A REPORT ON ODISHA BY SUNDAR BURRA, DECEMBER 2012

Sundar Burra was invited by Shri I.Srinivas, IAS, Principal Secretary, Housing and Urban Development Department, Government of Odisha (GOO), to speak at a capacity building workshop for Urban Local Bodies (ULBs). The workshop was held in Bhubaneswar on Saturday, December 8, 2012 and it opened with a prize giving ceremony in which the Chief Minister gave awards to various ULBs. Altogether there were 103 ULBs represented with only a few municipal corporation and municipalities. The vast majority of ULBs were Notified Area Committees (NACs) with low levels of population. Each ULB was represented by usually two elected persons and one official. About 400 people attended the function.

Ms. Madhu Kishwar of Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, spoke about urban street vendors and the laws, polices and programmes concerning these groups. There were two speakers from WIPRO and TCS who made brief presentations on E-Governance. Sundar Burra and Monalisa Mohanty from SPARC spoke about the problems faced in slum upgradation, slum resettlement and slum redevelopment under various different government programmes like the Basic Services for Urban Poor (BSUP) in different States. SPARC emphasized the role of community participation at all stages of the process including the preparation of detailed project reports (DPRs).

The Principal Secretary Shri Srinivas, though he had joined only a few months ago, has introduced a path-breaking  legislation in the Assembly for the Rights of the Urban Poor to live in cities. It is expected that this bill will become law during the current session of the Assembly. Shri Srinivas is an excellent officer whose heart is in the right place. He accompanied Monalisa Mohanty and Sunder to a slum on the day before the workshop and interacted with the Mahila Milan women from different cities in Odisha. Both from the point of view of the project on urban poverty that PRIA and SPARC are doing together and also from a more general perspective, it is important for us to engage with  Shri Srinivas and showcase his efforts in Odisha to a national audience. How to do this can be the subject of discussion. It was deeply heartening to observe his commitment.

DHARAVI NEWS: SECTOR 5 INAUGURATION GETS DISRUPTED, NOVEMBER 2012

Dharavi redevelopment project is continuing to remain in flux. Somehow, the recommendations and suggestions made by the Committee of Experts is never actually explored in the spirit of the advise.

The recommendation not to take all five sectors together, but  only start with sector 4 was initially suggested. Sector 4 is a dense sector where the communities have themselves begun to work on exploring solutions. Instead the state and MHADA chose sector five which does not produce robust solutions for the rest of Dharavi.

Another recommendation made after sector five was selected was to develop a master plan for Dharavi and then work through NGOs with the community. Unfortunately, without implementing any of the recommendations, an inauguration ceremony was initiated and after eight years  the people are once again resisting the intervention.

“Why are the benefits of capitalization of land not being shared with the people of Dharavi?”

REFLECTING ON CHANGING DEMOGRAPHY IN INDIA, SEPTEMBER 2012

http://www.economist.com/node/21563412 In this article there is a general conclusion that India and its cities are not equipped for growth and while there are some exceptions, like Surat, in Gujarat, most cities with its slums and poor infrastructure are ill equipped to grow. It makes we wonder how we view history and cities and what came first good organized cities which invited investments, or investments that produced good and bad impacts and produced planned cities. More importantly how can we examine planning strategies that can have a disconnect from the past which ignores the expanding presence of the poor in cities. Sheela Patel

A mainly rural country is ill-prepared for its coming urban boom http://www.economist.com/node/21563412

September, 29th 2012 | from the print edition some quotes from the article.

Putting off urbanisation can also mean postponing prosperity. When farmers leave the land to work in factories, call centres or almost anywhere else, their incomes and consumption almost always go up, lifting assorted development indicators. In China just over half the population is now urban.

Aromar Revi, director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), says that India’s 100 biggest cities, with 16% of its total population, contribute 43% of its national income. Even slum-dwellers are often productive manufacturers and traders.

Some urban centres will become megacities. According to one vision, India’s entire western seaboard could turn into a single conurbation, stretching from Ahmedabad in Gujarat in the north, past Mumbai and south to Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala. Inland, Delhi and its environs could be a hub for 60m-70m people, provided there is enough water.

Within two decades India will probably have six cities considerably bigger than New York, each with at least 10m people: Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai.

India is ill-equipped to make such places attractive drivers of growth and better living. “I see no improvement in thinking about cities,” says a senior figure in construction and retailing. Much land is privately held, but markets are opaque and development too often depends on cronies with political connections.

Mumbai is especially bad. “Property in the city has run riot,” says Mr Guzder, the Parsi businessman. Towers shoot up, especially around the Sea Link, a bridge connecting the southern part of the city to the north. “But we have no urban infrastructure, no widening of roads, no provision of police.” Prithviraj Chavan, the chief minister of Maharashtra, blames the city’s woes on a “deep nexus of property and political funding”.

CLUSTER DEVELOPMENT: MORE NECESSARY AFTER FSI LAND GRANTS TO PRIVATE HOTELS, AUGUST 2012

In an article in the  Hindustan Times, Chief minister Prithviraj Chavan announced that the government is looking into cluster development as a way to rehabilitate Mumbai slum-dwellers.  In the article Chavan expressed his fears at being able to accommodate all 14.5 lakh hutments of slumdwellers in the cluster plans, even if they manage to build housing projects as dense as 500 homes for square kilometer.  At the same time, though, Chavan spoke openly about FSI land that has recently been granted to five star hotels in the coastal regulatory zone.  Despite this practice being legal, it makes the housing crisis even more severe for Mumbai’s urban poor.

Chavan’s defense of the FSI hotel land transfer demonstrates that allotting land to the urban poor is not a current government priority.  Chavan himself says that “the only way out, as I see it, can be cluster development,” but 500 homes for square kilometer is an ambitious goal for even the most densely populated clusters.  Furthermore, while cluster development will provide shelter to those who need it this development strategy does not address the consumer needs of the urban poor; the poor need to buy food and supplies and also work for themselves in order to survive, but cluster development will geographically separate these people from business and market areas and make day-to-day shopping and bread-winning more difficult for them.

Clusters can be effective community layouts, but they need to be integrated with commercial areas so that families can take care of their other basic needs like food, water, and an income.  The less land that the government gives to commercial developers for hotels and other elite attractions, the more land will be available to service the basic needs of the urban poor even as they live in a cluster arrangement.  The government needs to look beyond what they are legally able to do in giving away land to private developers and think more critically about what is the best use of the land for the greatest number of people.  If they take collective good and the urban poor into account in their decision-making process, they will find that the available land can and will stretch to accommodate the urban poor who need living space.