Jockin Arputham (15 August 1947 - October 13, 2018) has worked for more than 40 years in slums and shanty towns, building representative organizations into powerful partners with governments and international agencies for the betterment of urban living. Arputham is the president of the National Slum Dwellers Federation which he founded in the 70s and of Slum Dwellers International which networks slum and shack dweller organizations and federations from over twenty countries across the world. The National Slum Dwellers Federation works closely with Mahila Milan, a collective of savings groups formed by homeless women and women living in slums across India, and with SPARC, a Mumbai-based NGO, and together they have been instrumental is supporting tens of thousands of the urban poor access housing and sanitation. He has also worked with the police to set up 'police panchayats' in many of the informal settlements in Mumbai. Here, for the first time, police are assigned to work in these settlements and are supported by a committee of ten residents from the community (three men seven women).

Jockin realized that slum dweller organizations had to change their strategy. They had to make governments see them as legitimate citizens with knowledge and capacities to implement solutions. So they sought to work in partnership with government to address their housing problems – and other problems. He has often said that how can you reduce urban poverty if you do not listen to and work with the urban poor.He has built more than 20,000 (toilet) seats in Mumbai alone.He insisted on new standards on redeveloped housing, an increased floor-space-index. Over the years, Arputham has built 30,000 houses in India, and 1,00,000 houses abroad.Funding for his work comes from many sources. Thanks to his work, he has met both Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela.

He has visited many other countries to encourage and support slum or shack dwellers to organize and to encourage them to take their own initiatives to show government what they are capable of. He is currently residing in Mumbai; his office is in Dharavi. He was the winner of the 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding and an honorary Ph.D. from KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, in 2009. In 2011, the Government of India bestowed on him its fourth highest civilian honor, the Padma Shri award. He is well known for his charisma and excellent public speaking.

Sheela Patel, founding member and current chair of Slum/Shack Dwellers International, speaks about, “Confronting the Urban Housing Crisis in the Global South: Adequate, Secure and Affordable Housing,” the latest working paper in the World Resources Report, “Toward a More Equal City.”

Take a look at the video and the link to the videos are here as well-

Sheela Patel on the Urban Housing Crisis #1: The Existing Gap Is Huge-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5awO0tBfF9k

Sheela Patel on the Urban Housing Crisis #2: There Are a Range of Solutions

https://youtu.be/gn0kpwlYdpg

Sheela Patel on the Urban Housing Crisis #3: “The City Is Like a Body”

https://youtu.be/4L3mQ4C-SmY

The story of the port trust beginning to explore the usage of 3.11 of SRA

Like other informal settlements in Mumbai those households living on Mumbai Port trust lands always thought they would never get alternatives.

In the mid 1990s they joined NSDF and Mahila Milan  to explore if the strategies of enumeration could assist them to document their settlements and explore alternatives.

The Indian alliance suggested that a particular slum located where the railway and Port joint venture wanted to use land commercially, let to MbPT finally agreeing to relocate and re-house slum dwellers on their land for the first time using the 3.11 section of SRA .

MbPT has always ensured that its lands were never part of the DP reservations. They have also only recently conceded to open space for the non toll road from Chembur to VT, and then to consider opening up the eastern sea front to the Mumbai citizens. 

In the surrounding areas of Oshiwara station there will be over 5-8000 slum dwellers relocated due to various projects. Finally by chance more than planning poor households will be within walking distance from the relocation site they were moved to

The Oshiwara business district fifteen years ago was full of tabelas full of buffalos  and was finally converted into a relocation site for re-housing slum dwellers, living on land needed for public infrastructure projects. The land use was changed  giving land owners who gave land and housing to MMRDA an FSI of 1 for the land 

Wonder why the lease renewal did not happen?

A very large part of Mumbai suburbs and extended suburbs are state lands leased to industry. We know that all textile mills factories and other such lands were leased as were salt pans.

Some ( all textile mills) are now huge gated commercials and residential areas. 

How come this was not done on time? And what will happen in the High court where the petition is now being made by the company?

­­­German Habitat Forum, Berlin – Designing Sustainable Solutions for Cities In The Future, 1^st June, 2016

Theme- People, Politics and Practice

Sheela Patel spoke at the conference as a representative of communities who live and work informally in cities, and who in her estimation represent a majority of people in the cities. This is a transcript of her speech.

“The city development, as you see it today, excludes with or without purpose the challenges that poor people who live in cities either recently or over the last eight decades have been facing, they remain invisible, and their participation I believe is a very important ingredient in discussions about People, Politics and Practice.

If we don’t start exploring solutions that will make us feel good 50 years from now, we will never begin; because in today’s cities there is inequality, there are huge differences in incomes, in opportunities that have political and many other reasons for not being explored but which will only exaggerate in the future, but we don’t want to wait any more to solve those problems because we can’t solve those problems if we don’t solve them today.

This is a decade of aggregators and organizations like ours, Shack Dwellers International, ACHR; we are all aggregators of urban informality, of men and women living and working in very difficult conditions to reach out to the other players in the city, to find scalable citywide solutions that both picks from what’s outside and take the unique characteristics of the city that is there. So it requires a new disruptive partnership strategy in order for this transformation to occur. Business as usual is not going to work, so do we have the courage, do we have the guts and do we have the capacity to explore these unusual and disruptive solutions?.       

         

In the end a lot of what happens in cities is around land. The politics of who owns land, what its used for, what mechanisms produce inclusion or exclusion forms the basis of how cities evolve and grow and whether they have a chance for sustainable equitable options or not. Politics is at the centre of this, there’s no shortage of technical solutions. Do we have the courage to do that, do we have the capacity to explore new solutions? Because in the end, the sustainability that we are challenged with today (which we start with the meetings we will have for Habitat III, that we’ve come with all our challenges of climate) of our sustainable growth will happen in the geography of cities which will have to deal with a multiplication of challenges and we are far away from that. We should be extremely dissatisfied with what is happening because we don’t have the courage to explore unusual relationships and partnerships.

As the representatives of the networks of the urban poor, we want to explore possible relationships and partnerships, new ways of doing business with whoever has the courage to come and work with us. We are looking for ways by which we transform the future that we prepare for the youth of tomorrow into one which is safe, which turns that into the advantage rather than the violence that we predict that will take place if their aspirations and expectations are not fulfilled by our generation. If we have the courage to explore change, we explore new ways of doing business and of sharing and supporting each other through this process; I think we can see a glimmer of success.”

How Community Mobilization Influences the Political Environment: Reflections on Pune

Yerwada was an in-situ upgrading project aiming to build permanent ground, ground floor +1 and ground floor+2 houses. The cost of each constructed house was Rs 300,000 rupees, with 90% of the costs funded by the different branches of government (local, state and national). The remaining 10%, Rs 30,000, was provided by each household. In total, the project built 1125 houses in 8 different wards.

Mahila Milan in Pune

There are a few elements that made the Yerwada project a success. First, the involvement of the community in all the stages of the project, from design to implementation, guaranteed that the needs and expectations of the households were satisfied. What particularly characterises this case is the key role played by groups of women, who assumed the leadership positions throughout the whole process. Second, by upgrading households and services in-situ rather than relocating them, the government managed to maintain the cohesiveness of the community and improve their conditions faster, as in-situ upgrading is generally deemed to be the most socially and economically desirable strategy for low-income housing. Third, this project created job opportunities for the local community throughout its implementation phase, thus fostering a true sense of community participation in the project and sense of ownership of the households.

Nevertheless, the element that captured our attention the most was how crucial of a role the political environment actually played in allowing the development of this project. The political environment is key in order to enable communities to influence the process of agenda setting. The policy process is a complex interaction of problems, proposals (solutions) and politics (political environment). In order to move a cause higher in the hierarchy of the political agenda, these elements need to come together. When this happens, we are in the presence of a “window of opportunity”. For advocates of a cause, the success of their proposals is determined by how well they can influence, create and identify this window. This means that if the political environment is not ready to focus on a particular problem or to receive a particular solution, the window will be closed for the champions of the cause, and their proposal would not make it to the “short list”. This is why developing a proposal is not enough in the policy game, and advocating, coalition-building and policy-learning are all necessary to influence the conditions that will prepare the political environment to implement any solution.

In the case of Yerwada, SPARC, Mahila Milan and NSDF had been gradually creating the conditions to engage with authority for decades through their enumerations, precedent setting, exhibitions, and other successful projects in line with the general SDI model. These activities slowly built linkages of trust and camaraderie between different members while simultaneously strengthening them as a community. As such, it is important to understand the process by which the women of Mahila Milan empowered themselves politically in their formative stages to truly grasp why the subsequent Yerwada project was a success. 

In Pune, when the women of Mahila Milan first assembled themselves in 1993-1995, their initial socioeconomic surveys identified sanitation to be the most pressing issue. After doing so, with the help of NSDF, they set up various meetings with local politicians that resulted in improved sanitation, not only for the slums but also for the entire city. One important thing to note about this project is that a proposal put forward by the women of Mahila Milan Pune, when received in an enabling political environment, turned into a full-fledged project involving 8 organizations working in over 500 neighborhoods.

Confident by the launch of their sanitation project in 1999, they moved on to secure land for relocation of slum neighborhoods that they had surveyed and that were affected by the recurrence of floods in 1997. Although they had identified a specific piece of land in Hadapsar for their members, a road widening project that was happening simultaneously in Patil Estate led them to alter their plans. 98 houses were to be demolished, and those residents sought the support of Mahila Milan to convince city officials to relocate them rather than face eviction. Mahila Milan chose to offer the land in Hadapsar to the former Patil Estate residents instead of the original members that MM sought to relocate. This project was crucial in legitimizing the actions of Mahila Milan in the eyes of local government because they approached government with an alternate solution to eviction that was feasible and easy to implement. Once again, the political environment along with their community efforts converged into the perfect opportunity window to advance their needs and materialize them, with the commissioner incorporating additional neighborhoods to their plans. The negotiations that were partaken by Mahila Milan turned into a bigger project with three NGOS contracted to contribute on a fixed price basis. In doing so, they emerged as equal partners with the local government in the planning, design, and implementation of these projects. 

Upgraded lane in Yerwada

Around 2008, when JNNURM was launched, Mahila Milan tried to work on upgrading in two slums: Ram Tekdi and Yerwada. Yet, after facing opposition in the former, they requested from the Municipal commissioner that additional subsidies be allocated to the in-situ upgrading project in Yerwada. Their first efforts to upgrade this site consisted of pressing the government for cluster housing for people with less than 100 square feet per household. Cluster housing grouped people together to form groups of land that met the 270 sq. foot requirement to take advantage of the BSUP program. They included more floors in their design to increase the space per household, but grouped households together horizontally so that they met the requirement. Their other task was convincing the residents that BSUP was in their interest. As Savita recalled, when BSUP was to be implemented in Pune, people were skeptical at first due to the failure of earlier government programs and it took them almost 2 years to convince the community to be on board. Mahila Milan finally achieved community agreement and participation with a spatial demonstration of model homes using bamboo and cloth to showcase to the local population that such projects would indeed improve their livelihoods. With the political clout that they had garnered from their previous projects, they were also able to pressure local government to be more transparent with the people. They also had lower-ranked politicians accompany them to better inform residents about their work and convince them that it was in their favor. 

It is interesting to draw a contrast between these successful projects and the experience of Mahila Milan in Ram Tekdi where the political environment obstructed their progress in that area. Even though they tried to implement the same strategy, they did not receive the support of local politicians. Instead, the local politicians initiated a campaign to convince the community that they shouldn’t respond to SPARC surveys and that an alternate SRA project conducted by a private builder was in their best interest. As a result, the population demanded the SRA project over the SPARC one-house-per-household proposition as they thought they could get more than one unit per household. Since SPARC and MM act based on the interests of the community, they pulled out of that area and failed to move past the negotiation phase.

The work of Mahila Milan Pune showcases the need to have a groundswell of organized people utilizing local assets and resources for collective and participatory problem solving, yet what ultimately determined their success was the existence of an enabling political environment that reverberated their requests on a wider scale and implemented them at a broader urban level. As such, the contrasting experiences of Mahila Milan Pune highlight the importance of the policy environment in materializing their projects. In Ram Tekdi, MM implemented the same strategies, yet the difference in the receptivity and endorsement of the local politicians obstructed their progress. In Yerwada, problems, proposals and politics came together and proved that when all the parts are involved and their interests align, solutions are easier to implement and their impacts are deeper and longer lasting.

Jehane Akiki and Dafne Regenhardt,

The New School, Graduate Program in International Affairs