Social Organisation in an Indian slum: Study of a Caste Slum

Slums are one of the important and equality persistent problems of urban life. Unlike many recent studies which take a too objective view of the life in slums and depict them as the very purgatory of human existence where poverty and crime alone predominate, the present study, based on the approach of the Chicago School of Park, Burgess, Why and others, takes a humanistic attitude and attempts to search for organized life in it. The study looks at the slum as an organic unit of the larger urban social system and examines the interrelationships both within the smaller system of the slum and between the smaller and the larger systems, namely the slum and city, and how the changes in the larger system affect the smaller system-a linkage which no slum development planning can afford to ignore. The findings are the result of a field-study undertaken by the author in a slum of wodars or stonecutters and builders emigrated from the northern parts of Karnataka to the metropolitian city of Pune (or Poona) in Maharashtra.