Securing
Shelter
Hope
for Mumbai's Slums
By Nivedita Sharma
Women's Feature
Service
Half
of the 14 million people in Mumbai, India's commercial
capital, live in slums. A number of non-governmental
organisations ( NGOs ) are working to help these
communities but one NGO that stands out for its work with slum
and pavement dwellers is the Society for Promotion of Area
Resource Centres (SPARC).
Since 1984, SPARC has successfully followed a
multi-pronged approach : Working with the homeless and
slum dwellers and forging partnerships with other organisations
so that the urban poor can participate directly in how their
city is managed.
Mumbai
(India) : 14
million people live in Mumbai, the country's commercial capital.
Half of them - migrants from other cities and towns -- in slums,
clinging to dreams of making it big in this metropolis.
It isn't easy. At
periodic intervals, the administration tries to relocate those
living near railway lines, airports and other strategic
locations. Once they are thrown out, these people return often
to hostile conditions as they fight for any place that they can
find to build a shelter. Some of them live in the huge water or
sewage pipes left over from civic projects while others live in
flimsy shanties on the pavements.
The situation is
marginally better now for these people than it was in the 1970s
or even the '80s. Says Sheela Patel, Director, Society for
Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), which has been
working for the benefit of slum dwellers in Mumbai since
1984,
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"The
city had 50 per cent slums even in the '70s. But today
the situation is slightly different because the
government has started accepting the fact that it alone
cannot solve the problems of these people and so it has
started working with non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) like ours." |
Started by like-minded
social workers, researchers and professionals, SPARC believes
that the poor must be organised and their skills developed for
sustenance if they have to achieve social justice and equity. So
this NGO creates a physical, emotional and social space for
people to pool their resources.
The term 'Area
Resource Centre' was coined by SPARC to describe such a space.
This may not be a physical, tangible space but could be a
psychological space created by the community for itself. The
initiative begins with the community deciding on the issues that
it considers important. When SPARC started work, it took a
decision to allow only the communities to identify the issues
that they wanted to work for. The only thing that the organisers
were clear about was that SPARC would work with the poorest of
the poor.
Why concentrate on the
urban poor? When SPARC started its activities, India had just
gone through its biggest wave of urbanisation. This had lead to
a massive proliferation of slums and pavement settlements and
NGOs were struggling to respond to this problem. Their responses
were clearly inadequate.
In such a scenario,
SPARC wanted to create a process of NGOs working hand in hand
with poor communities. SPARC's reasons for working with pavement
dwellers were obvious: In Mumbai, the headquarters of SPARC, the
plight of pavement dwellers is most glaring - to those who want
to see - and they are the most vulnerable of the urban poor. Yet
this section is the least acknowledged by policy makers. By
beginning to work with this section, SPARC could ensure that the
poorest of the poor were acknowledged. And if a solution worked
out for them became a success, then it could well work for other
segments of society as well.
From here, deciding to
focus on women was just a step away because in any vulnerable
group women bear the consequences of deprivation, and yet they
have the capacity to create innovative means of survival with
available resources. |
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SPARC concluded that
any successful alternative must ensure the central involvement
of women in designing solutions and implementing them. For
instance, when women from pavement settlements stated
categorically that secure shelter was their main priority, SPARC
decided to take up this issue. This demand by the women was
amply justified after the 1985 Supreme Court of India judgement
decreed that the Bombay Municipal Corporation could evict
pavement dwellers and demolish their houses.
But secure shelter was
an issue which neither the pavement dwellers nor those from
SPARC understood very well. And so began the process of learning
about land, development planning, housing norms and
construction.
SPARC then developed
its own settlement model plan and began to initiate ways to be
heard by city and government officials. At another level,
savings groups for housing were started and construction skills
acquired. It was on this foundation that a movement of the urban
poor was built.
Says Patel, "We
are working together with the government to relocate the slum
dwellers but it is a process which is decadal and not something
that can be done in a year."
And Patel should know,
having helped in one year to relocate 8,000 households from
tenements along the railway lines. There have been many hurdles
on the way in achieving this. For starters, there has been a
huge backlog that SPARC has had to deal with. "Then there
is a lack of faith in almost everyone that change is possible
and one also has to deal with a corrupt and exploitative larger
environment which destroys any project in this state," adds
Patel.
Despite these
problems, SPARC has been making progress in other directions.
For instance, having organised the first pavement dweller census
in 1985, SPARC has stressed the importance of accurate
information about communities and settlements. A group of the
women involved in collecting this information has visited other
settlements in Mumbai as well as in other cities in India and
abroad to share their ideas.
New methodologies were
also evolved for project planning and evaluation, community
organisation and participation and recognition of the crucial
roles of women as teachers, decision-makers and managers of
water and sanitation services. Significant progress was made in
the development of low cost yet appropriate technologies such as
hand pumps that the local community could repair and sanitary
latrines that could be constructed by individual households. The
recent establishment of the Water Supply and Sanitation
Collaborative Council has been another step forward.
Another lesson that
SPARC learnt well was that any project should be seen as a
marathon, not a quick dash. "There needs to be time for
development," says Patel, "Sometimes without strict
outcomes. Projects need to grow and they won't necessarily
develop as expected."
Over the years, SPARC
has also formed partnerships with two organisations
headquartered in Mumbai: The National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF)
and Mahila Milan (Women's Collective). NSDF was started in the
mid-'70s by slum leaders from several cities who wished to
participate in all policy discussions affecting the poor. On
observing the work done by SPARC and Mahila Milan they
sought to align themselves with this partnership.
As a result, several
objectives were fulfilled. SPARC wanted to expand its work, and
while maintaining its thrust of work with pavement dwellers as
its nucleus, it also recognised that unless other groups of the
poor linked with them, pavement dwellers would continue to be
isolated. NSDF saw the power of women's participation and
SPARC's advocacy as a major sustaining factor of slum
mobilisation.
The roles of the
partners of this alliance emerged clearly. Mahila Milan
would be a network of women's collectives from the communities
which were affiliated to NSDF. Mahila Milan would help
women members get recognition and support from the settlements
and train them to undertake activities and skills needed for
them to play a central role in the community's decision-making
process. NSDF, on the other hand, would organise and
mobilise the social and political environment which would create
conditions for the poor to negotiate with resource-providing
institutions. And SPARC would train, educate, advocate and lobby
to set up this process.
According to Patel, it
is vital that in the long run, communities of the poor 'own'
their process and become central to its expansion and growth.
Consequently, the overall goal of the work that the alliance of
SPARC, Mahila Milan and NSDF is to create institutional
arrangements which mobilise large numbers of the urban poor,
create and strengthen their organisational arrangements so that
they become a vital part of the city structure and can
participate directly in how the city is managed.
The strength of SPARC
is its broad vision -- reaching out to other organisations with
its skills, and in turn being enriched with new inputs. For
instance, SPARC is involved in the exchange between the NSDF in
India and the Homeless People's Federation in South Africa, now
in its tenth year. Groups of Indian pavement dwellers have been
to South Africa while groups of South African squatters have
visited India. Both groups have learnt from each other about
mapping, hut counting, social surveying, house modelling and
house savings schemes.
Sadak Chhaap (slang
for street children) is another project that SPARC is associated
with. A loose but fast-growing federation, Sadak Chhaap
operates for children who have run away from home and seeks to
create networks for and by the street children, and initiate all
rehabilitation on the basis of the children's aspirations.
SPARC wanted to create
a process of NGOs working hand in hand with poor communities in
cities to create equity in the oasis of resources, create
mechanisms by which those who migrate to cities have
organisational networks to fall back in times of crisis or when
they sought to fulfil their aspirations. Ten years on, this
mission has never been more relevant as India urbanises rapidly
and the problems of human settlements magnify manifold.
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