Andrew Milner asks Sheela Patel questions about SPARC and Slum Dwellers International (SDI) for a Ford Foundation document he is preparing
Was there any single incident which led you to set up SPARC/SDI (or its precursor – I’m not too clear about the details here)? Could you tell me about it?
I worked in an agency that served a poor neighbourhood. We worked very hard to make the services work for the poorest and we were generally effective. However a series of different events culminated in some of us leaving to set up SPARC. One being that cities demolished the homes of the most vulnerable and all our efficient attempts to improve their education and health were unable to withstand this violence. In fear of the NGO where we worked to challenge the city for what it was doing, but willing to take grants to work with the poor made us realise that as organisations get more consolidated they fear risks. So SPARC was born.
I gather that, in the beginning, it was more a movement than an organization. Was there already the groundswell of such a movement? How did you find adherents in the early days? How many people were involved? What – physically – did you do to start a movement?
We registered SPARC as an organisation in December 1984, exploring the institutional requirements to partner with people’s organisations, and we began with exploring issues of the most vulnerable, the pavement dwellers in Mumbai, and began discussing lives of migrant women who came to the city to follow their husbands and lived on pavements. It took a long time to convince women that there was value in meeting us even if we did not give them welfare goodies. In July 1985, our supreme court gave judgement in a Public Interest Litigation from 1981, in which after commiserating the plight of pavement dwellers the judgement stated that the duty of the city to keep its pavements cleaned for all superseded the rights to life and livelihood of the pavement dwellers and gave the city right to clear pavements by November 1st. In early 1985 we had a small office in the midst of pavement dwellers in Byculla which was the garage behind a pubic dispensary, and pavement dwellers began to come there to work out what to do. Then pavement dwellers, men and women, came to check rumours about evictions, and while the men wanted to fight the evictions, the women wanted to negotiate to live in cities.
With no data about pavement dwellers and research institutions unwilling to do a census, we undertook a census with full involvement of the communities (entitled We, The Invisible) and justified the plight of pavement dwellers. There were no evictions that year and many complex reasons can account for that, but it gave us the legitimacy we sought with the poor about the need to explore issues of identity inclusion and concerns about issues they could not solve as neighbourhoods. They formed a Pavement Dwellers Association. It was watching this that NSDF (National Slum Dwellers Federation) formed in 1975 to deal with evictions of slum dwellers, that Jockin and his colleagues began to visit us and offered to get into an alliance in 1986 at which time the alliance of the three organisations was formed.
Can you recall some of your early struggles? How difficult was it to get the movement going? (Official resistance? Resistance or reluctance among the shack/pavement dwellers?)
Actually compared to the challenges young organisations face today, we had grant makers giving us modest amounts of money to explore our process, government officials ready to listen to us although they did not know how to give us what we wanted, and much greater openness to engage, but little policy to support the process.
It helped that everyone agreed that habitat options were not easy, and our saying we were not experts but would explore this together made us vulnerable but equals. What we could do is initiate our role as a bridge between crucial and critical mechanisms to get to admission in schools, get a ration card for subsidized food, admission to public hospitals, bank accounts, manage crisis at police stations, which have procedural challenges which they learnt, and through them teaching others the federations began to develop their knowledge sharing and early impact of association.
Were there times when you thought it wasn’t going to work?
The complete lack of space to explore rights, of policy and interest about urban poverty was very frustrating and we never gave up but often wondered if we could ever get the pavement dwellers housing, because the strategies we had developed for them were beginning to get other vulnerable groups housing options if they were to be removed for infrastructure projects.
In your eyes, what was your first success? Was there a kind of breakthrough moment?
The pavement dwellers census was the breakthrough as was the alliance with NSDF.
How did the Ford grant come about – can you recall the first contact?
The first Ford grant came to rejuvenate the modest NSDF network which was of 8 cities when we met them and grew to 20 cities at the end of the first grant. The second grant was to consolidate the process which it did, and the third grant helped develop scalable projects in housing, sanitation and relocation. However in each instance the person who facilitated the grant left and we were the institutional history of that amazing support.
In your estimation, what was the importance of the Ford grant for you?
It served to develop and incubate what we believe to be one of the important innovations in urban development, which is the federation model, and give us a free reign to evolve it while we worked with communities and their federations, national governments and international actors. We also persuaded Ford to give SDI a grant to develop its institutional structure, and today it remains one of the few global organisations that works on advocacy and engages international development institutions.
I gather that, at first, you and the others behind SPARC/SDI resisted the idea of creating a formal organization, but that Ford was very keen for you to do so. What made you change your mind?
We resisted creating a formal structure before the constituency of its members were ready for it…Ford facilitated this process by not being prescriptive and allowing elements to develop when federations were ready.
Finally, I wonder if you could give some ‘then and now’ examples which will help illustrate what SPARC/SDI has achieved and how far it has come?
SPARC stands for Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres. Our first office in Byculla was named over to the pavement dwellers to run as an Area Resource Centre which is owned and man- aged by communities, and now in India and SDI such centres are in every city (often, several in a city) depending on the geography of the locations. SPARC through its alliance now works with 70 cites, the national government and has facilitated many policies. Our work in enumeration has been precedent setting. When we began SPARC we had no path to follow other than that which emerged through our interactions with communities. We developed a series of rituals and practices which we call enumerations, savings and loans, peer exchanges, precedent setting which are now practices by SDI affiliates as well. Community leaders from SDI affiliates sit in events and policy discussions with international and national politicians and technical professionals and represent the views of the poor. Our work in infrastructure, housing and relocation now informs the practice of many international agencies who commission SDI to undertake these processes which we do through a very decentralized strategy. We have recently begun to explore how originally provided grants are leveraged in different phases of our work, and SDI will undertake similar assessments to challenge the manner in which monitoring and evaluations are done of programs.
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