The first ever complete census of India’s large slum population suggests that, one in six urban Indian residents’ lives in slums or squatter settlements, equivalent to roughly 17.4% of urban Indian households. Slums are likely to play host to over 100 million people by 2017 in India, and Mumbai, the financial capital of India, has one of the largest populations of slum dwellers at roughly 41% of 20.5 million people that populate the city Delhi has 49% of its population living in slums without any basic civic amenities.
In India, given the rapid rate of urbanization at an annual rate of 2.4% combined with migration and land scarcity, the incidence of growing urban poverty, slums and illegal squatter settlements in cities are inevitable. Further, these settlements are prone to disasters and health risks given that the temporary houses are made of materials that could easily ignite or collapse. The debate around slum resettlement and redevelopment continues unabated in India and is fraught with political, economic and social ramifications. What emerges as a crucial need is the empowerment of the urban poor residing in the slums through real solutions to resolve their housing needs.
The Housing Conundrum
India has faced a host of slum housing crises. During the 11th Five Year Plan, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation suggested that the urban housing shortage in the country was 24.7 million units. The Government of India has facilitated various schemes and policies to uplift the urban poor; the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) is the overarching mission. Under the JNNURM, there have been many schemes and programs like the Integrated Housing and Slum Development Program, Basic Services for the Urban Poor, and Slum Rehabilitation Authority that have either come to a halt or been delayed because of various planning, budgetary and implementation challenges.
While the schemes emanate from the Central Government, provision of affordable housing lies in the hands of the State Governments, and different states have different approaches to address the problem. In 2006, in Delhi, eligible slum dwellers were resettled in colonies mostly on the urban periphery and their homes in the slums were demolished for commercial purposes. Similarly in Mumbai, those who have lived in slums since 1995 are entitled to a free 225 square feet apartment from the Mumbai Slum Rehabilitation Authority – only, these could be far away from their slum locations. These resettlement colonies are far away from job opportunities, markets and essentials like schools and hospitals, making survival a nightmare. Although aimed at empowering slum dwellers with ownership rights, the process of resettlement in most cases has in fact stripped them off their livelihood options. Further, there has been an influx of slum inhabitants’ since 1995, who are not included in this scheme – and they are rendered homeless when the slum is demolished.
The most recent scheme related to housing, the Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) was introduced in 2011 under the JNNURM with an agenda of making India slum-free. This scheme is comprehensive and includes mapping of slum communities, community involvement in projects, rental housing (25% of residential stock that has been set out for slum housing is dedicated to rental housing) and property rights. The preparatory phase of the scheme ended on June 2, 2013. The progress has been slow and there are budgetary concerns with the existing structure in which the Central Government bears 50% of the cost of redeveloping existing slums and creating new affordable homes, and the state government, municipalities, and beneficiaries are to bear the remaining 50%. Many state governments have flagged off their inability to meet this financial requirement.
Budget constraints are not the only challenge that the RAY faces. Micro Home Solutions, a Delhi-based social enterprise with a vision of creating socially inclusive cities, worked on a RAY pilot with the Mahila Housing Trust – the pilot eventually did not take off. Mukta Naik, Architect and Urban Planner at Micro Home Solutions explains that “one of the challenges with any of these schemes is that, regardless of the push from the central government, there is a need for municipalities and State Governments to take a step forward and understand the critical need of developing appropriate housing.” Apart from this the other hurdle is the lack of capacity of local government resources to understand issues of design and resource management. The RAY is going to go through some changes where the focus is going to be on redeveloping or upgrading slums in situ, where the central government would give funds for basic amenities and an additional interest subsidy on loans to slum dwellers to improve their houses.
Wanted: An Integrated Approach
Experts point out that the issue at hand is not about getting rid of the slums alone, but about empowering those who live in the slums without disrupting their livelihoods. Many NGOs, social enterprises and community-based organizations in the housing space advocate the need for a sound approach where the community is equally involved in the planning and implementation process so that they address different aspects of the housing problem.
Shelter Associates, an NGO engaged in advocacy for appropriate housing policies, also works with the community to implement housing projects. One of their successes has been the resettling of slums from Sangliwadi to Sanjay Nagar in Sangli, a city in Maharashtra under the Integrated Housing and Slum Development Program. The organization mobilized the slum dwellers to work with the municipal bodies in planning and implementation of the housing project. During the planning phase, weekly meetings were organized with the municipal commissioner to address the slum dwellers’ concerns. Currently, construction is underway, and the slum dwellers have been temporarily relocated to a transit camp. “Slums cannot be viewed in isolation” suggests Pratima Joshi, Founderof Shelter Associates. “There is a need to ensure that any redevelopment or rehabilitation doesn’t affect the basic livelihoods of the people and they are still able to access essential economic and social opportunities.”
Another NGO, the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers (SPARC), has been engaged in housing and infrastructure issues of the urban poor. SPARC, in collaboration with the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan, now known as “The Alliance” has worked in over 70 cities across the country to develop a sustainable solution to the housing and infrastructural gap faced by the urban poor. The Alliance mobilizes communities to develop their own housing projects and engages the Government in the process to build long term housing solutions. “The issue with the existing schemes is that they incorporate a target driven approach where the mandate is to build a certain number of houses because of which the environment and needs of the slum dwellers are not taken into consideration,” suggests Sundar Burra, Advisor, SPARC.
More often than not, slum dwellers build their homes incrementally using local masons and contractors. This method, while being affordable and convenient to them is unsafe and the houses are poorly designed, lacking adequate ventilation and other amenities. Picking up the concept of incremental housing, SPARC developed an incremental housing strategy for inner city slums that helps in organically improving housing conditions without uprooting the slum dwellers. SPARC has helped slums across the country to incrementally upgrade their housing structures with efficient techniques and thus, has showcased a model for affordable housing through community participation. Micro Home Solutions is also building on-the-ground solutions for housing by catalyzing the concept of incremental housing.
Apart from sensitivity to location for slum resettlement, experts point out that planners also need to ensure that resources and land are used more judiciously. Given the scarcity of land and the need for convenient housing, the most optimal way to use land and ensure convenience to the dwellers, is through building ‘low rise, high density’ structures, suggest Burra, Naik and Joshi. High-rise structures have proven to be extremely inconvenient for slum dwellers and should be an option only if the population density is significant in a city.
Finally, not everyone can afford to own or purchase land in cities – least of all, the urban poor. Micro Home Solutions is trying to deliver market-based solutions to issue of land and housing. Most migrants who settle in illegal settlements are unable to afford housing or have a permanent house. “Rental Housing can be answer to the affordability question of the urban poor” while having decent returns for the owners and managers, suggests Naik. The informal sector seems to be thriving in this concept – with informal leasing and sub-letting of slum structures at high rental rates in cities like Mumbai. The government can successfully adopt the concept of subsidized rental housing with access basic services like water and sanitation, and further provide technical and financial assistance to owners with regard to unlocking tenure, which could go hand in hand with the current mandate of the RAY.
Challenges to Provision of Affordable Housing
The path to providing the urban poor with legal and affordable homes is not so smooth. Complex land security issues crop up from land scarcity and the plethora of land scams around it. The need is increasingly “to identify tenable lands,” suggests Burra. While the Government has made land tenure mandatory in their schemes, the implementation is rather weak. NGOs like SPARC and Shelter Associates are working towards securing land tenure in all their projects and advocating its importance to the government. Identifying ownership of land is difficult as paper work, if done at all, is complicated. Mobilizing the community to identify land ownership might work in many cases. More often than not, all parties are not involved in negotiations of land leading to further insecurity. “If the land is privately owned, it is important to engage both parties in the negotiation to gain secure tenure” suggests Joshi. The other issue is distribution of tenure. “One way to ensure that the land tenure is not misplaced or misused, is to organize slum dwellers into cooperatives, thereby formalizing the locality where the tenure belongs to the locality and not to individual entities,” says Joshi.
The other issue faced by urban planners is the lack of comprehensive data on slums and illegal settlements. SPARC has been involved in mapping slums, where it mobilizes the community in the process. Shelter Associates has also developed slum surveys and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to map illegal settlements and slums in Sangli and Pune city. The idea is not only to map the number of slums and slum dwellers but also to get a sense of the environment they live in, the amenities required and their livelihood options to ensure informed planning.
Slum Free Cities – A Possibility?
The government is often criticized for using a universal city wide approach to slum housing. Most government mandates suggest 25 square meters that are to be allocated per beneficiary. “This certainly works well if the allocation was in large and densely populated cities like Delhi or Mumbai. However, in tier 2 or tier 3 cities, the land scarcity is lesser and the slum dwellers are used to living in a 40-60 square meters space. During redevelopment that needs to be taken into consideration,” says Naik. Added to this, it is necessary to bring to light that a common method of redevelopment or in situ or incremental housing will not suffice the need of every slum. “A city wide approach is essential for mapping slum pockets, however, the planning of better housing needs a slum-to-slum development model given the difference in nature of the slums,” suggest Joshi, Burra and Naik. To ensure sustainable slum housing, community participation becomes an imperative for informed localized planning.
However, the bigger challenge faced is an ideological one – for most people, slums are informal and therefore unwanted. While slums represent a story of absolute poverty, they also represent a story of successful informal economic activity and livelihoods. Dharavi in Mumbai, for instance, is a well-known example of bustling economic activity and innovation for survival. The critical need is to ensure that housing and livelihoods go hand in hand making community participation in the process imperative. There needs to be an “institutional and attitudinal orientation in involving people” from all the stakeholder groups, suggests Burra. In a conference put together by Micro Home Solutions, Naik states that the CEO of Delhi Shelter Board agreed upon the fact that most schemes fail because the informality is either rejected or ignored. There is a need for development that happens with the slums and the urban poor – and not in spite of them – which then changes the mandate from slum-free cities to socially inclusive cities. (
http://urbanpoverty.intellecap.com/?p=1018)
Noopur Desai
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