Mumbai (formerly Bombay) has seen an overwhelming influx of migrants from the rural hinterland of India since the early 1900s.  However in the name of modern development the number of informal settlements in the city has increased exponentially. Today 6 million people, half of Mumbai’s population, live in slums and another 1 million live on the pavement in one room shelters unsuitable for the 5-10 that live in them.  Migrants arrive with no money, no skills and no knowledge of the city, grouping together in settlements set up alongside railway lines, airport sidings, ports or major roads.  Families live with no running water, no sanitation facilities and no electricity, just a small shelter erected to give protection and privacy to sleep without fear of harassment.  To prepare food residents pay more than double the market rate to get one or two pots of water a day. The lack of both sanitation and privacy means the settlement streets become the only available toilet, a place to wash and prepare food.  The shortage of housing and abject poverty means that everyone lives in fear of the settlement being bulldozed to the ground.

Grass Roots Organising
For the last 20 years the ‘Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers’ (SPARC), Mahila Milan and the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) have been successful in fighting to gain basic human rights for Mumbai’s migrant community.  SPARC, in it’s inception a small group of outraged professionals began work with slum and pavement dwellers in 1984, Organising against the routine demolitions that were taking place.  As their success grew the group set up community based women’s groups to initiate savings and credit schemes. Everyday women from the slums would visit huts in their neighborhood and ask people to contribute what they could to a community emergency fund.  These women became known as Mahila Milan, in Hindi this means ‘women together’.  The community built organisation (CBO) now work with over 3000 households across India.  Their main aim is to empower and involve women in organisation that tackle the injustice women face when trying to feed and look after their families.  The organisation travel across India teaching women how to duplicate the Mahila Milan program, their ethos is that they ‘collect people’ not just savings.  

In 1986 SPARC and Mahila Milan formed a powerful alliance with the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF), which was until then a largely male organisation that grew from a grass roots movement to prevent the demolition of 60,000 huts outside central Mumbai in 1974.  The NSDF founder, Arputham Jockin is also responsible for taking the fight for the provision of human rights to all slum dwellers onto an international stage.

The alliance shared information and experience with other non-government organisations (NGO) and community based organizations (CBO) around the world.  In1996, at a conference in South Africa, an international network was formalized and named, Slum Dwellers International (SDI).  Their goals are to empower slum dwellers through community collective action and savings groups.  SDI has member organisations in twenty- countries from Malawi to Zimbabwe, Brazil, Kenya, Cambodia and Namibia.

Big Achievements
SDI and their regional members put some of their success down to their strategic decision to lobby and campaign for progress amongst civil society professionals rather than politicians who in their experience made false promises to win votes.  Carrying out land surveys and numbering shelters (this is called the enumeration process) they gathered their own evidence on the situation communities were facing on the ground, giving every family an ID photo and cards confirming their household details and needs.  This ‘hard data’ exceeded any information the government had on the households that needed to be resettled. 

This initiative combined with the money raised in the community savings program led to the development of a program that supported community members in the design and modeling of houses they proposed to build if they were given land and amenities by the government.  The model houses (life size prototypes) were tried and tested by community representatives and presented to civil servants and decision makers at regional housing exhibitions.  These community home shows illustrated to important regional actors, the capability and determination of the community and the importance of community participation.  The community efforts forced the government to start a resettlement program and to create a government department to manage it, the Slum Rehabilitation Authority.  Over 24,000 households have been resettled in Mumbai to date and many more have completed the enumeration processes and are waiting to be moved.

Small Disappointments
Despite the success of the SPARC, Mahila Milan and the NSDF, statistics suggest that in Mumbai, less than 1 percent of the population has been affected by their re-settlement projects.  Interviews with relocated families have raised interesting issues; re-settled families have piped water connections and pay standard rates but none have running water for more than 30 minutes a day.  Rubbish is not collected and transit campsites built to house people while their new homes were completed are poor.  Some families are waiting in this state of limbo and poverty for up to 6 or 7 years, despite promises of being re-housed in two.  These issues have little to do with SPARC and their colleagues but they are serious problems that need to be explored and addressed.  So it seems that the fight is not over.

Information on slum dweller in the worlds major cities.

www.sparcindia.org
The Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) is an Indian NGO that supports two people's movements - the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and Mahila Milan (MM).

www.sdinet.org
Slum Dwellers International (SDI) is an umbrella organisation that supports community built organisations and non government organisations in their fight for reasonable housing and access to clean water and sanitation in some of the words poorest cities.

Click here to read 'Beyond evictions in a global city: people managed resettlement in Mumbai'.

Click here to read the SDI article 'Foundations to Treetops'.

Click here to read 'Towards more pro-poor local governments in urban areas'.

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