Sunday 30 September 2012

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”.

Friday 28 September 2012

SUMMER INTERNS /VOLUNTEERS AT SPARC, SEPTEMBER 2012

Through the years at any given time we have many interns and volunteers who come to work with us. This summer we had three interns – two from the USA and one from France. We had two volunteers as well for a short period of time.
Ariane Cohin worked on the incremental housing report, and did some diagrams of the evolution of the construction (sections and plans) for every household. She did some 3D models of these houses on Sketch-up as well.
Ginny Fahs worked on two major projects: launching the SPARC Citywatch Blog and doing background research on the possibility of instituting a private donations platform through the SPARC website.


One of the volunteers, Nova, helped in creating state and city databases regarding urban re- forms, local NGO and CBO networks, summarized reports on consultations at Kerala, updated housing and sanitation tables for the Annual Report and prepared the DSR for Pune and Ahmed- nagar in Excel. Lastly, also created a reference for charts in Excel and what they are used for. While Jayesh helped in doing some proof reading of the reports.

Learnings from SPARC:
We asked the interns and volunteers what they have taken from the SPARC experience. Some of the feedback that we got was:
  • Better idea on incremental housing process & challenges they face while upgrading their houses
  • How difficult it is to implement any broad strategy in slums because of the huge variety of problems that require a different approach and solutions
  • Learnt about Indian politics & policies & current events surrounding urban poverty and slums
  • What effective community organization looks like, methods of mobilizing & catalyzing activity on the ground

Monday 17 September 2012

THE DIRTY PICTURE OF SANITATION, JULY 2012

In July 2012, the ministry of Urban Development of the Government of India published an advisory to cities about the challenges of sanitation and a national commitment to universal sanitation provision in urban India. In 2009 the Cabinet passed a policy on universal urban sanitation called the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, and released resources for a National Sanitation campaign. 400 cities were provided resources to undergo a city wide sanitation review and be- tween that survey and the census the picture of urban India is definitely DIRTY.

Clearly there are technical and financial challenges in dealing with provision of universal sanitation.
Firstly, the country does not have a universal commitment to treat sewerage and most cities lack sewerage management and hardly have sewers.

Secondly, if most areas of a city or town are deemed ‘slums’ and most of these are not recognized, the challenges are that they have no water and sanitation.

Thirdly, dense slums with houses less that 200 sq feet can hardly have toilets inside the house if there is no water and sewerage disposal. Yet ambivalence about community toilets makes this provision of sanitation impossible.

Fourthly, slums – which are every politicians vote banks – find that the possibility of a community toilet being built in their areas is one more location of a battle between parties to own and manage the toilet and often the community which should be managing this gets left behind.

And finally, no one who does not defecate in the open cares about the plight of those who do. The solution lies in a commitment to make sanitation universal, come what may.

ANSWERING QUESTIONS ABOUT SPARC, SEPTEMBER 2012

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.

Wednesday 12 September 2012

STATUS OF ACCESS TO SANITATION TO URBAN POOR, SEPTEMBER 2012


According to the National Urban Sanitation Policy, as of 2009, 12.04 million (7.87 %) urban households do not have access to latrines and defecate in the open; approx. 18.88 million (27.63%) urban households use either community or shared latrines. 12.47 million (18.5%) households do not have access to a drainage network; 26.83 million (39.8%) households are connected to open drains. The data also shows that the situation is worse in non-notified slums (slums that are on central government land and others not formally recognized by the municipal government) that have no legal tenure status and are therefore not entitled to civic provision of basic services: the percentage of notified and non-notified slums without latrines is 17 percent and 51 percent respectively. More than 37% of the total human excreta generated in urban India are disposed off unsafely.
Since 2010, SELAVIP a private foundation that supports housing projects to shelter very poor families living in cities of Latin America, Africa and Asia has been giving grants to SPARC to assist poor and vulnerable households that cannot pay their community contribution under the ongoing BSUP projects being implemented by the Alliance in Pune and Puri.
For 2013, SELAVIP had asked NGOs to again submit proposals on the same grounds of supporting very poor families. But this time, SPARC thought of making use of these funds to provide either individual toilet to families who can afford to put in some amount of contribution, renovate & repair existing community toilet blocks or construct new toilet blocks in slums where there are no toilets at all. Over the past 26 years, the Alliance has observed that small neighbourhood associations of the poor, sometimes self-organized and sometimes organized by NGOs, are unable to effectively negotiate with service providers to cater to their needs – be it a water tap, relief against evictions or a toilet. Increasingly, land-based entitlements including sanitation require the aggregation of a very large critical mass of households with unmet needs to make their presence felt and to seek response to their demands.
In order to come up with slums where the project can be implemented, an analysis of the data collected through settlement profiling conducted by the Federation and Mahila Milan was taken into consideration. We took up three cities of Maharashtra –Ahmadnagar (12 settlements), Malegaon (6 settlements) and Nasik (14 settlements) and decided to concentrate on only those settlements where Mahila Milan and Federation have a presence.

What the data analysis says

Ahmadnagar
  • 2 toilet blocks need repairs in terms of providing water, electricity connection.
  • 4 settlements have no toilets along with insufficient land to construct a new toilet block
  • 2 settlements though having community toilets are not sufficient for the population size. Having space to construct new toilet blocks provision of individual toilets is also a possibility
Malegaon
  • 1 settlement where communities have enough space to construct individual toilets and can even afford to pay for it if given a loan.
  • 4 settlements have no toilets thus defecate in the open. Also there is no land to construct new toilet blocks.
Nasik
  • 6 settlements have individual toilets
  • 4 toilet blocks need repairing – fitting doors, taps, water & electricity connections
  • 1 settlement which has no toilet facility therefore people defecate in the open

Monday 10 September 2012

THE GUARDIAN MET SDI AT THE WORLD URBAN FORUM, SEPTEMBER 2012

Guardian article on the power of slum surveys to give voice to millions of slum dwellers – who, in spite of their numbers, remain largely invisible – excluded from claiming their rights to the city, from state investment and from participating in urban planning. Surveys have helped fight evictions and produce strategies that work for the urban poor  - more case studies in the April 2012 edition of Environment and Urbanisation.


Wednesday 5 September 2012

SUPPORTING DATA COLLECTION BY THE POOR, SHEELA PATEL, SEPTEMBER 2012


Data in the sphere of development has been effectively used for big picture questions like measuring levels of poverty and malnutrition or assessing the health and educational standards of a country or region’s population. For those of us who have been working on a smaller scale on issues like urban poverty, data about cities is very silent on issues related to poverty, slums and all forms of informality. Information is never accurate, it is always outdated, and it is seldom comprehensive. Often just a few informal settlements will be included. At the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) and Slum Dwellers International (SDI), we have found that using the poor to collect
and record data about themselves both develops their capabilities and produces better data.

SPARC and SDI use what we call ‘enumerations’ –data about slums and their land and amenities status, and data about households. We find that this is a powerful tool. First, it creates the organizational form of social movements: when everyone answers the same questions about who they are, what they do in the city, where they live and what their challenges are, it produces an identity; it produces solidarity and it forms the basis for developing a consensus on collective priorities. It also forms the basis for dialogue with the city or state, both to legitimize data that the poor collect about themselves and to define what the development issues are and where investments should be made. Because the data can be aggregated and disaggregated, they can also become a benchmark of impact and the value of investments. 
In many cases, foundations have assisted us in developing the infrastructure and capability to design, collect and store data. Often grantmakers need to see the impact and value of slum dwellers collecting information before they become convinced about financing the process. Generally, they see the collection, management and use of data as activities for researchers,academics and state agencies; their initial view of communities collecting data is that it is an unnecessary duplication.

However, we have been able to demonstrate that communities can often collect better data about themselves and use it more effectively than professionals can. Not only would it be extremely expensive to contract an organization, say, to undertake interviews with the inhabitants of 200 informal settlements from all over Namibia, or to map and produce profiles of 330 informal settlements in Cuttack (India), but the professionals would face formidable obstacles because of their lack of local knowledge. They would be working in areas with no maps, no lists of buildings, often no
street names or details of where the settlement’s boundaries are. There would be pressure on interviewers to work quickly. Furthermore, they may not speak the language of those they interview, which adds to the costs and to the difficulties of getting accurate responses. They would also have to contend with suspicion from people who feel
threatened by outsiders asking questions – for instance, those who fear eviction, those engaged in illegal activities, or illegal immigrants.


Through our advocacy over time, more and more cities and government institutions have been commissioning data gathering projects from organizations of the poor and the NGOs that work with them. They have seen that the organizations that conventionally collect data don’t know how to work in slums, and the results of community-driven
exercises have surprised them. In Old Fadama in Accra, for example, the enumerations showed a much larger population than local government estimates; it also showed the scale of residents’ involvement with the local economy and the extent of public infrastructure and services. This documentation helped discourage successive
governments from their intention to evict. By contrast, the enumerations in Joe Slovo in Cape Town showed a smaller than expected population, which made in situ upgrading, which locals had been agitating for, more feasible.

These are just two examples of the sort of detailed and accurate picture of informal settlements that can emerge when the poor collect data about themselves, and the uses to which this can be put.

SUPPORTING DATA COLLECTION BY THE POOR, SHEELA PATEL, SEPTEMBER 2012


Data in the sphere of development has been effectively used for big picture questions like measuring levels of poverty and malnutrition or assessing the health and educational standards of a country or region’s population. For those of us who have been working on a smaller scale on issues like urban poverty, data about cities is very silent on issues related to poverty, slums and all forms of informality. Information is never accurate, it is always outdated, and it is seldom comprehensive. Often just a few informal settlements will be included. At the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) and Slum Dwellers International (SDI), we have found that using the poor to collect and record data about themselves both develops their capabilities and produces better data.

SPARC and SDI use what we call ‘enumerations’ –data about slums and their land and amenities status, and data about households. We find that this is a powerful tool. First, it creates the organizational form of social movements: when everyone answers the same questions about who they are, what they do in the city, where they live and what their challenges are, it produces an identity; it produces solidarity and it forms the basis for developing a consensus on collective priorities. It also forms the basis for dialogue with the city or state, both to legitimize data that the poor collect about themselves and to define what the development issues are and where investments should be made. Because the data can be aggregated and disaggregated, they can also become a benchmark of impact and the value of investments. 
In many cases, foundations have assisted us in developing the infrastructure and capability to design, collect and store data. Often grantmakers need to see the impact and value of slum dwellers collecting information before they become convinced about financing the process. Generally, they see the collection, management and use of data as activities for researchers,academics and state agencies; their initial view of communities collecting data is that it is an unnecessary duplication.

However, we have been able to demonstrate that communities can often collect better data about themselves and use it more effectively than professionals can. Not only would it be extremely expensive to contract an organization, say, to undertake interviews with the inhabitants of 200 informal settlements from all over Namibia, or to map and produce profiles of 330 informal settlements in Cuttack (India), but the professionals would face formidable obstacles because of their lack of local knowledge. They would be working in areas with no maps, no lists of buildings, often no street names or details of where the settlement’s boundaries are. There would be pressure on interviewers to work quickly. Furthermore, they may not speak the language of those they interview, which adds to the costs and to the difficulties of getting accurate responses. They would also have to contend with suspicion from people who feel threatened by outsiders asking questions – for instance, those who fear eviction, those engaged in illegal activities, or illegal immigrants.


Through our advocacy over time, more and more cities and government institutions have been commissioning data gathering projects from organizations of the poor and the NGOs that work with them. They have seen that the organizations that conventionally collect data don’t know how to work in slums, and the results of community-driven exercises have surprised them. In Old Fadama in Accra, for example, the enumerations showed a much larger population than local government estimates; it also showed the scale of residents’ involvement with the local economy and the extent of public infrastructure and services. This documentation helped discourage successive governments from their intention to evict. By contrast, the enumerations in Joe Slovo in Cape Town showed a smaller than expected population, which made in situ upgrading, which locals had been agitating for, more feasible.

These are just two examples of the sort of detailed and accurate picture of informal settlements that can emerge when the poor collect data about themselves, and the uses to which this can be put.

Saturday 1 September 2012

JOCKIN REPORTS ON SOME OF HIS ENGAGEMENTS, SEPTEMBER 2012

A Large team from SDI attended the World Urban Forum in Naples in the First week of September. The delegation from india was Celine D’Cruz, (SPARC/SDI) A Jockin, John Samuel, (NSDF) Parveen and Savita ( Mahila Milan ) . There were leaders from several other countries from Asia and Africa in the delegation.
SDI had many events which were at their exhibition center, several networking sessions in which they showcased the work of SDI and its affiliates, and many SDI representatives participated in the events of UNHABITAT in the official program as well as networking programs of other organizations. Over the next few weeks as different members report their presentations, views and activities these will trickle into the blogs.

Jockin at the Panel of “What needs to Change”?
In one of the main Dialogues of the UNHABITAT the question asked to all the Panelists was, “what can you say is needs to change to make cities work for all?
Jockin challenged the person who asked the question and also the audience: “ since 1976 when this discussion began in the 1st Habitat event in Vancouver, what have we all done since then to make what we discuss actualize in practice… we keep coming to these events, and we ask each other these questions and then we go away only to ask the same questions again.

Jockin On a networking Panel on Challenges of Sanitation:
In a networking event on sanitation, Jockin Challenges all the others in the panel and audience… “have you constructed even one toilet? In someone’s home, or a toilet shared by several families, or a community toilet in a slum?”
His perspective was that the actual DOING demonstrates the real challenges that stop universal sanitation from taking place.
Of all the MDGs that are critical fo rthe urban poor, this one is very tough because it’s the lack of practice, and learning and evolving solutions that has stagnated this development investment. Not money, not technology and policy.