The urban nightmare Zaigham Khan   The world is entering a historic urban transition; in 2007, for the first time in history, the world's urban population will exceed the rural population. Most of the world's urban growth -- 95 per cent -- in the next two decades will be absorbed by cities of the developing world, which are least equipped to deal with rapid urbanisation. In most Third World countries, growth in cities is synonymous with growth in slums. In South Asia, for example, annual slum and urban growth rates are 2.2 per cent and 2.89 per cent respectively, which means that 76 per cent urban growth in this region is in fact growth in slums. This is the context in which United Nations held its World Urban Forum from June 19 to June 23 in the sanitised environment of Vancouver, Canada, thousands of miles away from mega-slums of cities like Mumbai, Nairobi and Karachi. The stated aim of the forum was to "examine one of the most pressing issues facing the world today: rapid urbanisation and its impact on communities, cities, economies and policies." On the sidelines of the conference, UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlement Programme) also released its State of the World's Cities Report 2006/7. The report provides concrete data that shows that the world's one billion slum dwellers are more likely to die earlier, experience more hunger and disease, attain less education and have fewer chances of employment than those urban residents that do not reside in a slum. The report portrays a familiar picture of the urban apartheid in the developing world with two cities existing within one city -- "one part of the urban population that has all the benefits of urban living, and the other part, the slums and squatter settlements, where the poor often live under worse conditions than their rural relatives." The Report shows remarkable similarities between slums and rural areas in health, education, employment and mortality. Many experts have noted that unlike nineteenth century Europe, the mega-urbanisation in the third world is not a 'natural' process resulting from industrialisation and 'progress'. The rising rural poverty, that no juggling in figures could hide, is creating a big push in the rural areas. This poverty, on its part, is linked to national and international policies that discriminate against the poor, particularly the rural peasants, in the name of economic growth and development. Policies of the industrialised world, together with IMF and World Bank debt policies, have imposed ultra-low prices on agricultural produce from poorer countries, bankrupting hundreds of thousands of peasants and small farmers. Many rich countries, that support third world governments and NGOs to fight rural poverty are not ready to provide fair terms of trade to third world farmers whose situation keeps deteriorating. However, it is too convenient to lay all blame at the door of foreign governments. The main credit must go to the policies of efficient and enlightened rulers of the third world countries. Our own duly elected and fully democratic government of the 'Islamic welfare state' of Pakistan works overtime for the welfare of those who deserve it the most --- the rich and the powerful. Take the very hot example of the sugar industry, one of the most incompetent and protected of all industries, yet married to power and politics. After exploiting farmers for decades and forcing consumers to pay a premium for its incompetence, the sugar-industry government combine is now ready to attack and totally annihilate the cottage industry producing gur. Ideally, the government should have been running a campaign to promote the use of gur, which, apart from empowering farmers and providing employment to hundreds of thousands of rural workers, is a much healthier and organic sweetener. This cannot happen because it is not poor gur but the wealthy stepsister sugar that sits in the cabinet. Once gur is destroyed, sugarcane farmers will be vassals of the sugar industry forever. Any wonder cities will get a few hundred thousand new residents. As a result of such policies, besides other socio-economic factors, peasants, farmers and artisans are leaving their lands, drifting towards the cities, knowing that even a 'marginal' city existence, as peddlers, beggars or even turning over rubbish tips, gives them a better chance of survival than a pitiful existence in the countryside. They turn to the cities, often not knowing that a new form of poverty, disease, discrimination and crime awaits them in the in their magnificent slums. Violence, drugs and child labour are the inevitable consequences of the magnificent way of life they are condemned to enjoy for generations to come. Denuded of their ancient identities based on family, clan and caste, the young ones in the slums look to sectarian and ethnic groups for new identities. Some even end up in sectarian and jihadi militant organisations in order to give some meaning to their lives and find a better life in paradise, which is often the only way to improve their existence. Ask patron saints of these outfits for a list of addresses and you will find ninety-nine of them in a city slum. Using ingenuity, energy and resourcefulness of the existing and potential slum dwellers, capable urban planners working under an efficient local government might have changed things for the better. But urban planning is non-existent and local governments, when functional, are ill-equipped, inefficient, starved for resources and well manipulated by the omnipotent puppeteers. The ruling wisdom, therefore, is to shut the filth out by creating lovely islands of prosperity, many being designed and developed by foreign consultants and firms. These heavens on earth need land, which has to be snatched away from suburban villages, at prices that are often thousands and at times hundreds of thousand times less than the market prices. When newly rootless and disintegrated communities ask where they can go, they are given addresses of a nearby slum. Perhaps, I should not be so pessimistic. Migrating to Islamabad the beautiful from a village in the Southern Punjab, I have landed full three hundred feet away from Maira Basti slum, inside a sector developed by the Capital Development Authority (CDA). Mercifully, my father was not a sugar-cane farmer. The writer is an Islamabad-based journalist and development consultant. Email: [email protected]