One of the most important effects of economic developments has been the rapid urbanization of population. The global urban population has quadrupled since 1950. All over, the world urban population is growing at a faster rate than total population. The 2011 India Census reveals that the urban population stood at 377 million and is likely to reach 600 million by 2030.

One of the inevitable consequences of such rapid urbanization has been the massive migration to cities because of displacement of labour force from the rural economy. However, in the absence of appropriate policy and anticipatory planning, cities are becoming homes to scores of urban poor seeking shelter in slums and squatter colonies. Slums are usually cluster of hutments with dilapidated structures and very little infrastructure. The facilities relating to water, cooking, sewage, and electricity are utterly inadequate in large parts of these slum areas. A number of schemes have been taken up for improvement of conditions in slums, but their success has almost always fallen short of expectations. The Millennium Development Goals have set up the target of improving significantly, the lives of at least 100 million slum dewellers by 2020. A number of schemes have been taken up by the Government of India, but the task is very challenging and coherent set of efforts will be necessary to successfully tackle this problem.

Sustainable social and economic development requires comprehensive coverage of the entire populace in respect of basic amenities like water, electricity, latrines, and the like. The challenges of improving literacy rate among the slum dewellers and raising their educational levels will also be an important task in our approach for inclusive development. We have to build up complete databases and think about a multi-programmed strategy for this apparently intractable problem. Our sustainability goals will remain unfulfilled unless we attach special importance to this problem.

We have as the Cover Story, “Sustainable Slum Improvement Models: Ban Mankong in Thailand and PRODEL in Nicaragua”. The article talks about the unique characteristics, community impact, and sustainability attributes of two globally acknowledged good practices: the Ban Mankong Programme in Thailand and PRODEL in Nicaragua, followed by a discussion on the lessons learnt for the design of future strategies for slum improvement in India. The articles bring out case-studies on new and successful approaches characterized by bottom up and community-centric planning and implementation, incremental norms and standards, and building up of social and human capital resulting in improvement of quality of life and livelihoods of urban poor, living in slums and squatters. These examples are important and we have to examine various approaches followed in different parts of the world to improve our strategies and practices.