ABSTRACT
The socio-economic circumstances of the people living in the non-plan settlements cannot be understood unless seen in relation to the dominant structure of the city's economy. In almost every sense, the residents of the non-plan settlements find themselves trapped in a position of unequal exchange. In order to obtain sufficiently diversified and representative data, it was decided to cover a 5 per cent sample of households, keeping the household as the unit of investigation. Households predominantly consisted of nuclear or joint families or of close friends or relatives staying with another nuclear family. An interesting characteristic of one-person households was that a majority of them did not consist of unmarried men. The constraints of parents' economic circumstances were inevitably reflected in the poor care of, and educational opportunities available to, their children. The respondents' occupations at the time of the survey were not necessarily their first in Chandigarh.
