Elsevier

Habitat International

Volume 50, December 2015, Pages 160-168
Habitat International

Scalable community-led slum upgrading: The Indian Alliance and community toilet blocks in Pune and Mumbai

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2015.08.020Get rights and content

Abstract

It is projected that there will be two billion slum dwellers in 2030. ‘Best practice’, market-led strategies of slum upgrading are failing to stem the growth of slums. The Indian Alliance has formulated a community-led Federation Model of slum upgrading that has underlain the delivery at scale of community toilet blocks in Pune and Mumbai. Issues pertaining to sanitation are especially pernicious in the high density slums. This paper identifies the circumstances that have made delivery at scale possible with a view to determining whether the Federation Model is scalable in different cities and contexts. It was found that ‘overlapping champions’ comprising organized communities, NGOs and municipal leaders enhance the ability to scale up in any one location and that without overlapping champions replicability at scale will be diminished.

Introduction

This paper explores a context where opposition to slum upgrading and relocation projects does not take the form of protest, violence and bulldozers. Instead, asserting “the primacy of the poor in driving their own politics, however much others may help them to do so” (Appadurai, 2001: 32), the paper considers the ability of organised communities to shape slum upgrading policies, programs and projects. To this end I assess the Federation Model (Model) of the Indian Alliance (Alliance) that focuses less on knowledge products than processes of community-led knowledge generation, precedent setting and knowledge exchange, and on policy advocacy.

The replicability and scalability of the Model and the role of communities are assessed in its application of the Pune community toilet block (CTB) precedent and its scaling up in Pune, the 2001 Slum Sanitation Program (SSP) in Mumbai and the 2007 Nirmal Mumbai Metropolitan Region Abhiyan (MMR), and the inclusion of this experience in the 2008 National Urban Sanitation Policy (NUSP). The Pune, SSP and MMR stories were selected because they are well-documented, presented by the Alliance as illustrative of scaling up a precedent, and the claimed success of the SSP has been the subject of debate, especially by McFarlane (2008). The Pune precedent, the SSP and the MMR provide a case study for exploring whether there were specific circumstances that lead to questions about the replicability and scalability of the Model in different contexts.

The Alliance was formed in 1984 and comprises Mahila Milan (Women Together), the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), together with SPARC Samudaya Nirman Sahayak (Nirman), a non-profit construction and financial arm of SPARC. Subsequently the Alliance played a leading role in the formation of Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) in 1996, which was registered in 1999. SDI's secretariat is located in Cape Town. Jockin Arputham, president of the NSDF, is also president of SDI, and Sheela Patel, founding director of SPARC, is chair of the board of SDI. SDI is ‘probably the world's biggest and most effective network for south–south exchange among poor people, inspired by the co-operative models and peaceful forms of protest that Jockin pioneered in Mumbai’ (Perry, 2014; no page). In effect, an evaluation of the application of the Model in India is also to reflect on the application of the SDI ‘methodology’ among its 34 affiliate countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Model and the methodology are essentially the same.

The paper is structured as follows. First, I describe my research methodology. Second, I define slums, provide an empirical backdrop for unhygienic sanitation in India and Mumbai, and explain why the focus is on CTBs. Third, I describe and comment on the Model and the approach to scaling up ‘precedents’. Fourth, the application of the Model is demonstrated through reference to the Pune CTB precedent and continues to the SSP and the MMR and to its inclusion in India's NUSP. Last, the question asked is whether the circumstances under which the precedent emerged and knowledge exchange occurred, and the SSP and MMR projects were framed, are readily replicable. My conclusion suggests that there were particular circumstances that enabled the Pune precedent and scaling up that will constrain not replicability, but replicability at scale in individual cities.

It should be noted what this paper does not do. Presentations on the topic have encountered the expectation that there will be a commentary on SPARC and that the topic will be problematized in the context of neo-liberalism. In the case of SPARC, there have been a number of commentaries (e.g. Appadurai, 2001, Buckley, 2011, McFarlane, 2008, McFarlane, 2004, Mitlin, 2013, Mitlin and Patel, 2004; Ramanath, 2009, Ramanath and Ebrahim, 2010, Roy, 2009b, Roy, 2009a), with some repudiating the other (see Buckley (2011) on Roy (2009a)). This paper does not add to this commentary, but does consider McFarlane's criticisms of SPARC's role in the SSP.

In the case of neo-liberalism, it is a defining feature of the Alliance's approach that it chooses to collaborate with government and financial institutions to obtain housing and services. This falls foul of McFarlane's (2004: 907) view that SPARC and, by association, the Alliance ‘works with the symptoms of poverty rather than the causes’. Open defecation is a symptom of poverty. A toilet enhances dignity, health and safety and concentrates the location of fecal matter for removal. Neo-liberalism undoubtedly provides the context for all that is to come, but to focus on causes rather than symptoms is to forego the struggle for a toilet. The Alliance addresses inequalities in the market through community organisation, confidence, capacity and relative power. It does not articulate its role as combatting neoliberalism.

Section snippets

Research methodology

The research methodology is based on teaching and research, which included semi-structured interviews and ethnographic research in 2012 and2014.1 In the case of teaching, in 2007/2008 at Columbia University I taught the policy and governance aspects of slum upgrading, which included classes on India and Mumbai and student research

Slum upgrading and improved sanitation

The paper employs UN HABITAT's definition of slums (2003: 18, emphasis in original). The five criteria employed by UN HABITAT represent the bare minimum, with a priority ranking implicit in the listing of the criteria. The criteria are:

[…] a slum household is defined as a group of individuals living under the same roof lacking one or more of the conditions below:

  • Access to improved water

  • Access to improved sanitation facilities

  • Sufficient living area, not overcrowded

  • Structural quality/durability

The Alliance's federation model

This presentation of the Model summarizes text from Alliance and SDI websites, academic publications and discussions.4

The impact of the Pune precedent

The backdrop to the Pune precedent is that, after its formation, the Alliance set out to pressure Mumbai and other large cities to provide and improve the maintenance of public toilets. Failing in this attempt, with financial and technical assistance from Homeless International and some other donors, the Alliance began ‘to build community toilets with the participation of groups in the communities”, during the course of which it introduced many “innovations in design’ (IHC, 2012: 2). ‘The

An assessment of the replicability of the model in the light of the Pune precedent

It cannot be assumed that the success of the Pune precedent and subsequent scaling up is both replicable and scalable. The reason for emphasizing the and can be explained through reference to the Langrug precedent in Stellenbosch, South Africa (SDI, no date). The CTB precedent was adopted in Langug following a knowledge exchange visit by the Informal Sector Network (a member of the South African Alliance) and senior government officials to Kampala, Uganda, from where there had been an earlier

Conclusion

This paper is premised on the limited success of market-led, expert-based slum upgrading best practices. The focus is on whether there are community-led slum upgrading processes that are scalable. With the evidence that community-led knowledge generation and exchange process have been implemented at scale in Pune and Mumbai, the obvious question concerns whether the Model employed is replicable and is scalable in different contexts.

Replicability and scalability are not the same thing. The

Acknowledgements

I am especially indebted to Sheela Patel and SPARC for hosting the research while I was in Mumbai, and for providing many contacts in and outside government. Sheela, Sunder Burra, Vinodkumar Rao, other SPARC staff and members of Mahila Milan who indulged my endless questions are gratefully acknowledged. Piyush Tiwari and Sheela Patel provided me with introductions to a remarkable group of persons in Delhi that included academics and persons in NGOs, government and development agencies. To

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