Sisterhood: Banoo Sayed Ishaq (at left) is a founding member of the Mahila Milan and one of the first women to experience the empowering process of planning the location, design and construction of her dream home (see box at left). Here she poses with two other members of her Mahila Milan: Sakinabi Sheikh Abdullah and Mushtari Ghoush.

Resigned to a Role: Powerless Squatters

About 20 percent of the world's urban population lives in informal settlements and slums throughout Asia, according to UN-Habitat's State of the World Cities Report 2006-07. These settlements are expanding with the steady influx of rural immigrants who are searching for a better livelihood in the city.

Mumbai—India's commercial capital and the fourth-largest city in the world (after Tokyo, Mexico city, and New York City)—has more than 5 million slum residents, a bigger population than the entire country of Norway, according to the UN report. They are part of a massive, unorganized labor force that provides a dizzying range of cheap services that help sustain India's growing urban economies, from roadside food vending to domestic help, rag picking, furniture shifting, laundry services, and paper-bag making.

Cities rely on these informal workers' services but offer little or no safe, legal housing in return. Most of these workers live in appalling conditions, deprived of adequate shelter and even the most basic services such as water, sanitation, and electricity. Many live in constant fear of being evicted and rendered homeless because they lack legal ownership of the space they occupy.

Ironically, most are unaware that they could use India's pro-poor laws to secure basic rights to housing and infrastructure. They lack access to critical resources—such as information about their rights—and institutions—such as urban planning bodies and banks—that would help them understand and exercise their rights.

They also lack access to grassroots organizations that would connect them to residents in other communities and allow them to build a collective movement. Because they are uninformed, disorganized, and isolated, they acquiesce to a role assigned to them by the government and society: illegal encroachers with no rights.

These slum residents consider it an act of inevitable fate when their homes are demolished and they are forced to resettle in unsuitable locations and conditions. Their protests rarely generate more than pockets of ad-hoc resistance that are crushed by the ruthless efficiency of the state.

Shanties being summarily razed to the ground in a typical government-led demolition drive with no promise of rehabilitation

Delivering Housing while Building a Citizenry

The three-way alliance of SPARC, Mahila Milan, and NSDF pools the strengths of these citizen organizations in a sector better known for deep schisms than robust long-lasting collaborations. The alliance is pioneering a roadmap that helps slum residents navigate from the precarious position of urban squatters to the security of homeownership.

Slum residents become architects of both their homes and their community's fate while finding ways for constructive dialogue with government and other institutions so that blueprints are turned into buildings. The alliance delivers housing solutions while creating an empowered citizenry.

A key factor that contributes to a community's disenfranchisement is the lack of official information about it. Invisibility on official rolls renders people voiceless and therefore profoundly powerless.

"You can't expect people who don't exist as far as the government is concerned to make the government pay attention to their problems," says Celine d'Cruz, a SPARC founder and its associate director.

SPARC starts the process by helping slum residents perform a detailed community survey to assess the number and size of its households and the major problems confronting it, in order of priority. The census is carried out by women in the community.

The community makes strategic use of the wealth of data generated by the survey to get on the authorities' radar, and as valuable bargaining chips in negotiations. Community residents create a wish list of basic services that inevitably includes drinking water, sanitation, and electricity.

This forces the government to listen to poor communities at the outset of its engagement with the residents by leveraging the power of verifiable statistical data gathered through rigorous, comprehensive surveys. Community residents meet with municipal authorities to gain official acceptance of the data and to ensure that civic records are updated, complete, and accurate.

Bridging the Power Gap Between Classes

With help from SPARC, the community organizes itself into groups consisting of a leader and 50 households. These groups build the community's capacity to work collectively. SPARC connects community groups with development professionals including architects, civil engineers, and low-cost housing specialists, to give them guidance as they plan construction of their future homes.

These development experts help the alliance empower the urban poor by providing essential support services including research, documentation, data processing, report generation, financial management, and administration backup. SPARC serves as a portal for poor communities that need access to government bodies, multilateral agencies, donors, and financial services. NSDF also helps communities work with local authorities.

"Such access is vital to promote a model of inclusive development," she said. "Inequity within cities must be recognized as a political condition and not simply as the result of a resource gap. Indeed, conditions in slums and their prevalence represent the deep asymmetry of power between different classes."

The Power of Networking

Through its extensive network, NSDF connects community groups with members of other settlements who have successfully completed the relocation process. This exposes them to different low-income housing models and allows them to learn practical tips from those who are further up the learning curve.

The alliance leverages NSDF's impressive networks to ensure that poor urban communities across India are connected. The NSDF network enables a swift exchange of ideas and information so that successful housing solutions innovated in one community are rapidly replicated in other areas. This transforms disparate clusters of urban poor, who are struggling to deal with housing issues, into a robust community whose members share common problems and concerns, co-operate to design common solutions, and exert substantial collective pressure on the government.

For example, when a particular innovation emerges—such as a low-cost floor layout that solves the problem of limited space, or a model of low-maintenance community sanitation—the group that created it tests a crude on-the-ground demonstration.

Other groups visit and give suggestions so that the design can be refined. A pilot is created and tested by different communities. Once it gets the thumbs up, it is ready for large-scale application.

Seeing is usually the quickest route to believing for a new community, says Monalisa Mohanty of DAWN (Development Across Wide Networks), the alliance's partner in the eastern Indian state of Orissa. "When they visit a group that has been there, done that, and they see concrete outcomes—like model houses or the size of community savings—they realize it's actually possible," she said. For example, a visit to a community in Hyderabad city triggered the beginning of self-belief for the first Mahila Milans in Orissa.

"We are creating an informed and enabled critical mass whose voice cannot be ignored or silenced by state agencies and policy-making bodies," said Jockin Arputham, NSDF's founder, winner of the prestigious Magsaysay award, and a co-winner of the Schwab Entrepreneur award with Patel.

Women Drive Community Mobilization

Women in each community form savings groups called Mahila Milans ("women's collectives") to get the credit they will need, a service traditionally provided by money lenders whose exploitative lending rates usually guarantee a one-way ticket to indebtedness. They also receive mentoring from members of established Mahila Milans in other communities.

The Mahila Milans are a network of community-level women's savings collectives that goes well beyond the traditional savings and credit functions. They help groups organize to build and sustain their collective strength.

A group of Mahila Milan members working out housing finances

These savings groups become a force for mobilizing their community to identify and work toward achieving common goals. Significantly, they create space for women's participation and leadership in community affairs, ensuring that as self-determination becomes a reality for the urban poor it is made available to both women and men.

The skills and know-how that the savings groups gain by organizing their savings and credit activities can be easily adapted to other kinds of community organizing efforts. In this way, community governance is built from the bottom up.

Visits between Mahila Milans have also ignited a powerful understanding of the thrilling possibilities inherent in solidarity. After visiting Hyderabad, Sujani Sau described her experience: "Meeting other women working on the same issues, and realizing that you are not alone, propels you forward and energizes you into believing you can achieve the impossible."

Turning Defeat into Victory

Community residents design life-size models of their ideal home. After a community has fine-tuned its own model, its residents examine the city's master plan to identify sites where they are entitled to relocate. They then scout the different site options and assess factors such as availability of utilities and public transportation.

Two model houses built by community residents

After selecting a site, the community begins negotiating with the government to obtain permits for relocation and building. The roles and contributions of both the government and the community must be hammered out at this point.

Government subsidies for housing vary from city to city and are notoriously nontransparent and complicated (see sidebar at left below). The alliance helps communities find and leverage such resources, ingeniously combining them with their own resources to get the best possible deal.

The community then participates in the actual construction work, or it closely monitors a building contractor that it has engaged. When new homes are ready to be occupied, the community organizes its own relocation in a planned, phased manner—no more apocalyptic scenes of circling bulldozers and riot police.

When the community residents are ready to hand over their former huts to the government it is no longer a gesture of defeat, but a celebration of a major victory. This achievement is solid testimony to what can be achieved by working together in well-organized, tight-knit groups that never lose sight of the common goal.

Shifting Gears from Helping to Empowering

Mumbai city pursued demolition with a vengeance during the 1980s that peaked in 1985 when a Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for ruthless evictions of pavement and slum dwellers. The formation of SPARC in 1984 was a direct reaction to this development.

Through SPARC, a group of development professionals who were working with women and children in pavement communities introduced a paradigm shift away from the traditional services delivery model. They replaced it with a facilitative model that supports poor persons to identify and manage their own development agenda.

"We realized that we were treating the symptoms and not the cause," d'Cruz said. "After we had provided medical attention to a sick woman, for instance, she would still go back to a home with a leaking tarpaulin roof and be eaten up with worry that even that bit of shelter would soon be demolished. It became very clear that if we wanted to make a real difference, we had to work on changing the system with the poor taking the lead."

With this shift in gears, SPARC's relationship with women evolved from a top-down, beneficiaries' model to one where the women have become equal partners in change. An important first step in this new dynamic was creating women's savings collectives that quickly morphed into the Mahila Milan network.

Gaining adequate shelter, and home and land ownership, topped the community's list of critical needs. Organizing the means to obtain these became the top priority for SPARC and Mahila Milan.

In 1986, NSDF became the third member to join the alliance. It was a perfect fit. NSDF was committed to empowering the urban poor and had been active since the 1970s. It had grown rapidly across India, achieving some major victories in resettling displaced populations.

Building Inclusivity: Broadening the Base

But a decade after founding the organization, Arputham and other senior leaders were questioning some of the its approaches, especially its male-dominated set-up and its sole focus on slum inhabitants when there were other poor urban constituencies that needed help, such as pavement dwellers. Moreover, the federation's rapid expansion required scaling-up of administrative, financial, research, and documentation projects to sustain the network and keep it growing.

By allying with SPARC and Mahila Milan, NSDF created an opening for bringing pavement dwellers into its constituency. The Mahila Milans provided a ready-made model for women-led community based organizations (CBOs) that the federation could propagate.

A Mahila Milan member collects money for the Laxmi savings kitty

Today, there are Mahila Milans in all the settlements where NSDF works and female leadership in the NSDF has zoomed from 0 to 50 percent. The NSDF and Mahila Milans are associated with about one-half million households in 11 states and union territories and 72 cities.

SPARC provided exactly the kind of organizational support that NSDF needed, freeing it to focus full-time on outreach to more people and communities and on building the collective strength of the urban poor. SPARC and Mahila Milan were becoming increasingly aware that they needed to connect with a larger, more broad-based organization of the poor that strengthens the claims of groups like pavement dwellers.

By joining the alliance, NSDF—and especially founder Arputham—were now contributing a wealth of practical experience, know-how, and the wisdom gleaned from years of working for the rights of the urban poor. This was an invaluable asset as the alliance negotiated the complex minefield of housing for the urban poor.

The alliance of these three citizen organizations is demonstrating how to work aggressively for government engagement and approval of housing projects and activities, and how this is critically important. In the process, the alliance is making steady progress toward aligning government policies with the development aspirations of poor city dwellers.

While it's undeniable that India has a number of pro-poor policies, the trick is to explore and optimize their full potential. SPARC adds the muscle of creating extensive, high-quality research, documentation, and reports when communities fight at the ground level with practical demonstrations of their ability to find solutions for their housing and infrastructure problems.

This is a highly successful approach that has led to critically important changes in government rules and new policies. The alliance's latest victory is a Maharashtra state government policy that guarantees housing for all eligible pavement dwellers within three years. The policy will be made official any day now, and resettlement activities are already in full sway.

The alliance has achieved another significant victory in the area of housing regulations. Previously, government housing did not allow mezzanine floors. But a community prototype included this element because it maximizes available space. The alliance helped develop a pilot project and convinced authorities that it provides benefits so that mezzanine floors have been made a legally valid feature of their houses.

The alliance has also pushed the government to introduce a program that provides a 50 percent subsidy for construction of community toilets by local organizations and public authorities.

When a model, plan, or project requires government sanction and support, the alliance ensures that there is a pilot or precedent on the ground that authorities can visit. The most effective way to persuade government officials to support a proposal is to show them a working community-grown and operated model that operates efficiently.

Raising the Money to Build Housing

Housing and infrastructure projects aren't cheap. The alliance has explored many avenues for securing financial support for its activities, ranging from donor grants and government subsidies to seeking home loans from the banking sector.

Much of its early organizational and experimental activities were funded by external funding. For example, the alliance has analyzed and creatively blended India's substantial but complex government housing subsidies to yield maximum benefits.

More recently, the alliance has alerted the banking sector to the potentially huge housing loan market represented by its federation members. The members' excellent savings records add weight to this argument, and SPARC acts as a guarantor. It has secured loans for a range of housing activities from major players such as Citibank, UTI Bank, National Housing Bank, and ICICI Bank.

Although banks remain cautious about entering this new market, they definitely are aware of its huge potential. "We see a large potential," said Anil Kumar, of the ICICI bank, described the bank's work with the alliance to finance slum upgrading initiatives in Mumbai during an interview with Ruth McLeod of Homeless International last year. "Not just in slum rehabilitation but also other areas such as urban micro lending to individuals for housing . . . There is a large unexplored market."

Going Global

The alliance is at the forefront of global initiatives that are designed to connect communities throughout the world in order to put collective pressure on institutions—like the World Bank—that call the shots for international development policies. It was instrumental in setting up the Slum and Shack Dwellers' International (SDI), a network of groups from different countries that are working to secure the rights of slum and pavement dwellers.

In 1989, members of the Mahila Milan visited communities in Seoul, Korea where houses had been demolished in the run-up to the 1990 Seoul Olympics. This marked the beginning of learning exchanges between poor communities from different countries. The SDI was launched to create the institutional mechanism that would sustain this learning—locally and globally—with initial guidance from the alliance and the South Africans Homeless People's movement.

A banner at a Mahila Milan meeting in India welcomes their South African counterparts

The alliance uses its membership in networks like the SDI and the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) to learn about the best practices developed in other cultures, and to export its own model beyond India. The tools and processes developed by the alliance are now used with great success in several countries including Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, and Swaziland.

"Our message is that we want our governments to remember that most of the world's housing stock today is designed, constructed, and financed by the poor themselves," said SPARC's Patel about the goals underpinning the SDI. "The only way forward is to examine what is being done and refine it incrementally, creating incentives that encourage communities to continue to do so with support of tenure. Creating restrictions and barriers and making such processes illegal is dysfunctional."

The Urban Poor: Staking a Claim

Governments still need to hear this message. Demolitions continue to be a knee-jerk response to appeals for better urban planning. The boom in property prices is sending real-estate values through the ceiling in many large cities, causing land sharks to launch aggressive takeover battles for prime land occupied by slums.

So the poor continue to battle the government's bulldozers and the bullying tactics of developers. But they are no longer a rag-tag army. They have a tried and tested roadmap to home ownership, and the support from a network of allies.

The evidence is mounting—brick by brick—as the urban landscape increasingly yields space for their new homes that the poor can stake a claim to living on their own terms in the city that they call home.