New law needed to provide accomodation to slum-dwellers: De Soto

A new law is essential to provide proper accomodation to slum-dwellers, a big challenge which India is facing, a leading economist said."The Indian government should enact a new law for slum-dwellers, making sure that they are getting proper accomodation and identification legally," world-renownedeconomist, Hernando De Soto, said here today."Asia's biggest slum (Dharavi) was trapped in a glass jarphenomenon," he said."At one end you have India's financial capital and at the other hand a huge industrious potential lying with the poorest inhabitants of Mumbai as well India," De Soto said.The Peruvian economist was here to attend a conference on paradigm for conclusive growth organised by industry body,FICCI."It is pity that the Dharavi slum is still not a globalised society. The Government should give it the legal infrastructure as early as possible," the author of "The Mystery of Capital" who recently visited the slum, said. 

De Soto is president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, the Peru-based think-tank that advocates for property-rights reforms in developing nations. "The poor do not even have the tools to access their own national economies, never mind global trade. Globalisation is just not on their radar. If their Governments can provide adequate legal tools, poor people will be able to lift themselves and their countries out of poverty," De Soto said.They have resources hundreds of times greater than all foreign aid and direct investment provided they can be made fungible through law. Only then will globalisation sound like a global proposal to ordinary people and not another scheme to help elites, De Soto said."The global economy has grown more in the past 60-years but the poor in developing nations are trailing behind with no hope of improving their lives significantly," he said.