| When the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" came out in 2008, the British journalist Alice Miles, writing in the Times of London, panned it as "poverty porn." Set in Mumbai's biggest slum, it told the story of an impoverished 18-year-old, Jamal Malik, who won the grand prize on a game show. The author Salmon Rushdie derided the plot as "patently ridiculous conceit." Yet Danny Boyle's Oscar-winning film contained a core of economic truth. Back then, you could argue convincingly that even the most hellish slums in Mumbai (or Rio de Janeiro, or Lagos) beat life in the poorest villages. There were plenty of jobs in big cities—as maids and cooks in the homes of the wealthy, as casual laborers, food vendors and auto rickshaw drivers—even if they were poorly paid. Far from being poverty traps, slums that are home to almost a billion of the world's people could sometimes serve as ladders out of rural destitution. Covid-19 is changing all that. The pandemic has plunged many slum dwellers back into the world of absolute poverty they left behind, and in the process has highlighted the reality of vast and growing inequality within cities—in the developed world and in nations of the new economy. It is a reality that is no longer sustainable.  Of the 19 million people who reside in Mumbai and its suburbs, half live in slums. Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan This week in the New Economy In India, lockdowns earlier this year forced hundreds of thousands of jobless slum-dwellers to flee to their native villages, a journey of hundreds of miles on foot since bus and train services were halted. Alas, the greatest internal migration since Indian independence ended in tragedy for countless individuals: villagers turned away the sick and dying. Unclaimed bodies filled hospitals. As the pandemic continues to rage across India, which now has the world's highest toll of daily new cases, "we are seeing yet another class of untouchables emerging," wrote Pritish Nandy, a columnist at The Times of India. "They have lost their bearings in urban India and their villages are no longer eager to have them back." One study showed that more than half of all residents living in Mumbai slums may have contracted the coronavirus, compared with 16% of non-slum residents. Social distancing isn't an option when you are sharing toilets and kitchens with scores of neighbors, and crowding around communal standpipes.  Residential skyscrapers in Mumbai Photographer: Tim Graham/Getty Images Europe It has taken the worst crisis since World War II to demonstrate to the privileged urban classes that these conditions threaten the health and economic welfare of every city resident. It is no longer possible for the well-off to retreat to their gated communities and luxury high-rises and ignore the fetid shantytowns where their cooks and security guards live. The Indian social activist Harsh Mander asserts that "we have effectively abandoned the poor in their crowded, unhygienic habitats." He adds that "middle-class people fail to recognize how closely our destinies are tied, and indeed our survival." Developing economies are experiencing their sharpest contractions on record. India's shrank by almost one-quarter during the April to June period compared with a year earlier; Peru's shrank by one-third; Mexico's by almost one-fifth. The World Bank projects that Covid-19 could push as many as 100 million people back into extreme poverty this year, about half of them in South Asia and most of the rest in sub-Saharan Africa. World Bank President David Malpass warned "that number could go higher" if the pandemic worsens, or drags on.  Dev Patel, left, and Anil Kapoor filming the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" in 2008. Ironically, residents of the labyrinthine alleyways of Dharavi, the slum near Mumbai's financial center where "Slumdog Millionaire" was shot, have organized themselves far more effectively against Covid-19 than many other parts of the city. Through rigorous testing and contact tracing of its 850,000 residents, the settlement has gone from a coronavirus hotspot to a template for emerging economies across the world, from the favelas of Brazil to shantytowns in South Africa. Longer term, though, Dharavi must be rebuilt—a project that's been discussed, and delayed, for years. Boyle's optimistic instincts as a filmmaker may have been appropriate at the time, even if he did glamorize poverty. But the world has changed. Rebuilding urban economies from the ruins of the coronavirus will require a historic effort to revive neglected neighborhoods, create jobs at the bottom of society and narrow the inequality now too obvious to ignore. Restoring the engine of urban opportunity begins in the slums of the world's poorest countries. That's a health imperative, a social justice necessity—and good economics.
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