The Indian government has unveiled a plan to increase employment among the country's urban poor.

Designed to reduce the number of citizens living within city slums, a new scheme has been launched by the Ministry of Union Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (MHUPA) that will promote the development of vocational skills.

The program is intended to help ten million Indians over the next five years and two million by the end of 2010 by creating training courses at institutions accessible to slum dwellers, the Hindu reported.

Kumari Selja, head of the MHUPA, explained that the Rajiv Awas Yojana project would also attempt to allocate property rights to the Asian state's urban poor through subsidized credit.

Earlier this year, chief economist of the World Bank's South Asian region, Shanta Devarajan, suggested that between 400 million and 600 million Indians are presently living in poverty, despite the country's continuing economic growth.