India’s newly elected government has proposed an ambitious drive to rid the country of its slums within five years in an effort to improve urban infrastructure and raise standards of living.

India has some of the biggest slums in the world. An estimated 60.2m people live in informal settlements in the country’s cities, as much as a quarter of the urban population, according to the 2001 census. The slum population has been rising as more people migrate from India’s rural areas to cities in search of jobs and higher incomes.