many important trading centers on the Western coast of India took Bombay by force of Arms from the Mohammedans. In 1662 the islands were given to the English King Charles II in dowry on his marriage to Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza. In the year 1668 the English East India Company on lease from the crown acquired the islands for an annual sum of ten pounds in goal. Subsequently in 1687 the English East India Company moved its headquarters to Bombay, making it the trading capital of India. In 1858 after the unsuccessful First War of Independence, the East India Company was accused of mismanagement and the islands reverted to the British Crown. The Bombay Stock Exchange was established in 1875, and is one of the oldest in Asia preceding even the Tokyo stock exchange. On August 15?th 1947, India gained independence from British rule and today Bombay is considered the financial and business capital of India.

Behind the hype of being considered India?s most dynamic and westernized city, lies the reality that the city is in a constant crunch for space and is overburdened by poverty. In less than five hundred years the city has metamorphosed from a fishing settlement into a sprawling megapolis of fifteen million people. The roots of the population problem lie, paradoxically, in the city?s enduring ability to create wealth. Bombay by itself generates 35 percent of India?s Gross National Product (GNP), its port handles half the country?s foreign trade, and its movie industry is the biggest in the world. Symbols of prosperity are everywhere: from the phalanx of office blocks clustered on Nariman point (India?s Manhattan) to the yuppie couples nipping around town in their shiny new cars. The flip side of the success story is the city?s much chronicled poverty.

Each day, hundreds of economic refugees pour into Bombay from all around the country. Some find jobs and secure accommodation; many more (around a third of the total population) end up living on the already overcrowded streets, or in the midst of the appalling squalor of Asia?s largest slums. Their day-to-day economic survival is reduced to rag picking and begging from cars at traffic lights.

The reason behind this mass exodus of people from the rural areas is the fact that there are few ways of earning livelihood open to village workers who do not possess any land. They can find jobs in farms, but real wages (money wages adjusted for inflation) have been declining. The average real wages for unskilled agricultural labor declined by 6.2 per cent in 1991-92 for the country as a whole. Since then accepting for the year 1994-95, real wages have been increasing slowly, that is by less than 5 per cent. As a result there is a natural temptation to make more money in the cities in order to survive the onslaught of inflation. As a result Bombay has been the city hardest hit by migrant workers who survive in shanty living conditions and put a tremendous burden on the already overburdened urban infrastructure.

Located on the Eastern Atlantic coast of the United States, New York City is the largest American city and the third largest city in the world. It is considered the financial capital of the United States and in a sense the financial capital of the world. New York City is made of

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