Week 10, Work

There’s no exciting trips or festivals this week, so I thought I’d write an update about what I’m doing at Shelter Associates. One of the main things that they do here is that the social workers go into slums and complete detailed questionnaires with the slum residents. What results is a lot of data about the people that live in each house. The data is input into a Microsoft Access database, and then also imported into GIS software for special querying. I was asked to make a web site that displays all the data for each slum in a nice way, because at the moment the data just sits on someone’s computer and is not very easy to use.

For the computer geeks among my readers, I converted the database to MySQL and am using PHP to make dynamic pages and graphs from the data. I like this kind of programming because you can see the website develop in front of your eyes.

You can select which city you want to look at (we work in Pune, Sangli and Solapur), and then which slum specifically. Mostly I’ve been working in Indira Gharkul Miraj, in Sangli. Here is an example of the kind of data I put on the website. First are the graphs of the data. On the left are the religion and caste category for each household in the slum, and on the right are some of the assets people own (click on the image to see it better, sorry the one on the right is cut off):



The caste categories are basically groups of castes. For example the Denotified Tribes (DT) are a group of castes that was identified by the government in 1871 as ‘criminal tribes’, and the Scheduled Caste (SC) is a group of castes explicitly recognized by the constitution (I think SC gets a kind of affirmative action or positive discrimination, and is also know as ‘untouchables’). Both of these groups contain lower castes that you often find in the slums. And the assets on the right really show you the level of poverty that we are talking about. Only one house out of the 319 slum structures (259 of which are occupied houses for which a survey was completed) has a refrigerator, and less that 20% own a fan to keep cool.

In addition to looking at the raw data, we can produce spatial queries using the GIS software, and a jpg will be put on the web with each of the graphs above. For example, here is the religion for each house in the slum (left), and just to show something different, the sex of the head of the household for each house on the right (click on the image to see it bigger):

Some of the structures where no survey was completed are shops, toilet blocks, temples, and empty/abandoned/locked houses. Together, the graphs and the GIS queries give a good visual impression of what is going on in a particular slum. Other data we collect includes electricity, water, waste disposal, sewage, income, occupation and education, all of which can be displayed as above.

Hopefully, once the data are available on a website, it will be easier for Shelter Associates and the local governments to analyze slums and make improvements to the living conditions there.