With a population of well over 1 billion people, India is the second most populous nation in the world. According to UN-HABITAT, India is home to 63% of all slum dwellers in South Asia. This amounts to 170 million people, 17% of the world’s slum dwellers. As India continues to develop its infrastructure and tries to compete economically with the West, it is important that its poorest citizens are able to work together with government to ensure pro-poor development.
The Indian Alliance is by far the most advanced and experienced assembly of partners with whom Homeless International works. The Indian Alliance helped found the Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) network and the ideas and methods of slum upgrading pioneered by the Indian Alliance over the past two decades have now become core features of SDI affiliated organisations. Today, the Indian Alliance comprises four organisations, each fulfilling a specific role:
The Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) is a Non-Governmental Organisation formed in 1986 by housing and social work professionals to support the ideas and priorities of the urban poor, organised via the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan (see below). SPARC was founded in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and is still based there, but it has increasingly become involved in supporting the Federation’s activities in towns and cities across India. Most of Homeless International’s grants are channelled through SPARC, but all programmes are designed and managed by the Federation and Mahila Milan themselves.
The National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) was founded in 1974, and has a membership of 750,000 poor households spread over 70 towns and cities in India. NSDF assists slum dwellers to obtain secure tenure, access adequate housing and develop basic infrastructure including water and sanitation. To make it easier to negotiate for secure land in Mumbai, households have organised into smaller networks as part of the larger Federation. For example, families living alongside the railway tracks in Mumbai have formed the Railway Slum Dwellers’ Federation, because they will mainly have to negotiate with the railway authorities. Likewise slum dwellers living on land owned by the national Airports Authority have formed the Airports Slum Dwellers Federation, whilst pavement dwellers have linked together to form a Pavement Dwellers network. Slum dwellers living in other cities or states have, for example, created the Karnataka and Orissa Slum Dwellers’ Federations, because they mainly have to negotiate with their individual city/state government for land, shelter and access to infrastructure.
Mahila Milan – which literally means ‘Women Together’ – is a network of women’s savings collectives founded by women pavement dwellers in Mumbai. Mahila Milan has strong links with the NSDF, and the two networks work together to enable poor people to share experiences through exchanges, train each other in financial management, construction techniques and other relevant skills, and develop the confidence and opportunities to take on leadership roles within poor communities. NSDF and Mahila Milan also work hard to build partnerships with local authorities, in order to carry out larger scale developments in slum areas.
SPARC Samudaya Nirman Sahayak (SSNS or Nirman for short) is a non-profit company founded by SPARC, NSDF and Mahila Milan in 1998. Its role in the Indian Alliance is to support building and construction projects put together by SPARC, NSDF and Mahila Milan. As the Indian Alliance’s projects became larger in scale and complexity, a need for more sophisticated legal, financial and technical expertise arose and Nirman was created to fill this void. Nirman is based in Mumbai and is Homeless International’s partner in implementing the Community-Led Infrastructure Finance Facility (CLIFF).
Over the last two decades, the Indian Alliance has developed an incredible network of partners from across the social and financial spectrum. The progress they have made in improving the lives of slum dwellers throughout the country is unprecedented. Through creating strong and unified Federations of the urban poor and partnerships with government bodies and the private sector, the Indian Alliance has been able to create alternatives to forced evictions and enable poor communities to find their own solutions to the challenges they face. Throughout its long history, the Indian Alliance has embarked on numerous shelter and infrastructure initiatives, however, with the implementation of CLIFF, the Alliance is now able to finance large-scale settlement upgrading. CLIFF is currently supporting 15 housing and infrastructure projects in India, which will directly benefit between two and three million poor people when complete.
The Indian Alliance also supports the innovative ‘upgrading’ of slum communities beyond the physical features of housing and water and sanitation infrastructure. For example, in 2003, NSDF and Mahila Milan joined forces with local police in Pune and, one year later, Mumbai to create the innovative Slum Police Panchayat Scheme. The scheme involves a local police officer working with 10 sahayaks or ‘helpers’ (predominantly women) from a slum to assist in maintaining the peace and order in these settlements. The sahayaks, who are selected by communities themselves, try and resolve disputes within the settlement without having to bring in outside help or resort to the formal legal system. This new partnership helps build trust between government, police and slum dwellers and reduces the amount of time law enforcement officials ineffectually spend in slums trying to patrol the complicated maze of informal structures. In September of 2004, Mumbai’s Commissioner of Police was able to present the pioneering Slum Police Panchayat Scheme to a wide range of eager listeners at the World Urban Forum in Barcelona, Spain and since then the scheme has been scaled-up greatly.
Please click on the links on the left to learn about different initiatives being implemented by the Indian Alliance.
