THE people of the Hanuman Masdoor slum have enough to worry about already. If the women work at all they are poorly paid cleaners. Most of the men are scavengers, gleaning a pitiful living from recycling the waste of Delhi's 14 million inhabitants.

Raw sewage flows past the homes — built over an open drain in the west of the city — and children play amid the rubbish and flies. Now the 1,000 families who live in the shantytown have fresh problems. The national government has announced an unprecedented initiative mapping India's slums. Though ministers claim the scheme will make life better for slum-dwellers, the inhabitants of Hanuman Masdoor are worried.

Supporters of the plan say it will allow municipal authorities to provide basic utilities where they are lacking and plan education and health services. But critics say the data gathered by the survey, almost certainly the biggest of its kind anywhere, will simply open up new opportunities for India's notoriously aggressive land mafia.

The plan is ambitious. According to official statistics, a seventh of India's urban population live in shantytowns. In cities such as Mumbai the proportion is much higher.

The country's slums — the result of huge influxes from poverty-stricken rural areas into the cities — have seen anarchic and unplanned growth. Using detailed images shot from satellites, the government aims to establish once and for all where India's slums are and how many people live in them.

The plan is the brainchild of Kumari Selja, India's housing minister, and will use technology developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation. “Most of the time the plans are based on projections rather than hard data,” she told reporters last week. “We plan to map the whole country so that we know about the slums in each city.” A key aim, according to the minister, would be to map the “non-notified” or unofficial slums.

However, Ramendra Kumar of the Delhi Sramek Segathan organisation, which works with slum dwellers across India, said that the survey could serve only two purposes to benefit the property developers by showing where potentially vacant land was or to show “where slums are illegal and justify the forced relocation of inhabitants”.

Such expulsions have been going on for many years — the giant Dharavi slum in Mumbai, made famous by the Oscar winning film Slumdog Millionaire, has been the subject of successive bids to relocate some or all of its estimated 800,000 inhabitants — which have accelerated in recent weeks with the approach of the Commonwealth Games to be held in India in October.

In a bid to clean up Delhi local authorities have intensified a programme of razing slums in the centre of the city or clearing them from roadsides on key routes.

The Hanuman Masdoor slum, built like an estimated two-thirds of such communities on public land, lies alongside the road leading from the centre of Delhi to the international airport.

Last month bulldozers arrived with no warning to demolish a 5m wide strip of houses along one side to clear space for advertising hoardings that will hide the ragged shantytown from passing traffic.

Ka Tanana Nair, who chairs the community council, said that she had been assured by municipal engineers that the slum was not scheduled for demolition. She remained unconvinced however. “I have been here 20 years. Once we had nothing. No water, no electricity, just wooden shelters. Now we have all that and solid homes too,” she said.

— The Guardian, London