Slum dwellers from various federations now apply for construction projects in their cities and through SSNS undertake construction of sanitation, slum infrastructure and housing. Cities by and large on the one hand, are always lagging behind in making payments, and on the other hand, documentation necessary, inspection coordination with the municipal officials, and follow up to ensure that the payments is done has lagged on the part of the local federations as well. Sundar Burra, Aseena Viccajee and SK Joshi along with a team of NSDF SPARC SSNS and Mahila Milan members have developed a group that reviews the dues, and follow it up at several levels from senior officials to ward engineers to obtain the payments. This activity also serves to reflect on how the ongoing project and its processes have to incorporate these actions in their ongoing work so that such long delays do not occur.
Reflections of the process indicate that in the initial contracts, especially for sanitation and housing subsidies – both community and federations but more importantly cities were not prepared to face the changes needed to be taken in their procedures to manage relationship with communities who took up construction.
Similarly community federations and their NGO support staff did not have the documentation, supervised measurement records and follow up for municipal inspection to follow their billing.
A team now works with the administrative and accounts division as well as with the project management unit in the city to produce detailed documentation needed to get the bills.
Initially this was very difficult for both the cities and the organization as many of the projects were several years old, the municipal staff both senior and junior has been transferred. But gradually as the combination of persistence, improved documentation and requests targeted at both senior administrative level and local officials was systematized, the payments have begun to flow in.
An Ongoing Challenge:
A toilet was constructed in one of the cities where NSDF has been working for several years and for which the work order was given by the Municipality. After the toilet was built, an individual went to court and said that the toilet was built on his land and should be demolished. Even though the negligence is on the part of the corporation which would have checked out the land ownership, the dues for the construction of the toilet was not given to the alliance .
After much negotiations, now the resolution is being explored whereby the city will give the payment for the construction if provided with a guarantee that if the construction is demolished within a year we would return the money!
No comments:
Post a Comment