Topic:
Country: India
Delegate Name: Sabrina Green
Informal housing is widely spread throughout every country. These communities have many benefits and drawbacks. Informal settlements result from increased population but decreased housing. Some downsides to informal housing are an unsafe, non-regulated environment, and the inability to get basic resources. For example, not enough regulated houses have caused poor societies to make their communities without government or any regulation. This causes housing to be very inadequate for living and unsafe. However, these informal housing situations allow citizens to not become homeless. Because these houses do not have a lot of government regulation it causes the people to lose less access to basic needs that would otherwise be given by the government. Although these living spaces can be very unsafe, they also have many advantages. Some advantages of these houses would be supporting the government by having smaller communities that supply the government, and by creating communities that have similar challenges which brings people together. Informal housing heavily supports local government through informal labor. These houses also support one another through the closeness of experiences.
India’s population is around 1.42 billion. Though these informal communities can be bad, for India’s large population, they cannot be prevented. India has many of these informal societies already in the country. India has around 26-37 million informal houses. One big factor is that India is known for its large population, the size of India compared to The USA is around ⅓ the size, however, the United States has roughly around 334 million people. This results in many areas being crunched together and has little to no room for its citizens. New Delhi is a big contributor to “the slums” otherwise known as informal settlements. India is very well aware of the increased population as well as the increased settlements, and India is taking great action by putting money into building more houses. These actions India is taking would include building around 22 million homes near New Delhi. Another action taken by the Supreme Court of India stated that one homeless shelter for every 100,000 people should be built in every city. Though India still has many homeless due to the size of the population, the government is trying to help its citizens.
India urges the United Nations to help create a system to give all countries needed help with housing. One way The United Nations could help solve this problem all over the world is by creating a sub-committee in the UN to specialize in these house improvement projects. This committee could include actions like finding countries with the majority of homeless and focusing on improving life quality. This project could be funded by larger countries with higher GDP through taxes or by fundraisers such as CIC (center on international cooperation). One thing is committee could do is send representatives for each suffering country and have them report the highest concentration of these informal settlements. The committee could mainly focus on the more dire cases but still try to help all these informal communities. Overall life quality needs to be improved for those who suffer daily due to insufficient housing situations.
