Combining top-down and grassroots
land approaches in Mumbai
By Sundar Burra
Mumbai, the former Bombay, is India's economic capital
but more than half its 12 million population are living
in slums. Over the years, authorities have implemented
a variety of policies to provide adequate housing
to the poor, with some degree of success. But if anything,
government's largely top-down policies and the market's
own shortcomings have highlighted the pressing need
for community involvement in slum policies.
In Mumbai, slum policies have evolved from slum clearance
in the 1950s and 1960s to protection and provision
of civic amenities in the 1970s. In 1976, local government
conducted a census of slum-dwellers and issued so-called
photo-passes entitling them to relocation should the
land they occupied be required for public purposes.
Central government provided grants towards a number
of basic amenities including water, sanitation and
power.
Cross-subsidisation was first introduced in the 1980s
under the Bombay Urban Development Project (BUDP).
One of the schemes, which ultimately benefited 85,000
families, provided land and services to a variety
of people, with the better-off segments of the population
subsidising slum-dwellers.
Land tenure and civil society
The BUDP was the first scheme recognizing the importance
of both land tenure and civil society in housing policies
for the poor. Its Slum Upgrading Programme granted
tenure of local government land to cooperative societies
of slum-dwellers, and public amenities were provided
on a cost-recovery basis. Some 20,000 families benefited.
The programme launched in 1995 by the newly-established
Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) decided that a
higher proportion of the area of any land was to be
made available for building. Cross-subsidisation for
slum-dwellers was supported by revenue from the sale
of any extra tenements built, or of the right to build
other tenements at other locations.
The SRA programme entitled existing slum-dwellers
to free accommodation or, if required, relocation.
The scheme was also the first to include pavement-dwellers.
To date, only 20,000 SRA tenements have been completed
and another 80,000 are at various stages of development,
against a local government target of 800,000. The
problem was that the builders edged some of the slum-dwellers
out, and a collapse in real estate prices provided
a poor incentive to complete the scheme.
The way forward
Despite these market-related shortcomings, the SRA
scheme remains the only way for Mumbai's urban poor
to get both access to otherwise unaffordable land
and subsidies from the market.
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| Making the building blocks
in Mumbai. Photo © Alliance of SPARC, NSDF
and Mahila Milan. |
The SRA scheme has thrown open the doors for cooperative
societies of slum dwellers to participate in their
own redevelopment and with adequate financial support.
In this respect, the Society for the Promotion of
Area Resource Centres (SPARC), of which this author
is an official, is playing a significant role, in
conjunction with two other non-governmental organizations:
the National Slum-Dwellers' Association and a group
known as Mahila Milan (`women together' in
Hindi).
The alliance we form sees people's participation
- and women's in particular - as central to the project
of creating housing and infrastructure for the urban
poor. So far, under a project sponsored by the World
Bank, we have resettled more than 12,000 families
who were living along railway tracks. The Municipal
Corporation of Greater Mumbai has also hired us to
implement a US$10-million project to bring basic sanitation
facilities to thousands of families.
The challenge is to create conditions for community-based
slum upgrading where the poor can collectively determine
the process themselves, rather than being objects
of private developers' designs or hostage to political
patronage.
Still, increasing the supply of serviced land is
crucial to bringing real estate prices down, and this
requires a combination of land market forces, political
will and administrative vision.
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| It is an uphill struggle
to improve slums like this in Mumbai. Photo ©
Alliance of SPARC, NSDF and Mahila Milan. |
Private operators could take up greenfield projects
on vacant lands, which would force clearer lines of
divide between the profit-oriented and the community
sectors.
Central and local government need to reform existing
financial channels to provide infrastructure to non-serviced
land.
As for communities, they need to build capacity if
they want to drive the process of slum-upgrading and
carry it out to the appropriate, admittedly large-scale
called for in Mumbai.
Sundar Burra is an Adviser at the Society for the
Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), an Indian
NGO.
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