Survey-based socio-economic data from slums in Bangalore, India

Abstract

In 2010, an estimated 860 million people were living in slums worldwide, with around 60 million added to the slum population between 2000 and 2010. In 2011, 200 million people in urban Indian households were considered to live in slums. In order to address and create slum development programmes and poverty alleviation methods, it is necessary to understand the needs of these communities. Therefore, we require data with high granularity in the Indian context. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of highly granular data at the level of individual slums. We collected the data presented in this paper in partnership with the slum dwellers in order to overcome the challenges such as validity and efficacy of self reported data. Our survey of Bangalore covered 36 slums across the city. The slums were chosen based on stratification criteria, which included geographical location of the slum, whether the slum was resettled or rehabilitated, notification status of the slum, the size of the slum and the religious profile. This paper describes the relational model of the slum dataset, the variables in the dataset, the variables constructed for analysis and the issues identified with the dataset. The data collected includes around 267,894 data points spread over 242 questions for 1,107 households. The dataset can facilitate interdisciplinary research on spatial and temporal dynamics of urban poverty and well-being in the context of rapid urbanization of cities in developing countries.