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CHAPTER. XV. .
corrugated iron. With these exceptions, housing is. provided by private
landlords, The general standard is low and the practice of sub-letting for
profit is common and adds considerably to the degree of overcrowd-
ing.
Housing Schemes of Bombay Development Department. :

Until there is available an adequate supply of suitable rooms let
at rents within the means of the wage-earners, every effort to improve
housing conditions must fail. It was to meet these requirements that,
after the war, the Government of Bombay through its Development
Department built 207 new concrete chawls containing over 16,000 single-
roomed tenements in four different centres, a majority of the mills being
within a mile of one or other of the four. The large expenditure involved
makes it necessary to accept these places as a more or less permanent
feature of the housing of the Bombay industrial worker, although we
hope that this plan will not be copied in any future housing schemes.
In the new chawls the spacing out of the blocks provides reasonable air
and light requirements, and the individual rooms give a sufficiency of space.
The flush-out latrines and the bathing places are such as can be fairly
easily maintained in a sanitary condition, but their number is not always
sufficient. All the chawls have been provided with roads, water, lighting
and shops, whilst at Worli one whole floor has been converted into a market.
Schools and dispensaries have also been established in each of the four
chawl areas and yet these new houses provide the only accommodation
in Bombay which the workers have been reluctant to use. Never
more than 509, of the 16,524 rooms have been occupied since they
were made available in March, 1929. This is partly due to disturbed in-
dustrial conditions, but we believe that other causes are also responsible,
That the lack of lighting in the chawls themselves is one of these causes
is evidenced by the fact that a number of blocks in which electric light was
installed were immediately occupied, and we suggest that this improve-
ment be introduced throughout. Additional objections, especially appli-
cable to the Worli scheme, are the lack of cheap transport to the mill
areas, the inadequacy of markets and shops, defective medical facilities
and the lack of police protection. If further efforts were made to correct
these deficiencies, there seems to us to be every hope that the mill worker
would gradually see the advantages of residing in areas where conditions
are so much superior to those in the old overcrowded slums.
The ¢“ Cheries °’ of Madras.

Conditions in Madras, Madura, Coimbatore and other urban and
industrial areas are equally unsatisfactory. In Madras City, 25,000 one-
roomed dwellings shelter 150,000 persons or one-fourth of the population.
The general shortage of houses is so acute that many hundreds of workers
are entirely homeless and live on the streets or on the verandahs of go-
downs in the vicinity of the harbour. In Madura, where a number of
cotton mills are situated, conditions are specially bad. The Municipa-
lity has done nothing to relieve the problem, and none of the cotton
mills has provided housing accommodation with the exception of the