SPARC annual review 2010-11 1 Contents 1. Cover 2. Contents 3. Message from the Director 4. Reflections of Relationships of alliance with others 5. Contd 6. Understanding the Alliance 7. Jockin Arputham 8. Creating solutions for the bottom 30% 9. Mapping Vulnerability 10. Focus on women centered development 11. Savings and loans facilitates women's’ participation 12. Area Resource Centers concept and practices 13. Learning through Peer Exchanges 14. The value of creating a critical mass/ The federation model of community organization 15. Nanded working at city wide level 16. How the poor secure tenure 17. Enumeration and Surveys 18. Creating Identity 19. Mapping slums: Upgrading strategy with technology options, Linkages with UNHABITAT and IIED 20. Power of Learning by doing 21. House model exhibition 22. Housing options for the urban poor 23. Bangalore federations assisting BSUP 24. The PUNE BSUP project 25. The Bhubaneswar BSUP project 26. The Puri BSUP project 27. Precedent Setting and Cycles of scale 28. A JNNURM and RAY of hope and the alliance 29. 12th five year plan In transition JNNURM and RAY and 11th and 12th five year plan. 30. Choosing Relocation for secure tenure. 31. Making tough choices and coping with consequences 32. Ongoing challenge of relocating Pavement Dwellers in Mumbai 33. First Apna street audio documentaries now a book 34. Mumbai Urban Transport Project II (MUTPII) 35. What it has facilitated others to explore 36. Mumbai Airport 37. MBPT: Mumbai Port Trust 38. Tata Power 39. Cuttack 40. Dharavi Redevelopment 41. Dharavi Redevelopment 42. Creating innovative governance structures in slums 43. Police Panchayats: safety and security. 44. Sanitation Challenges 45. Sanitation Challenges - federation responses 46. Sanitation and slum dwellers solutions 47. Sanitation delivery 48. Events and conferences 49. Planning Monitoring and Learning 50. In Feb 2011 51. Visitors and interns 52. Slum Dwellers International engagement with affiliates63 53. Slum Dwellers International engagement with affiliates6 2 Message from the Director 2010 was a year of continuing growth for SPARC and new opportu- Measuring urban poverty: Measurement of poverty is a serious development business. How it is done is a deeply political nities for learning. process. In the last few years, many state governments in India have ended up having more families deemed below the pov- erty line than are present in the city, to get increased allocation of central funds. Manipulation of statistics, redefinition of Around 35 city to city exchanges took place what constitutes poverty and shaping of data to show reduction of households below the poverty line or above the poverty line are all happening side by side. All depending on what masters dictating the statisticians want to proclaim. There have 7 international exchanges been several committees to define the measurements of poverty. This is a crucial issue at the point of time when the Plan- ning Commission begins to undertake the 12th Plan strategy and allocations. Debates about hunger and food security are also 9 state level exchanges ongoing in parallel. Inflation on food staples, lentils, onions and staples having to be purchased at sky rocketing prices due to speculation and millions of tons of food grain rotting because it’s been badly stored. Underlining this whole situation are 4 new research projects — the unin- impoverished households and those in distress getting no resources claimed on their behalf by the state, along with scams tended consequences of slum concerning how the money that was intended for them gets diverted. resettlement, the work of the Mahila Milan Police Panchayats, Development planning and informality: Planning is a deeply political process that can end up meaningless if treated as just the community’s definition of a technical exercise. In Indian cities, current planning is being confronted by reality on a wide range of issues, foremost poverty and the incremental being challenges brought by slum dwellers. In the last few years, the Alliance has entered into many discussions about city housing process. Federation planning and urban poverty. Development plans of cities seem to be a piece of fiction created to fulfill a statutory obliga- groups also grew, adding tion. From the view point of the federations, these plans are only really used when it is useful to the state to deny the needs of the poor. Yet in the absence of a reality check of how and why cities grow, most cities have slum dwellers who squat 33 new savings groups. With this where they can in relationship to their survival and livelihoods, and real estate developers can connive and bribe to obtain growth, the federations also permissions to build upper income homes and commercial spaces. continued to strengthen their savings and credit capabilities: Right to the City: There have been many debates about who gets to obtain the rights to the city. Development agencies in 2010 have, by and large, provided support to professional activists to fight for the cause of those who find their rights denied. The Mahila Milan and the federation historical development of the NSDF and Mahila Milan has shown that sustained leadership development amongst the slum saved Rs. 21,867,694.00 dwellers can transform victims of evictions into those who produce solutions, not only to their own crisis, but to larger city problems. The trajectory of these processes is undoubtedly messy and often it is hard to track and document. Capacity 4,101 settlement profiles in 7 states building, strategy formulation and execution often occur in ways that are strange and unfamiliar to professional development and union territories of India. management evaluators. We in SPARC now see clear processes, patterns and strategies and have developed the capacity and skills to support them: to stand by while they get explored, contribute when needed, back stopping when strategies get The federation mapped 110 settle- executed and then document and disseminate information about the process while communities move on to their next chal- ments using GIS in Bangalore lenge. and 200+ in Cuttack, Orissa. Creating Policy from Practice: Communities learn by doing and create solutions that in turn produce policy. This process JNNURM projects Contracts for over demonstrates that just developing a good policy is not enough; it needs champions to breach the dissent and opposition, and 3000 units in 4 cities of which nurture new processes and actors to take it forward. In 1985, SPARC began to work with pavement dwellers. Women pave- 727 houses are under con- ment dwellers taught us ‘professionals’ that when they have no other option but to live on the pavement it’s time to dia- struction in Pune, Orissa and logue and negotiate, rather than agitate and argue. Those explorations with the pavement dwellers, in turn, showed us that Bangalore. the city administration and the state had no idea who the pavement dwellers were and why they were there. When we asked Sanitation projects also continued others to take on research and found no takers, we undertook a study that was a census of more than 6,000 pavement fami- apace: as of March 2011, under lies. We created the enumeration strategy which is now implemented globally by Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan and which we continue to use in India to produce data about the poor and form federations. In 1995, we sat on a task force Toilet Scheme in Mumbai, and created a policy in Maharashtra under which pavement dwellers received equal status as slum dwellers. Later that year, SPARC constructed 289 toilet we designed the Mumbai Urban Transport Project II (MUTPII) relocation policy based on principles and practices developed blocks with a total of 5780 for pavement dwellers. In 2005, the State Government of Maharashtra and the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai toilet seats and 37 toilet blocks developed the Mahatma Gandhi Pada Patha Wasi Yojana (Scheme for Pavement Dwellers) and has since relocated 10,000 of with 855 seats under MSDP II the 30,000 households in the city. These same principles guide our support to the residents of Dharavi, who since 2004 have resisted the Redevelopment Plan In 2010, In January 2011, Sheela Patel and Jockin Arputham for Dharavi and today have devised alternatives which can be community driven, managed and executed. The process of were awarded the 2011 Padma studying the causes of dissent produces the basis of understanding the logic of ways in which dissent occurs. From there, it is Shri awards, which is the possible to explore ways to produce the foundational principles on which a solution can be formulated. This produces a rela- fourth highest civilian award in tionship of critical engagement with the state, where concerns by one set of communities can lead to dialogue representing India. the dissent, while at the same time alliances can be created with other sets of actors within state to produce and execute solutions. Federations and their mature leadership have helped us all to accept that whether it is the state or private sector, or people from different class backgrounds, no one is simply black or white, good or bad. Each has interests and concerns, The most valuable resource that the Alliance provides communities with is the capacity to explore, to test and make mistakes, to correct and then refine solutions before they scale up. The Alliance acts as a crucible to develop innovative strategies, experiment with them and then scale them up. The sheer size of the federation also functions as a risk manager, which supports this experimentation and is able to absorb the implications of any risks with the many successes. The federations’ leadership have been amazing hosts, teachers and fast learners. They have continued to play host to a wide range of guests, politicians, administrators, international ministers, academics, who come to visit them.