• This sounds great I am wondering what networks in India if you have connected with who could he...
• We are well connected with the social and administrative networks in India but really need help to...
• I love what you are doing and it shows how development can start with an acceptance of what is alre...
• Very good work keep it up!
• 1. the gains from the work appear to be very strong. what sort of documentation do you have for al...
• This is response to the clarifications sought by the on line reviewer on “Slum Networking – Transf...
• Through the judging panel held on September 29th, 2006 the judges reviewed the entries for the C...
• Thanks for the review comments. We have been working on so many new fronts that it is difficult to...
• Your initiative is so profound and fantastic giving shelter to the poor is to preserve life procre...

I am wondering what networks in India if you have connected with who could help multiply your learnings and practical maps

For example, who are opinion leaders in India who have adopted slums as their number 1 cause? The film actress Shabani Azmi recently spent 10 minutes on US television saying this is her number 1 social mission; she also appears to raise this issue at national stages such as http://rajyasabha.nic.in/resume/198/splmen.htm

Ahmedabad is of course famous as the epicentre of most of the learning that Gandhi codifies and shared with the world including the ashram and univesrities he founded there. The Ashram is celebrating a centenary of Gandhi's in October 2007. Slums ought to be one of the topics to be networked around because I suspect that if anywhere is going to lead the world in innovating beyond slums in big cities (without relocating the dwellers out of the city), India will be at that leading edge. Of course, I am delighted if there are other countries where top leaders recognise that slums are a sign of a systemic failure in economics of cities ; and this will be arguably a key indicator of where Peter Eigen is successful in fulfiling his 2 year mission http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=- 3407997752764644269 to raise consciousness for transparency all round the world as probably the simplest idea that richer people could serve to make systemic poverty history

chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk http://clubofahmedabad.blogspot.com

slums were also a primary conversation point of http://www.habitatjam.com - have you connec`etd with any of the groups who expressed concern for true system recociliation knwoledge on how to make slums history

- chris macrae

I had not heard of Habitatjam network and will follow that up. I have passed on the details to my daughter who is at present in South Africa to explore replication there. I note that there are many members in Kenya. We would love to work in the slums of Nairobi. Any takers?

- Himanshu Parikh Consulting Engineers

The value of the food that is produced locally and the clean water collected is a quantitative benefit that will produce income that (it is difficult to asses the value) would easily recover the cost of this investment. But the qualitative aspects of a green garden environment that is shaded and cooled by plants is of great value. With the SolaRoof sheltering pedestian avenues, courtyards and roads they all become pleasant environments where it is natural that further development will take place. Skills with building trades and crafts will then elevate the quality of life because lives can first be employed in self improvement and unlike those in the economic mainstream the slum residents have time to invest and are not burdened with debt for homes (built by someone else) that would not be affordable.

SolaRoof has other versions of the SolaRoof garden for cold climates so that (at low capital and operating cost) food crops can be grown year around and sheltered buildings would cost little to heat or cool. So there is a possibility of further upgrading of the technology as communities become more prosperous.

We do have a plan to work with a poor community, with our partners the Khutso Foundation (www.khutso.com) and it would be wonderful to collablorate and integrate the wisdom of your groundworks with our blue sky solutions.

- Richard Nelson, SolaRoof, Founder (Life Synthesis LLP, Director)

- Susan Kiragu, University of Cambridge, Miss

- i am one of the changemaker on line reviewers

1. Documentation:

Our first work at Indore was evaluated by Birmingham University on behalf of Department for International Development, UK (DIFD) and showed significant improvements in the living conditions but had reservations about maintenance and sustainability in this aid project. This study was done straight after implementation and, hence, did not record the long term socio-economic impacts (Amis, P., 2001. Rethinking UK aid in urban India: Reflections on an impact assessment study of slum improvement projects, Environment and Urbanization, Vol 13(1)).

The documentation of the subsequent work in Baroda and Ahmedabad slums which was moving from aid to self sufficiency) was done by Unicef (1999. Urban Initiative – Slum Networking Strategy, A Community Based Water And Environmental Sanitation Demonstration Project In Ramdevnagar, Baroda, Gandhinagar.), UNDP-WB (DFID, 2002. Making Connections–Infrastructure for Poverty Reduction. www.dfid.gov.uk/pubs/files/makingconnections.pdf.), and Dr. Tripathi of Indian Institute of Managemant, Ahmedabad (Tripathi, D., 1999. Slum Networking in Ahmedabad: The Sanjay Nagar Pilot Project, Working Paper No. 101, Available on http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu/publications/working%20papers%20pdf/wp101.pdf). Dr. Tripathi also published two books which give blow by blow account, warts and all, of the networking process and its long term impact (Tripathi, D., Tata McGraw Hill 1998, Alliance for Change – Slum Upgrading Experiment in Ahmedabad. 2001, Change After Alliance - Sequel to Alliance for Change).

The above studies record changes beyond the physical conditions such as improved health, literacy and incomes but fail to pinpoint WHY they are happening. Having worked with me for 7 years in slums, in 2004, my daughter Priti decided to take up doctoral research at Cambridge University to validate (or not) with a rigorous scientific study the hypothesis that infrastructure development significantly impacts health, education and prosperity and many other aspects of life. Some of the findings are drawn from her pre-doctoral MPhil dissertation (Parikh, P., 2005.) The document with the statistical analysis is available at Cambridge. Her final in depth doctoral research will be published sometime in 2008. It basically addresses the following issues: • What are the impacts and are they really caused by water and sanitation or something else? • Why do people suddenly start investing so much and where is this money really coming from. • Comparisons between the urban and rural areas and also comparisons between India and South Africa to study the regional and cultural impacts on replication.

2. Technology Fix:

The driving force behind the work is really a deeply held conviction that poverty is not insuperable and that charity or aid is not sustainable. Any measures which alleviate poverty without aid dependency would be acceptable. The innovative water and environmental sanitation route was simply chosen because, of all the interventions possible, this one appeared to be cheapest and the fastest catalyst of change. Interestingly, in the surveys, slum dwellers themselves also cite water and sanitation as their priority need and also the main incentive for making subsequent investments in their shelter, health and education.

To achieve our ultimate goal of poverty alleviation in a holistic frame, we have to be involved with multiple initiatives in parallel to engineering as follows: • Develop and establish a legal and administrative framework with the local bodies to ensure tenure rights, connectivity to larger infrastructure, maintenance, taxation policies and democratic decentralisation of authority. • Set up partnerships between the community, government and businesses. The most difficult part is making a making a good business case for the private sector partners. • Identify and persuade result oriented NGOs (often set up by businesses) to facilitate the whole process and bridge between the partners. It is a challenge to find NGOs which can deliver tangible results in a businesslike manner. • Organise communities and businesses to plan, implement and maintain the development. • Set up banking back-up for financing the community investments in infrastructure and shelter. • Network existing health, education and economic progammes of the government and private sector into the project for holistic development. Sometimes new programmes are also piggy-backed onto the project. For example, in Ahmedabad, skill upgradation programme was integrated into the project by the NGO Sharda Trust which still continues a decade later.

3. Costs:

The cost for the total package of infrastructure development is Rupees 3,000 ($66) per person in the urban slums. For the rural areas the cost is 20% higher because of low densities. The package includes roads and pavings, storm water management, house to house water supply and sewerage connections, sewage treatment, landscaping and the hardware for solid waste management. The cost includes the overheads and the soft inputs (almost 25% of total) for organizing the communities, setting up partnerships, setting up implementation structures, NGO inputs and for integrating existing health, education and economic programmes into the project. This overhead is generally paid for by the NGO itself from its own sources. The remaining 75% of the costs are shared almost equally by the three partners, namely, the community, government and business.

Subsequent to infrastructure development, the community invests substantially into shelter improvement. This, on average, amounts to somewhere in between $1,000 to $1,500 per family spread over a few years. This cost is met entirely by the community.

The running and maintenance costs of infrastructure development are again met entirely by the community in the form of annual taxation payable to the local bodies for urban slums and the village council (Panchayat) for rural areas. The annual tax is about $5 per family (about $1) per person.

4. Community financing:

The formal financing structures are weary of lending to the informal sector and the poor villagers. Perceived default risks, lack of collaterals, high costs of servicing small loans, lack of branch networks etc. are cited as reasons. In reality, the repayment record of the poor tends to be actually better than the higher income groups. It has taken us years to graduate from informal financing structures to tapping the formal banking structures.

In the Baroda project, the community investment in infrastructure and shelter improvement was financed by informal community Savings and Loan Society set up by the project NGO United Way. In Ahmedabad, the finance came from a non-commercial bank set up by SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association). In our more recent work in villages, we are in negotiations with ICICI, a formal sector commercial bank. Intense competition in the banking sector and the arguments for “the bottom of pyramid market” are finally helping us, coupled with appropriate mechanisms like tenure guarantee, peer pressure collateral, group loans and processing through elected councils, bank staff being drawn from slum communities, underwriting of default by businesses (rarely needed) etc. The traditional loan sharks, charging interest of 1% per day and reducing the community to permanent indebtedness, have fast disappeared from our project areas!

It should be noted that not all families avail of the banking facilities. Some invest from their savings while many others borrow from friends and family.

- Himanshu Parikh

All the best,

The Changemakers Team

“I really liked the mixture of high tech, high touch approach. And I think that the thing that dazzled me most about this was the impact that it was having in terms of public health benefits and everything else. I really thought, it really meets a gigantic need that’s out there, so to the extent that this is something that could be transferred all over the world, it could have gigantic impact if we could find ways to replicate it, so I thought that really it just made a lot of sense and it used some of the better technology we have been able to develop over the last few years with GIS, etc. to do some really sensible things in communities.”

“I had to infer quite a bit about what the innovation was on this one. I could tell that it was something important, based on the graphics, but I actually struggled a lot to understand what it was that they were doing that was innovative. This one did not ring, I mean, I could tell it was important, but I could not tell what the innovation was. Therefore, I could not tell how it differentiated itself from other examples in the book.”

“I think that the entry point you can get on this one in terms of environmental sanitation makes it interesting, because it gets at a holistic response, but I think that in the revised write-up, further clarification regarding exactly what the inputs are that are being provided is needed.”

- Changemakers Affordable Housing Judges: Habitat for Humanity, Ford Foundation, International Housing Coalition, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation

1. Slum Topography Correlation:

All cities have natural drainage paths. Without these, the cities would not have grown as they would have drowned in their own waste. These drainage paths constitute rivers and streams.

These natural drainage paths offer the best routes for gravity based urban infrastructure like water, sewerage and storm drainage (and also roads if they are coordinated with other services). If rivers flow along the surface and do not need pumping stations, nor should our water and drainage systems (after all they are not much different from rivers except that they are enclosed in pipes). We found that there were dramatic cost savings in the infrastructure, when we followed these natural paths. In none of our work, either at micro scale or at city level, do we have deep drainage or pumping stations. This is exceptionally rare in any cities in the world and is an innovation.

We also discovered in all the cities we studied in India and globally, that slums hug these natural drainage paths (rivers and streams) very closely. This means that just by interconnecting slums, we can create cheap and efficient urban infrastructure which not only serves slums but the whole city. This slum/drainage path/city connection has not been used constructively before and is an innovation together with all the associated new technologies and methods we have developed.

The environmental spine of a city (its greens and water bodies) normally happens around its natural drainage paths (and slums happen to be on these paths). Thus slums can also be used to improve the environment of the city at low costs, the pollution in the water bodies being cut off by the drainage networks installed in slums.

2. Water and Sanitation Trigger:

When we started monitoring changes in slums after our infrastructure development, much to our surprise, we noted that there were very substantial changes in health, education, incomes and self-built housing. These changes through any other route (say fiscal or educational) would have taken much longer and would have cost more. This was a most unexpected by-product of our intervention and we realized that water and sanitation is an amazing trigger for the overall improvement in the quality of life and poverty alleviation. Our innovation is, therefore, to use water and sanitation as a central plank of a holistic development as against just one component.

3. The Hidden Resources in the Developing World versus Aid

The first slum infrastructure work we had done in the city of Indore, about 20 years ago, was funded by aid. 5 years after development we noticed that the slum families had made substantial investments in their houses as a consequence. This investment was in the order of 20 times the original investment in infrastructure and was made without any grant support or micro-finance. We were staggered by these hidden resources within the poor communities. The question arose that if people can mobilize 20 times the aid sums, why on earth are we waiting for aid in the first instance to start development. All our subsequent work has thus gone away from aid. In Baroda and Ahmedabad, we also realized that local industries and businesses were willing to be partners, both in terms of investments and management. Thus we discovered another potential hidden resource, that of the internal economic forces of the country. The innovation in our work is thus tapping these unrealized potentials within developing countries and getting away from aid.

In summary, our work is showing that not only are tangible and holistic changes on significant scale possible but also that resources are not necessarily a constraint. Can we then not dream of a world free of poverty and slums?

- Himanshu Parikh

- Ventonia property development enterprise.