Optimisim For South Asian Slums
There is a growing wave of urbanization in the developing world as the cities are drawing people away from subsistence farming to jobs in the industrial and service sectors. This rapid migration of people from rural to urban areas is causing massive increases in urban populations, creating more and larger urban slums, increasing the potential for environmental deterioration, and bringing tremendous pressures on city services already strained beyond limits. Take sanitation, for example, and it is no surprise that three major South Asian cities, Dhaka, Mumbai and New Delhi, show up on Mercer's list of the world's dirtiest cities . United Nations Habitat estimates that roughly 1 billion people -- or 33 percent of the world's urban population lives in slums. By 2030, according to the UN's human settlement program, that number is likely to double. The slum dwellers struggle to survive with little clean water and sometimes no electricity around metropolises like Rio de Janei...