PAVEMENT DWELLERS AND THE LIFEBOAT ETHIC

Author(s): Ajai Sahni

Source: Journal of the Indian Law Institute , April-June 1990, Vol. 32, No. 2 (April-
June 1990), pp. 264-269
Published by: Indian Law Institute

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43953185

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 PAVEMENT DWELLERS AND THE LIFEBOAT ETHIC

THE FRIGHTFUL dimensions of urban slum and squatter colonies are

one of the most perplexing problems of contemporary public policy. The
official status quo on this issue is presently defined by the Supreme Court
judgment in Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation.1 In this case
the court voiced its concern over a multiplicity of moral issues, and sought
to impose some sort of balance between conflicting ethical claims. In
doing so, it had recourse, implicitly or explicitly, to a variety of
ethical arguments.
"Slums", "squatters", "ghettos", "shanty-towns"; each of these words
primarily arouse a sentiment of repugnance conditioned by our reactions to
the degraded physical conditions prevailing in the decrepit settlements of the
urban poor. For instance, "slum" has been defined as follows :

A street or area which is in an insanitary, dirty, dilapidated, and

neglected condition, inhabited by the poorest and most thriftless of
the population, and usually greatly overcrowded; a low dirty court,
back alley... the slums, area in a town or city covered with squalid
housing of the poorest kind.1"

Even the following definition of "slum" given by the United Nations

carries similar connotations:

[A] building, group of buildings, or area characterized by overcrowd-

ing, deterioration, unsanitary conditions or absence of facilities or
amenities which, because of these conditions or any of them, endanger
the health, safety or morals of the inhabitants of the community.2

A consequence of this attitude of revulsion is that there has been great

enthusiasm for slum clearance, and other haphazard attempts to tackle
particular evils, with little or no attention being paid to the forces that
determine the development of cities. In the process, many of the policies
intended to combat particular evils have, (/) actually made them worse, or,
perhaps more dangerous; and (//) increasingly placed power of direct control
by the authority over the private life of the individual without in any way
addressing or improving the ills they set out to address.
It is these powers that the Bombay Municipal Corporation sought to
defend in Olga Tellis. It observed :

1. A.I.R. 1986 S.C. 180.

la. Universal English Dictionary.
2. United Nations, "Urban Land Policies , 200 Document ST ¡ SC A ¡9 (1952).

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1990] PAVEMENT DWELLERS 265

[N]o person has any legal right to encro

structure on a foot path, public street, or
public has right of way.3

He added, that "the lack of proper e

criminal tendencies, resulting in more crim
Throughout the arguments, the central qu
existence of these slum and squatter settlem
the observations relating to heightened leve
supported by any empirical studies. And
of demolitions and slum clearance is ign
By and large, the five member Bench reje
Government's arguments, and attempted
Nonetheless, despite their intentions, the
that language had forged. Ethical ambigu
of the judgment. While the court at one
made by the State Government in its af
dwellers exhibit especial criminal tenden
C.J., nevertheless chose to preface th
emphasises only notion of physical and m
ent in the general conception.7
Despite a flood of humanitarian rhetor
judgment reaffirms that the executive's "
cannot be regarded as unreasonable, unfa
that "eviction from pavements and slu
livelihood and consequently to the depri
situation with a sort of static helplessne
responsibility.
At a single stroke, a vast sea of humani
of its existence, into the ranks of chroni
right to whatever shelter they may have
when the pressure on land was less, and w
titles (whether they were poor or rich m
late comers, seeking to keep these 'interl
In Olga Tellis , of course, the Supreme
dwellers a temporary and qualified reprieve
lition and extradition as a permanent
over their heads. Since then, executiv

3. Supra note 1 at 185.

4. Ibid.
5. Id. at 184.
6. Id. at 201.
7. Id. at 183.
8. Id. at 197.
9. Id. at 195.

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 266 JOURNAL OF THE INDIAN LAW INSTITUTE [Vol. 32 : 2

metropolii elsewhere, have repeatedly found fit to exercise their authority,

now ratified by the court, in randomly demolishing large and small squatter
settlements.

The judgment of the Supreme Court is obviously characterised by a great

deal of ethical conflict. It is an uncomfortable and unrealistic balance of
two counterpoised sentiments : the slum and pavement dwellers are regarded,
on the one hand, as a nuisance, and, on the other, recognised simultaneously
as objects of pity.
Such a view is absolutely incorrect, and fails completely to, (i) reflect
the productive role of slum and squatter settlements, and of their populations,
in urban development; and (iï) adequately address the question of the causes
that have contributed to the development of these "urban fungi."
The pattern of reasoning implicit in the Supreme Court judgment
in Olga Tellis bears striking resemblance to a model articulated by
Hardin.^0 The metaphor of a lifeboat is used by him to argue that the time
may have come to refuse aid in the form of food to those needy countries
which do not accept the responsibility for limiting their population growth,
and to drastically curtail migration from poor to rich nations.
In his metaphor, each rich nation amounts to a lifeboat full of compara-
tively rich people. The poor of the world are in other, much more crowded
lifeboats. Crowding, here, does not refer to a space/person ratio, but rather
toa resources/person ratio. Continuously, in this model, the poor "fall out"
of their lifeboats and swim for a while in the water outside, hoping to be
admitted to a rich lifeboat, or in some other way to benefit from the "goodies"
on board. The central problem of the "ethics of a lifeboat" is : what* should
the passengers on a rich lifeboat do?11
"The ethical problem," Hardin observes, "is the same for all." He
thus traces out his dilemma in a single representative boat :

Here we sit, say 50 people in a lifeboat. To be generous, let us assume

our boat has a capacity of 10 more, making 60.... The fifty of us
in the lifeboat see hundred others swimming in the water outside,
asking for admission to the boat, or for handouts. How shall we
respond to their calls.18

Hardin conceives of three possible responses, and three corresponding

scenarios :

One. We may be tempted to try and live by the Christian ideal of

being "our brother's keeper," or by the Marxian ideal of "from each
according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Since the

10. Garrett Hardin, "Living on a Lifeboat", in T.A. Mappes and J.S. Zambaty,
Social Ethics : Morality and Social Policy 322 (1977).
11. Id. at 324.
12. Ibid.

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 1990] PAVEMENT DWELLERS 267

needs of all are the same we take all the n

total of 1 50 in a boat with a capacity of 6
everyone drowns. Complete justice, co

Two. Since the boat has an unused exce

just 10 more to it. This has the disadva
safety factor, for which action we will
Moreover, which 10 do we let in? "Fir
best 10? How do we discriminate? And what do we to the 90 who
are excluded?

Three. Admit no more to the boat and preserve the small safety
factor. Survival of the people in the lifeboat is then possible (though
we shall have to be on our guard against boarding parties).13

The lifeboat model, we can see, has immense logical force. In framing
the question as one of survival, and arguing purely from necessity, Hardin
succeeds in ridding our approach to the problem of aid and distress immi-
gration of the sentimentality that usually accompany it.
By contrast the idealist's position- that the rich ought to help the needy,
that basic needs of all must be satisfied well before any other ethical criterion
of distributive justice is brought into play,14 or that it is morally wrong not
to prevent suffering when it is possible to do so18 - appear muddle-headed,
sentimental, based on an inadequate understanding of reality and for the
policy maker, thoroughly impractical.
Hardin's model of the lifeboat lends itself perfectly to the ratio under-
lying Olga Tellis. We may, in applying the model, conceive of the rural
areas as the poorer 'overcrowded' lifeboats, and the metropolii as the land
of promise, the rich lifeboats which the poor are trying to swim onto. This
corresponds to the Supreme Court's perception of the problem of "the
migration of people from the rural to the urban areas" as "being a reflection
of the colossal poverty existing in the rural areas." This is a viewpoint that
has wide currency among legal, administrative and town planning experts.16
The Supreme Court acknowledges that, (/') this mass of the abjectly poor
has a "right to life" under article 21 of the Constitution, and that such right
is meaningless without a right to livelihood;17 and (//) slum and pave-
ment dwellers choose locations in the vicinity of their place of work.18

13. Ibid.
14. Cf. J. Feinberg, "Economic Income and Social Justice" in Mappes and Zambaty,
id. at 306-15.
15. Cf. P. Singer, "Famine, Affluence and Morality", in Mappes and Zambaty, id. at
315-22.
16. See, Charles Correa, The New Landscape (1985).
17. Supra note 1 at 193-96.
18. Id. at 195.

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268 JOURNAL OF THE INDIAN LAW INSTITUTE [Vol. 32 : 2

The court, nonetheless, saw fit to ratify the executive's power of demo
lition and eviction.19 The reasons variously given were that such
encroachments for private use "frustrate the very object"20 of the publi
purpose for which they are earmarked.
Evidently, the flood of migrants that crowd the slums and pavements of
the metropolii are seen as a burden upon the urban rubric, and a strain o
the "carrying capacity" of the metropolitan "lifeboat." Like Hardin, the
Supreme Court recognises the claims of the less fortunate to our sympath
but not aid.
Once again, as with Hardin, the logic is almost irrefutable. Clearly, if
the alternatives are urban chaos, or the eviction of a segment, no doubt
unfortunate, of the burgeoning urban population, the latter must be the
preferred course.
Even if we admit, be it theoretically, the possibility of effectively evicting
these squatter populations from the urban lifeboats, there are strong argu-
ments against the morality of such action. Crucially, the lifeboat ethic,
both as articulated by Hardin, and as discovered in Olga Teltis, is illegitimate,
despite its apparent reasonableness. This is primarily because the "lifeboat"
analogy fails to reflect the reality of the relationships between rich and
poor nations (in Hardin's model), even as it fails to reflect the real nature
of the relationship between the urban and rural sectors.
Most significantly, the lifeboat analogy is static. It takes the poverty of
certain nations as given, even as it accepts the wealth of others. Similarly,
in Olga Teltis , the poverty of rural India is accepted as a fact, and the wealth
of the metropolii is self-evident. The static conception, however, is unfaithful
to the dynamic reality.
In the international context, advocates of the dependency theory21 have
demonstrated that the rapid economic growth of the First World could not
have occurred without draining out the resources of the Third World. In
the dual economics of today's developing nations, the metropolitan centres
could not have prospered without the untrammelled exploitation of
resources in the rural hinterland to its lasting detriment. The industries of
the urban conglomeration have grown at the expense of the rural sector.
They have, further, constantly encroached upon rural resources and
appropriated or degraded them in the process.28

19. Id. at 204.

20. Id. at 184.
21. Andre Gunder Frank, The Development of Underdevelopment' , in J.D. Cockcroft
(ed.), Dependence and Underdevelopment (1972); see also, Dos Santos, "The Structure of
Dependence", in LV American Economic Review (May 1970).
22. Centre for Science and Environment, The State of India s Environment 1984-85 :
The Second Citizens' Report 366-67 (1985); Aran Chaturvedi, "Land Requirements for
Urban Settlements : Issues and Policies", in Centre for Science and Environment, Report
of the Workshop on Alternative Approaches to Urban Development 8 (1984); M.N. Buch,
"Crisis in Urban Ecosystems and the Lessons of Bhopal", in Bandhopadhyay, et al.,
India's Environment : Crises and Response 133, 135 (1985).

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1 990] PA VEMENT D WELLERS 269

It does not acknowledge the dynamic interfac

the hinterland, or reflect the manner in wh
contributes to and causes (at least partially) t
factors could be accommodated in another, s
model. Since we are at sea, it may be calle
there are several rafts, some crowded and ot
cially, however, all these rafts are constantly
raft packing out pieces of flotsam from the
rafts . Thus a raft can grow. On the other h
from a raft, and, consequently, a raft could jus
Now, by virtue of their larger size and streng
often raid and plunder the smaller, crowded
themselves through this process. They may
occasional 'refugee' who swims from the poorer
that they displace many more than they acc
It is contended that such a model would m
relationship between the metropolii and the
highlight the moral issues involved in this
indicates the possibilities of a solution which
did the orders of the Supreme Court in Olga
Once we acknowledge the responsibility, be
for the progressive pauperisation of the countr
of compensation for damages can be applied
Two measures to implement this principle sug

(0 The welfare and housing, at least of m

must be made the responsibility not of gov
sector employers who, (i') lure workers to t
indirectly responsible for their displacement
are collectively responsible for the declin
habitat.

(//) Public policy must increasingly divert

urban sector to the rural sector to compensa
former to the latter. The volume of such fun
a cost-benefit analysis of various transactions b

Evidently, these two measures need to be fl

lation would have to give due attention to de
the rural/urban dynamic, of the ethical problem
relevance of the principle of compensation in th
steps in this direction.

Ajai Sahni*

♦Research Scholar, Department of Philosophy, Un

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