2nd opinion: Bombay nightmares

Looking out from the top floor of Mumbai's Ambassador hotel I can see a booming modern city. What I can't see from here, though, are the dense, unsanitary slums that stretch out on the fringes of this economic success story.

Despite having worked with homeless people in this country for many years, nothing prepared me for Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay). There are 20,000 families sleeping on the pavement, and 8 million slum dwellers – half the city's population – living in temporary shack dwellings, many without water, electricity and sanitation. Slum dwellers are mostly ignored. The political parties make no promises: there are piecemeal initiatives, but no national or state housing schemes.

Yet on the day I arrived in Mumbai, I went to the National Slum Dwellers Convention, where 26,000 people had come together. For more than 20 years now, an organisation called the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres has helped slum dwellers to organise and plan new homes. Much of its work is "capacity building": setting up savings schemes to contribute to the costs of homes in the future. It has deliberately avoided the mass clearance programmes so disastrous in the West.

Sitting on the floor at the end of the convention with a group of women and men struggling to survive, living on the pavements, bringing up children without even a roof over their head, I was in awe of their resilience and optimism.

Over the years, the society has built up respect and credibility with public authorities – and international agencies such as the World Bank – by delivering projects without the corruption that has scarred so many grandiose state schemes. They have received invaluable help from Homeless International in Britain and similar groups in Africa and South America.

Yet progress is painfully slow. The funding allocated to subsidised housing programmes falls massively short of need. The BJP party promised to replace all the slums when it came to power in the Mumbai province six years ago, but has been little better than the Congress party it replaced. Some politicians are reluctant to build new homes for fear it will attract more migrants, and there is now a law excluding new arrivals from eligibility for permanent housing – a reminder of British policies a generation ago that denied black newcomers from the Commonwealth access to public housing.

Tackling poverty is not a political priority. Economically, India is soaring but the gains have been made by the urban middle class and land-owning farmers. Almost a third of India's huge rural population lives on the subsistence line. Every year millions migrate to the cities, joining the surplus of unskilled, impoverished slum dwellers.

India's problems may seem a long way off, yet the chain of connections is greater than we recognise. While I was there, World Trade Organisation negotiations were taking place: the news reported India, China and Brazil's demands for reductions in rich countries' agricultural subsidies. We need to do more to recognise the justice of these demands. Raising the income of India's rural poor is essential to stem the flow of desperate people to the cities.

Looking at the problem from this perspective may also help us rethink the use of greenfield land in Britain. Affordable housing may be more appropriate than heavily subsidised agriculture, which undercuts poor countries – and forces yet more people into cities such as Mumbai.