One Kilometer Can Change Everything: Mobility after Relocation in Ahilyanagar

 

SPARC and its partners at Columbia University, New York, have begun to work on informal settlements and informal transport as a vertical area of work, as Indian cities are beginning to get electrical buses from central government funds. Creating sensitivity to inclusionary research that links informal settlements to formal bus routes is an urgent and vital action and demand. A secure home is only part of building a better future but without affordable and reliable transport, families can find themselves further from jobs, schools, healthcare and opportunities than they were before relocation.

SPARC and its partners at Columbia University, New York, have begun to work on informal settlements and informal transport as a vertical area of work, as Indian cities are beginning to get electrical buses from central government funds. Creating sensitivity to inclusionary research that links informal settlements to formal bus routes is an urgent and vital action and demand. A secure home is only part of building a better future but without affordable and reliable transport, families can find themselves further from jobs, schools, healthcare and opportunities than they were before relocation.

This is the question guiding our work in Ahilyanagar, Maharashtra, where we are studying how relocation has changed mobility for families living in two rehabilitation sites—Varulacha Maruti and Katwan Khandoba. Together, these settlements are home to more than 600 families who were relocated from informal settlements across the city. While relocation has provided permanent and legally recognised housing, many residents have lost something equally important: easy access to the city.

Before relocation, many families lived close to workplaces, schools and public transport. Today, both settlements are located about one kilometer from the nearest arterial road. There are no bus stops within the communities, no shared auto-rickshaw stands and no organised feeder transport. Every journey begins with a long walk before public transport is even available. On a map, one kilometer looks insignificant. In reality, it can mean walking through intense heat or heavy rain, carrying children or groceries, or supporting an elderly family member. That first kilometer often determines whether someone can reach work on time, attend school or seek medical care.

Our conversations with residents bring these challenges to life. One woman now leaves home twenty minutes earlier every morning because her commute has become longer and more expensive after relocation. A student described how missing a shared auto means arriving late for school. An elderly resident said he postpones hospital visits because the walk to the main road is exhausting, while hiring a private auto from home is often unaffordable.

These stories show that mobility is not simply about transport—it is about access to opportunity.

Working with local communities, students from local academic institutions and our field team, we are mapping public transport routes, shared auto-rickshaw networks and residents' daily travel patterns. Household surveys and focus group discussions will help us better understand the mobility needs of women, children and older people, who often face the greatest barriers.

The findings will contribute to Ahilyanagar's City Mobility Plan and support discussions with municipal authorities and auto-rickshaw unions on improving connectivity to relocation sites. Housing and transport cannot be planned separately. A successful relocation is not measured only by the quality of the house, but by whether people can easily reach work, education, healthcare and other essential services. As cities continue to grow and relocate vulnerable communities, mobility must become part of rehabilitation planning from the beginning. Because sometimes the distance between inclusion and exclusion is just one kilometer

The aim of this study is to understand the access to public transport and shared mobility services in the form of autorickshaws before and after relocation. We ask what kinds of challenges relocation communities face around travel to key services like education, health facilities and jobs and what can be done to improve access and ensure that future planning includes this as a key metric for an economically vibrant and inclusive city. A key starting point for this work is understanding the existing public transport system and how it might be improved and extended to include relocation areas by co-developing analysis with the communities involved using digital tools and platforms and to co-create practical user-friendly improvements that make it easier for people to access transport and hence the whole city. Another important objective of this study is to look at the mobility needs of women and children, and make rickshaw services women and child friendly.

Understanding the challenges.

To understand the impacts of relocations, we wanted to understand if relocation truly improves quality of life, does it have any impact on mobility; how does it affect the choices that people have to make to access public transport especially for women and children, are the transportation related challenges taken into account while planning the relocation sites. The idea is to conduct a more systematic survey around the access challenges and to use this information to develop ways to address the many service access problems in these places.

The Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Relocation Site also known as Katwan Khandoba, was developed by the Ahmednagar Municipal Corporation under the Integrated Housing and Slum Development Program (IHSDP) component of Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). The site currently houses families relocated from several informal settlements, including Indira Nagar, Kothi, Pune bus stand swastik chowk, manhihar chawl panchseel chawl from along the railway station      

Approximately 372 families were relocated to this site, which comprises 31 buildings and having a population of +2000 people. Families have been living here since December 2017. The relocation site is located about 3–5 kilometers away from their original settlements and lies in the vicinity of the Sanjay Nagar slum.

In the second site, i.e. Varuracha Maruti, there are approximately 252 families from 21 buildings that were relocated from Akbarnagar, Indiranagar, Kothala, Nalegaon, Laltanki, and those that were living along the railway station.

After talking to groups of men and women we understood that, “there is a lack of unity and trust among the families in the settlement” since they came from different places and many did not have pre-existing social ties.  Women also raised issues about their conditions. For example, during the Group discussion, they spoke about the social expectations like staying home and taking care of the young ones and daily chores Some women are not allowed to work or are afraid to travel because of fears of being harassed.  In some families, it is not seen as appropriate for the woman of the household to work with men, no matter what kind of job it is. In some families, women stepping out for work or participating in public activities is still viewed with conservative disapproval.

They also raised the concern of waste management as a major issue, with residents describing the daily challenges of managing garbage, as there is no doorstep pickup. The group discussion concluded with two women volunteers agreeing to do a mock survey at their household to help this work (Image 1).

 Our approach:

Before deploying our team to gather information, we had been talking with the communities (Image 2) identifying the community leaders and women who would lead the conversations with the local people. We also had multiple discussions with academic institutions like Ramesh Phirodia College of Architecture (image 3) and Centre for Studies in Rural Development (CSRD) (image 4) to look for students to join us in this project for them to build their knowledge on this subject and also assist us for conducting surveys. Our ground team based in Ahilyanagar, have been using public and informal public transport, therefore, have an idea of how the transport system works. Based on this local knowledge, GIS based maps highlighting the existing public transport networks and key areas where people commute daily for work and other activities were mapped. We prepared before and after maps of auto-rickshaw stops to visually demonstrate how access has changed due to relocation.  

 Talking with the communities we understood that in the core areas of Ahilyanagar, transport functions through a combination of municipal buses and shared auto-rickshaws. Ahiliyanagar is still working to build a bus system that adequately serves the city. As per our survey, at present, five buses operate daily on 5 routes, mostly linked through the Central Bus Stand. However, frequency remains limited, and waiting times can extend up to an hour. Even during off-peak hours, commuters often wait 20 to 25 minutes.

 

Due to this inconsistency, shared autos (image 6) have effectively become the city’s functional public transport system. Operating between routes originating from Maliwada Bus Stand to various locations across city, with multiple stoppages in between, like Vasant tekadi (22 stops),Gajanan colony (23 stops), Sahu nagar (12 stops), Alamgiri (10 stops), Vasant tekadi (11 stops), Savedi naka with (11 stops), Arangaon (6 stops), Lal tanki (6 stops), Vaishnav nagar (5 stops), Shivaji nagar (5 stops) covering approximate distance between 5kms to 12 kms, they charge between ₹15 to ₹30 per passenger and typically carry six commuters at a time. This flexible and demand-based system works reasonably well within the city core, allowing access to employment centres, markets, and institutions. The challenge begins when this network does not extend fully to the relocation sites.

 One Kilometer that effects the decision process.

Varulacha Maruti spans 3.24 acres and houses approximately 252 families, while Katwan Khandoba covers 3.61 acres with nearly 372 families. Together, these settlements accommodate more than 600 households. Both sites are located nearly one kilometer away from the arterial road. There is no bus stop inside the settlements, no shared auto stand, and no structured feeder transport. Residents have to walk around 1 to 1.5 kms to reach the main road before getting an auto or shared auto. On the map where one kilometer appears a small line, on the ground this one line under intense heat, during monsoon, or while carrying goods or child in one hand, becomes very hard and challenging.

During our field visits and discussions, one woman shared that after relocating, she leaves home 20 minutes earlier each day to reach her workplace at Market Yard on time. Before relocation, she lived in the Kothi area, approximately 650 m from her workplace. After relocation, the distance increased to 2.5 km, resulting in a longer commute and higher daily travel costs. A student described how missing one shared auto disrupts his entire schedule, creating uncertainty in reaching school on time. An elderly resident explained that he avoids frequent hospital visits unless absolutely necessary because the walk feels exhausting, and hiring a private auto from home to the destination costs between ₹200 and ₹400. These everyday adjustments requiring more time or missed services reveal how mobility has become a new challenge after relocation.

The Before and After of Connectivity

Before relocation, many families lived in informal settlements closer to their employment hubs or within the city core. Housing conditions were inadequate, yet connectivity was often easier. Auto stops and bus routes were within short walking distances. Post -relocation, housing quality improved significantly, with permanent and legally recognised structures replacing temporary dwellings but residents lost transportation options and access in the move and this needs to be fixed. To illustrate this transformation, we are preparing before–after maps comparing earlier proximity to transport routes with current accessibility challenges. These spatial comparisons show how previous settlements were integrated within the existing transport network, while the new relocation sites were constructed without giving any considerations to public transport connectivity and accessibility.

As our next steps, we will be conducting detailed household and transportation surveys as well as focus group conversations to understand the socio-economic characteristics, travel behaviour, and mobility patterns of relocated families and their needs and desires for addressing this situation. We will also talk to the auto-rickshaw unions and city, state and transit officials to understand how services might be expanded and share our learnings so we can co-develop improved plans that close transit deficit areas more generally. This  will not only provide essential data for planning gender inclusive and child friendly public transportation systems, improving connectivity and accessibility to not only the identified relocation sites but the city as a whole.      

Authors: Sheela Patel, Nihar Johari, Maria Lobo, Tanaya Walunjkar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Breaking the "Research Aristocracy": Why Climate Resilience Must Be Co-Produced in Learning Labs

Sheela Patel

For decades, international climate discourse has been dominated by what can only be called a "research aristocracy". Prestigious journals and elite academic institutions dictate what constitutes valid knowledge, often treating vulnerable communities merely as data points or passive recipients of expert advice.  But as extreme climate events intensify, this top-down approach is failing. The real experts on urban climate survival are not sitting in lecture halls; they are the women living in informal settlements who manage the daily realities of heatwaves, floods, and storms.

To build true structural resilience, we must completely invert the traditional architecture of dialogue. Resilience cannot be delivered; it must be co-produced.

Moving Beyond the "Isolated Pilot"

Traditional climate adaptation frequently relies on isolated pilot projects—highly subsidised, tightly controlled experiments that look brilliant in a report but crumble the moment the funding ends. They rarely scale because they ignore the organic socio-economic structures already operating on the ground. Instead of rigid pilots, the Roof Over Our Heads (ROOH) campaign relies on Learning Labs, which are active, community-embedded spaces where women’s collectives, local artisans, and young professionals work together as peers to test localised solutions.

Rather than treating a neighbourhood as a testing site, a Learning Lab uses a "spine" of standardised data tracking while allowing complete freedom for local experimentation. What works in one lab is shared peer-to-peer across a global network, creating an exponential multiplier effect rather than a slow, linear rollout.

Grounded Innovation: The Power of Lived Experience

When you give women the tools to map their own vulnerabilities, the focus shifts immediately from theoretical carbon metrics to practical, lived realities. In ROOH labs across different climate zones, adaptation is measured by everyday breakthroughs:

• Micro-Climate Materials: Testing breathable ‘Vedic Plaster’ in the hot, dry climate of Surat, or using solar-reflective roof coatings in Pimpri to cut indoor heat.
• Tangible Comfort: In upgraded homes, internal temperatures drop significantly, reducing ceiling fan usage from 12 hours a day down to just two.
• Livelihood Protection: A secure, climate-resilient roof means a home remains a safe space for women to run home-based businesses, secure from monsoon leaks or blistering summer heatwaves.

"We used to sleep outside in the summer because the heat inside was unbearable. Now, after the upgrades, we host guests. This is no longer just a shelter - it's a home."  Anita Sathe, Mahila Milan Leader, Pimpri

The Reality of Incremental Finance

Perhaps the greatest disconnect of the academic approach is finance. High-level adaptation funds expect neat, multi-year bankable assets. But for a household in an informal settlement, the financial reality is an annual refurbishment cycle—patching up the roof with tarpaulins or scrap metal sheets ahead of every monsoon season. These informal borrowing mechanisms cannot be dislodged overnight. The goal of a Learning Lab is to work with existing community savings networks, like Mahila Milan, to introduce blended financing models. By combining small community savings, non-cash contributions, and targeted climate finance, we can transition families from the financial drain of yearly survival patching to long-term, incremental structural upgrades.

Resilience is not a luxury or a high-tech import. It is a fundamental right, and the women of informal settlements are its true architects.

 

This blog post talks about the core philosophy of SPARC and the Campaign for Roof Over Our Heads (ROOH). It focuses on how we turn the "victim" narrative into one of agency through community-led data and design.

Sheela Patel

From Pavements to Power: The SPARC Way of Building Cities

For over 40 years, we at SPARC have heard the same story: that people living in informal settlements are a "problem" to be solved or "victims" to be saved. However, we know that the truth is the exact opposite. These residents are the city’s most resilient architects, its hardest workers, and its first responders to climate change. Based on this knowledge, we developed a methodology that isn’t about charity; it’s about democratizing knowledge and ensuring that those who build the city actually have a say in its future.

When Sheela Patel started this journey in 1974, she asked the women living on Mumbai’s pavements what they wanted. They didn’t ask for a handout; they asked for a future where their grandchildren weren’t born on a sidewalk. Over the years, we learned that women are the best managers of community resources, and by forming Women’s Collectives, we create a space where the women can negotiate with men, with governments, and with international banks. So our secret sauce for the ROOH Campaign was: Start with the Women.

SPARC trained the residents—even those who were illiterate—to map their own neighbourhoods. Standard "top-down" research or data collection often produces rubbish because people tell outside surveyors what they want to hear. SPARC pioneered the Community-Led Census. In fact the women told us, "don't ask more than 10 questions, or we'll give you rubbish." This became the rule of 10 while doing a community census.

Through community census, data becomes a shield that provides legitimacy to the communities. When a community can present a government official with a detailed map and census of 100,000 households, they aren't just "squatters" anymore; they are a voting bloc with evidence.

The "Roof Over Our Heads" (ROOH) Learning Labs

Climate change isn't a future threat for informal settlements; it's a daily reality. The ROOH campaign operates through Learning Labs in 12 countries. Here’s how the labs work:

ROOH doesn’t just talk about change; it builds it. The campaign funds "demo homes" where volunteers test new materials—like heat-reflective paint or improved flooring—to show the rest of the neighbourhood what’s possible.

Local masons are the ones who have been building these houses for decades. ROOH looks at the masons as engineers, and instead of bringing in outside firms, we train local masons by helping them upgrade their skills using better materials and resilient designs. 

The campaign collects real-time data to monitor heat by installing sensors that track temperature and humidity every 15 minutes. This data is then matched with "perceived heat"— by comparing the actual temperature to what it feels like to the residents.

The Value Proposition: Why This Works

Our approach offers a "Triple Win" for the communities, the climate, and the state. SPARC treats the poor as clients and partners, not beneficiaries. The poorest families already spend 11% to 22% of their annual income repairing their homes before every monsoon. ROOH’s methodology repurposes that existing spend into long-term, resilient assets rather than temporary measures and expenditures that recur annually. This creates a pattern of overall economic efficiencythat the communities are beginning to understand.

Climate money often gets stuck in government offices. By focusing on the 5 Verticals—Habitat, Health, Transport, Relocation, and Disaster Preparedness—we build a decentralised infrastructure that can be scaled up. Once a Learning Lab proves that a certain material works for one neighbourhood, it goes "viral" because the neighbours can see the results and the demand for that material increases, creating scalable resilience.

The gap between "illegal" settlements and "formal" planning is bridged by bringing in architects, university students, and material scientists to work inside slums. We force the formal system to acknowledge and integrate informal transport (eg, shared rickshaws) and housing into the city’s master plan, thus legitimising the informal.

The Goal: A Global Resource Network

SPARC and ROOH are on a journey to establish 100 Learning Labs. These aren't just construction sites; they are resource centres. They are places where a woman can learn about her health, a youth can become a data expert, and a community can prepare for the next disaster.

We aren't just building roofs; we are building the power to stay. We are the warriors who are the first responders to disaster, and we refuse to be treated like “victims."

Join us in changing the architecture of development.

 

 

 From Crisis to Catalyst: The Disaster-to-Development Framework for Climate Resilience

By Sheela Patel

When extreme heatwaves bake our cities, unseasonal deluges flood low-lying neighbourhoods, or chronic environmental stressors tighten their grip, informal settlements bear the heaviest burden. For decades, the global humanitarian and urban development playbook has relied on a predictable cycle: disaster strikes, emergency relief arrives, temporary shelters are set up, and communities slowly pick up the pieces—only to wait for the next inevitable shock.

This reactive loop keeps vulnerable populations perpetually on life support. At SPARC, we believe it is time to fundamentally break this cycle.

Our core philosophy is simple yet radical: We must transform the trajectory of disaster into a pathway for long-term development.

Climate resilience cannot be achieved in a boardroom or dropped into a neighbourhood via top-down mandates. True resilience is built from the ground up, turning moments of vulnerability and crisis into catalysts for permanent structural change. Here is how our Disaster-to-Development framework is reshaping how cities face the climate crisis.

1. From Passive Beneficiaries to Community Architects

In traditional disaster management models, residents of informal settlements are treated as passive recipients of aid. Our framework flips this dynamic entirely.

In our approach, the communities are the primary designers, testers, and builders of their own futures. Through grassroots leadership pyramids, peer learning exchanges, and localised housing labs across cities, residents take the lead. Whether they are testing thermal-comfort construction materials for extreme heat or managing community health and environmental monitoring networks, the expertise always rests where the lived experience is: with the people.

2. Incremental Housing as Climate Infrastructure

Climate adaptation cannot afford to wait for slow-moving master plans. Incremental housing is the reality of the Global South, and it is also our greatest tool for climate resilience.

Through initiatives like the Roof Over Our Heads campaign, we view every incremental upgrade—whether reinforcing a roof against severe storms, upgrading walls for better thermal performance, or improving local drainage—as a foundational block of urban infrastructure. Housing is not just shelter; it is the frontline defence against climate shocks. When people are supported to build better incrementally, they build permanence and security into their daily lives.

3. Data as an Instrument of Collective Agency

You cannot manage what you do not measure, but measurement must belong to the community. We design rigorous monitoring, learning, and evaluation (MLE) frameworks and collaboration maturity scales not just for institutional donors, but to empower local leaders.

When neighbourhood networks track their own health data, spatial vulnerabilities, and project milestones, they generate undeniable evidence. This data shifts the power balance, allowing grassroots groups to negotiate directly with municipal authorities, claim their stake in the city, and demand equitable infrastructure.

4. Bridging the Gap: Neighbourhood Handshake Protocols

Grassroots action alone cannot rewrite city-wide systemic vulnerabilities without municipal alignment. Scaling resilience requires institutional bridges.

Through instruments such as Neighbourhood Handshake Protocols and civic planning partnerships—including our ongoing work tackling urban heat islands and greening potential across municipal wards—we formalise agreements between local governments and communities. These protocols ensure that community-led adaptation measures aren't just isolated pilots, but recognised, integrated components of official city development plans.

The Road Ahead

The climate crisis is accelerating faster than traditional urban planning can adapt. We can no longer afford to treat climate disasters as isolated anomalies requiring temporary fixes.

By shifting from disaster response to locally driven development, we unlock a powerful truth: the communities most vulnerable to climate change possess the ingenuity, resilience, and leadership to solve it. Our job is simply to back them up, build the frameworks, and get out of their way as they build a safer, more equitable urban future.

Many of the learning labs at which we have begun to work on producing resilient housing are presently facing the challenges of heavy rain, and we will follow this up with stories about those learning labs that are dealing with this challenge, whether the ROOH solution produces protection against this weather, but also addressing the challenges of flooding.

 

 Relocation and resettlement of Urban, informal settlements

This note has three parts. The first is about an emerging vertical program that SPARC has on relocation and resettlement of vulnerable urban communities. The second, a short summary of it’s past work and the principles that it has produced. The third is an introduction to an emerging relocation that is happening in Ahilyanagar, Maharashtra.

The crisis of cities is constantly morphing with people moving around either to plan or to discuss relocations. This is how cities are born and grow, for the elite and for the formal there are systems and processes but for those who live informally, these are traumatic and their impacts multigenerational. City development produces changes that are going to be exacerbated with climate crises as oceans rise, as unbearable heat occurs, there is either lack of water or flooding along with other traumas that climate change brings into our lives.

The city not only demands that existing residents move, if they’re living informally without their consent, but this is coupled with the fact that there will be more and more urbanization as rural areas around cities, and even in distant locations have weather related crises that reduce lives and livelihood opportunities in rural areas. The world has already turned urban, however the imagery that poverty resides in rural areas alone and that those who live in rural areas need support while those who live informally in cities need to be driven out and evicted has yet to change.

The challenge of addressing informality takes many forms in most instances. People invade vacant spaces, build their homes and survive with informal jobs while, defending their right to live in the city. In some instances, through a range of opportunities their tenure gets recognized, however in other instances, the city chooses to relocate them, and this is often when the real estate value of that land increases, either for formal housing stock or for infrastructure purposes.

In most instances, this relocation is forced and even if it is not forced it may produce some form of tenure, but it produces a lot of hardships, challenges, alienation and other kinds of distress that households in neighbourhoods have to face when such a process happens without prior preparation.

SPARC began its work in 1984, addressing the challenges of pavement dwellers in Mumbai and dealing with the reality that as an organisation you cannot produce secure tenure on a pavement. When this was discussed with women’s collectives in communities, it became clear that the women and their families chose to live on these particular pavements, historically, because it was easy to walk to work, and somehow they were able to protect it for short periods of time, facing some demolitions which in some instances forced them to move somewhere else but in other instances they rebuilt their home again.

Yet they realized that this process did not in anyway produce an ability to make serious long-term investments in their homes and together communities and SPARC began to look at the possibility of designing a relocation process which would be driven by them, considering their needs and their challenges and with the possibilities of exploring solutions which were prepared in advance of a crisis of evictions.

It began with transforming a perspective that the city had no land. It became clear that planning instruments reserved lands for everything except for those who lived and worked informally, and that informality came out of the realisation that the city did not have instruments, political will and a perspective that acknowledged that a very large percentage of people in the city were already living informally.  Along with this came the realisation that plan allocations that were technically and legally put in as non-negotiable constantly changed with political will to utilise this land for other purposes.

 Having understood these external realities, this process began with a series of steps that emerged from dialogue and discussion not only within the group, but with government officials, professional planners and learning from other peoples’ experiences of traumatic relocation.  It began with a detailed census of every single household, providing each house with an address that demonstrated that the Indian Postal Service actually provided them with letters that came to them at a time when there was no Aadhaar. Each partner federation produced an ID card for each family with their photograph and their names, they produced every single government document (a list of 14) from immunisation to driver license to past legal notices of evictions to demonstrate how long they had been living in the location. They formed Cooperatives and formed committees, began savings that were meant for a start-up capital for getting a loan and a separate savings group to deal with the relocation costs.

In short, this introduction is to remind ourselves and those who read this process that all the case studies that I now present in the form of articles, blogs, or videos is to show a process that began in 1986 for a range of different relocation programmes that the alliance of SPARC, Mahila Milan and NSDF took up with three clear objectives

1.            The first is to say that communities, especially women’s collectives were critical core members of designing and executing, preparation, and ongoing evolution of the transition process of relocation.  They need technical, organisational support and in most instances a relationship with government officials to produce solutions that are robust, that work for them and work for the city. This has a protocol, which we hope with more people engaging in this strategy we will be able to make it more robust.

2.            There are many traumatic, unplanned, disastrous relocations, and there are planned relocations that haven’t worked for a lot of reasons and there are relocations in which everything was planned, but there were still unexpected, unintended negative impacts. All these need to be studied and documented and must come into the discussions of solutions with a realisation that a group or a constituency of people living informally and being neglected for the last several decades are themselves unable to find perfect solutions as the duty bearers often participate in this process unwillingly for the good of the city.

3.            For SPARC in its reformulation, relocation and rehabilitation are now an important vertical to develop not only with a view of deepening and sharpening our own practices and learning from what we have done but to develop a community of practice with collaboration, knowledge sharing policy formulation, building new protocols for developing and designing relocation, and building community capacity to acknowledge that solutions are never perfect but can be worked on and improved as we go along and learn to work in collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders, both duty bearers and others to work on these issues.

From Settlement to Relocation: Life at the Mahatma Jyotiba Phule and Varuracha Maruti post relocation, Ahilyanagar

One of the core lessons from SPARC’s work over the past 40 years is that sustained engagement and not a one-time intervention is  what enables real change in relocation settlements. Relocation is often presented as a solution to informality—an administrative response that replaces precarious housing with permanent structures. But for families that move, relocation is not just about new buildings; it is about rebuilding lives.

SPARC is working at two relocation sites in Maharashtra: Mahatma Jyotiba Phule (Khatwan Khandoba) and  VarurachaMaruti that were developed by the Ahilyanagar Municipal Corporation under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). Around 372 families (2000+ individuals) were moved to Mahatma Jyotiba Phule in 31 buildings (G+3) in 2017 from various slums situated 3-5 kms away from the original settlements While in VarurachaMaruti, around 252 families were relocated in 21 buildings (G+3) from other slums.

For the city, the project represents a significant public investment in housing infrastructure but for the residents, the experience of relocation has been much more complex. While the new housing provides formal shelter, residents at the Mahatma Jyotiba Phule and Varuracha Maruti continue to face multiple challenges that affect their daily lives and long-term stability.

The construction of the buildings is substandard, and while individual toilets with a connection to septic tanks have been provided for each house, no underground or overhead water tanks have been provided and there is a daily struggle for water. Garbage collection mechanisms are not yet in place, there are drainage issues, and a lack of streetlights at both sites.  As yet no individual electric meters have been provided in Varuracha Maruti.

These challenges related to maintenance, common infrastructure, and service delivery, highlight the gap between housing provision and long-term habitability.

One of the most immediate impacts of relocation has been the distance from earlier livelihoods. Many families were earlier dependent on informal work opportunities close to their original settlements. Moving several kilometres away has increased travel time and costs, and in some cases disrupted income sources entirely.

The design and planning of the site, while structurally adequate, has limited integration with surrounding services and economic opportunities. Access to transport, markets, schools, healthcare facilities, and anganwadis (government run health care day centres for children from 0-6 years) requires additional time and expense, especially for women, children, and the elderly.

Without sustained institutional engagement for the people who have been relocated formal housing brings the risk of becoming isolated rather than integrated into the city.

Building Trust, Step by Step

For the past two years, efforts were made to work with these relocation colonies. However, progress remained slow because there was no one consistently present—someone who could meet residents regularly, listen, follow up, and build relationships over time. SPARC now has a dedicated person working on an everyday basis to work closely with residents in both colonies. This is an important shift and though Pravin has been working with the communities for just two weeks, the difference is already visible.

Meeting the Community Regularly and Organizing them

Pravin meets with residents in smaller groups from both relocation colonies on a daily basis and these are ongoing conversations, not just a one-sided communication. He begins by explaining who we are as an organisation, why we are present, and—most importantly—why community organisation matters after relocation. At the same time, Pravin is navigating the community’s hesitations where many residents have valid concerns and past experiences that make them sceptical of organising or approaching authorities. He listens to their concerns; he also tries to explain why certain changes are important post relocation and what benefits collective actions can bring.

A key part of these discussions focuses on helping residents understand how, when they come together as a group, they can collectively raise their concerns and seek solutions—whether through local corporators, ward-level mechanisms, or directly with the municipal corporation.

Addressing Everyday Needs:

One concrete example of this work relates to Anganwadi services. In one of the relocation colonies, there is currently no anganwadi. While there is an anganwadi in a nearby settlement, women face serious challenges in sending their children there daily—especially since many of them also need to go to work and manage household responsibilities.

When the concerned government department was approached, their initial response was that an anganwadi already exists nearby. However, through continued engagement and explanation of the practical difficulties faced by women, a verbal agreement from the authorities to open an Anganwadi within the relocation colony itself has been initiated. The next step is to submit a list of eligible children so the process can move forward.

Health access is another area and though a healthcare centre exists nearby and periodically conducts camps in different locations, residents highlighted that many of their specific health concerns—especially those of women and children—are not adequately addressed. Pravin is now negotiating with a private organisation to hold regular health camps directly within the relocation colonies, focusing on issues raised by the community.

Ration Cards are also an issue since households can acquire subsidised food rations through these. Many residents fear that transferring ration cards from their previous address to the new location will result in long delays, during which they might not receive rations at all. Discussions with the ration office to understand the process clearly and explore alternatives are ongoing so that families do not lose access to essential food supplies during the transition.

Initial discussions and conversations around the formation and registration of housing cooperatives has also begun with the residents.

With Pravin’s consistent presence, conversations are moving forward, issues are being taken up systematically, and residents are beginning to see that something is finally happening on the ground. Though several issues will only be dealt with over a longer period of time, smaller and visible interventions will be taken up first so that residents can see how collective actions lead to real outcomes helping build trust amongst communities and their representatives before moving onto more complex processes.