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Atanu Chatterjee on Governance and Design in Slum Rehabilitation
Chatterjee and Rajagopalan examine the transition from informal to formal housing.
SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Welcome to Ideas of India, a podcast where we examine academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan and this is the 2024 Job Market series where I speak with young scholars entering the academic job market about their latest research on India.
I spoke with Atanu Chatterjee, a PhD candidate in geography at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a lecturer at the School of Human Settlements, XIM University Bhubaneswar. We discussed his dissertation examining the in situ slum rehabilitation scheme through a state-led intervention in low income housing in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. We talked about the reasons for the emergence of urban slums in Ahmedabad, the successes and failures of the in situ slum rehabilitation scheme, the differences across four recent slum redevelopments, the types of problems residents face post rehabilitation, and much more.
For a full transcript of this conversation, including helpful links of all the references mentioned, click the link in the show notes or visit mercatus.org/podcasts.
Atanu, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is such a pleasure.
ATANU CHATTERJEE: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.
RAJAGOPALAN: I was just telling you, that only the geography PhDs sent me an entire dissertation, which is always exciting. We’ve had a few geography scholars over the years, so I actually got your entire dissertation, which was very fun.
The Aims of In Situ Slum Redevelopment
You look at slum redevelopment. You’re looking at a particular slice of it, which is in situ slum redevelopment rehabilitation schemes, specifically in the urban setting of Ahmedabad. You look at four case studies that we can talk about more.
The idea behind rehabilitation is to improve living conditions in the slum for slum dwellers, but also for people who are adjacent to the slum because there are all these public health sanitation issues. The goal is to get these folks proper housing, some security of tenure or property rights, better access to water, electricity, sanitation, sewage, all those sorts of things. This has been controversial in India for a long time on how we do this rehabilitation.
The earlier mentality was, “Okay, we’re just going to pick these people up and transplant them somewhere far away in a really nice location.” Except that view has now been completely debunked because cities are fundamentally labor markets. The goal is to keep them in the same place, have them in the same economic and social networks.
Now the new thinking in this space is we should rehabilitate them in situ, by which we mean wherever the original slum is, we transition the residents out for a short period, we build new housing in the same location, and then we move these folks back in. For this, sometimes the government builds the scheme themselves; sometimes they partner with a private developer.
There are lots of policy issues at play. One, of course, is urban, that there’s, of course, building these buildings, but also the broader question of who gets included and who gets excluded in these slums. Typically, there’s a cutoff point of some sort.
Finally, how do we make sure that the residents—there’s a huge disruption in their lives, but how can we make this situation better than what it was before in the slum?
Is this a good way of thinking about what you’re trying to do?
CHATTERJEE: Yes, yes, this is a good way to start this conversation because for the last many years, this model is ongoing and it’s very popular in India, particularly after the introduction of Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, “Housing for All” in 2015. Earlier, we only knew about the Mumbai slum development scheme, but nowadays, many states are implementing slum redevelopment (schemes). This is a good time to rethink what we are doing under slum redevelopment, whether it is a good policy that we are looking for or there’s all sorts of questions we can ask.
RAJAGOPALAN: No, and you do ask them.
Before we get to your evaluation of four particular cases, this is Lakhudi Talavadi, Sanjaynagar, the slum behind B-Colony,and Kailash Nagar. These are the four slum rehabilitation programs you look at.
Frameworks for Understanding Slums
Before we get into that, for those who are unfamiliar with the urban slums problems, can you just zoom out a little bit and tell us about how these slums emerge and what is the role they play in urban settings because nobody wants to live in those conditions, but people obviously do in very large numbers, so there must be a reason for it? Then we can talk about the rehabilitation part.
CHATTERJEE: I can give you three frameworks to understand slums. The first framework, which is more of a problematic framework to understand slums, is we define or understand slums more like a spatial or analytical category: a residential space which does not have access to basic communities, facilities, living in overcrowded or substandard housing, or lack of security of tenure.
We do not ask questions beyond that. We always say that this place is unfit for human habitation, and the state always justifies their action against those spaces by defining “slum” in this way.
Second, is the whole idea of formality, informality, or legality.
Who is legal, who is illegal, who is a citizen, who is not a citizen? That is essentially related to how they came up in the city—the question that you asked. Usually, slums came up on public land or private land. They encroached on public land and private land, the vacant land, or the land remains reserved for various public utilities and activities, and over the time, they developed a settlement.
That construction of buildings or the occupation of land is always in contravention with the development plan, which actually governs the urban planning, the master plan, that it’s popularly known as. That’s why those places [are called] informal settlements, slums, popularly Although, I think you know that this particular discourse has been criticized by scholars like Ananya Roy and many others. That informality not only encompasses our urban poor, but also the middle class and elite because this land occupation is done illegally.
The slum is also an economic space and also a very vibrant social space and also, definitely, a site of political engagement and negotiation. In that case, slum dwellers hugely contribute to the city.
If I go back, I think long ago, Jai Sen wrote an article that it’s more like an unintended city. I think later, Ashish Nandy said that it’s like, slum as self-confrontation. I think it shows our attitude towards them, but we often ignore the economic contribution that they make to urban living, that the whole informal economy thrives in slums, and our maid and our auto driver and all of them often come from slums.
It’s also a place of cultural diversity. Many slums in India, like Dharavi in Ahmedabad it’s Hollywood Busti, in Kolkata it’s Kumortuli All of these slums are very culturally rich settlements. These are three ways we can actually look at slums.
RAJAGOPALAN: A fourth aspect I would add, is when we’re looking at slums, we’re typically only looking at that location and those people, but it also depends on what’s happening everywhere else around them. What are the zoning laws in place around these slums? What are the housing policies in place that are causing this massive housing shortage, especially for low-income groups or migrants who have recently moved to the urban setting? It is actually a much larger problem because nobody who could afford otherwise would want to live in these settings, right?
The Economic Context of Slums in Relation to Governance
Which means that there’s something wrong with the choice set to begin with. The supply of housing has not adjusted to the kind of demand there is for housing. Sometimes it’s not adjusted because we have terrible zoning laws, FSI requirements, and things like that. Sometimes it’s not adjusted because our entire cityscape is designed for the rich and the middle class. Every home must have X number of bedrooms and windows of this size and two fire exits. It’s either panacea or slums. These are really the choices that are offered to people, as opposed to tailoring them across all income levels, household sizes, and so on.
I feel like now I see that in your work, but I’m also seeing that in other people’s work on how what’s happening outside the slum is also being studied and integrated into why the slum exists in the first place or how it is emerging and how it’s being governed and so on.
CHATTERJEE: The governance aspect and the planning and legal aspects are also very much responsible for the production of slums—that you have mentioned. In Ahmedabad also, people have documented how, building regulations are responsible for the production of unaffordable housing.” Many people are not able to access affordable housing. That’s why they resorted to slums.
RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, and urban sprawl because I’m sure they can find housing somewhere. The point is, you want your chauffeurs and maids and domestic workers and schoolteachers and auto-rickshaw drivers to show up and report for duty at 7 AM. It’s not exactly feasible. Cities will come to a standstill if we relocate these folks outside of the city. Or new people will come and take that spot in the same location.
CHATTERJEE: I would like to just add one point here. That, that, most often, it’s also contextual. In the city, like Ahmedabad, many social, economic, political factors play a role in the proliferation of slums, like the closure of textile mills or communal violences. I have seen many slums which are produced only because of communal violences. Most often, we do not talk about those social–political factors, which are also responsible for the production of slums in cities.
Communal Violence and Segregation and the Formation of Slums
RAJAGOPALAN: Can you tell me a little bit more about the communal violence part because that is very unique to some cities like Ahmedabad or Meerut. There are some cities which are prone to recurring violence over the decades and there is this massive displacement because of the violence. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that has played out in Ahmedabad, because the other aspects might be relatively more comparable to other cities?
CHATTERJEE: Long back in 2014, I visited a slum, Allah Nagar, predominantly resided by the Muslim population. At the time, I wanted to understand the origin and evolutions of informal settlements in the city. That slum, located in the public land, particularly in the periphery of the city—when I asked them, “Why did you come here?” All of them said, “yes.” Because we only know that 2002, there’s this Godhra riot and aftermath. Before that also, there are 1969 communal violences and the repetitive communal violences, which are not documented and may be documented in some research articles or books, but [are] not widely known.
All of these communal violences force people to look for the community of their own, which happened then. They moved to a place where their people live, and that’s how a small locality converted into a slum or a slum neighborhood there.
RAJAGOPALAN: There are also, maybe I’m getting this awfully wrong, and you can correct me, I believe in Ahmedabad and many cities there are also rules on who people can buy and sell housing from, and it has to be within the same community. I am not familiar with the exact regulation, but maybe you can tell us more about it. If a community wishes to live together past the point, the only alternative is to move into something which is completely illegal or informal when none of these rules are enforced, which ends up becoming a slum. Do I understand that correctly?
CHATTERJEE: Yes. There is an act, but I do not remember the name of the act, but there is an act that Muslim population cannot buy a house in the Hindu locality. There is a sharp, spatial segregation that you can see. I think you all know that there are many such popular settlements which are segregated. Also documented by Darshini Mahadevia and other scholars, is how this spatial segregation has affected and impacted the people of a particular religion and particularly the urban poor.
This has also happened in the context of resettlement—Ahmedabad is a fascinating place to study. Why? Because in 2005, they implemented basic services for the urban poor—Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Mission—and they resettled the people from the central city to the periphery of the city. There are many locations, like Vatva, and all predominantly resided by the Muslim population. This spatial segregation actually played out a very important role in city making in Ahmedabad.
Approaches to Slum Redevelopment
RAJAGOPALAN: Now that we understand how these slums have emerged, can you just tell us about how this rehabilitation and redevelopment plays out specifically in the four areas that you study? Then we can get into the differences on those four case studies. But first, I just want to hear from you how you view this rehabilitation and redevelopment effort in the first place.
CHATTERJEE: Yes. There are—on the broader context of slum development—three or four such approaches which emerged over the years. One is definitely slum relocation, as we are talking [about], which is definitely not a viable model.
Second is slum upgradation, essentially in situ slum upgradation, where you are not replacing them with a new apartment complex or an apartment building, but you are only taking care of their basic needs, like improve their basic infrastructure services, or give them some financial assistance to improve their housing or give them security of tenure.
Then this in situ slum redevelopment, where you demolish the existing informal settlement and construct multi-story apartment complexes and accommodate, which is happening in Ahmedabad.
Slum Redevelopment in Ahmedabad
Interestingly, Ahmedabad experimented with all of these policies. Back in 1990, Ahmedabad then implemented the Slum Networking Project, which was very popular back then, and still people appreciate the whole intention of that model, essentially improve the environmental quality of the settlement. Interestingly, they gave them some verbal assurance that, “You will not be evicted for 10 years,” and that works wonders. I have visited many of those settlements where the Slum Networking Project has been implemented, and they have upgraded their housing and improved the living conditions.
Then in 2005, as I was mentioning, Ahmedabad implemented basic services for urban poor. They resettled them in the periphery of the city. It is also well documented how derogatory that policy was and what impact it had in the life of the urban poor household.
Then in 2010, everything changed because in 2010, the Gujarat state government policy introduced a scheme: Rehabilitation and Redevelopment of Slum Regulations, 2010.
They welcome private developers, similar to the Mumbai model, for rehabilitation of the slum dwellers. As I have documented, Lakhudi Talavadi and Sanjaynagar, those two cases are from the 2010 policy. Within three years of the introduction of the slum redevelopment scheme, the Gujarat government replaced that earlier scheme with a new policy guidelines for the rehabilitation of slum dwellers in public land in 2013. They made various changes in the 2013 policy. The approaches remain the same, that rehabilitation of the slum dweller in situ with the active participation of the slum dweller.
Within this context, I thought that it is interesting to look at the informality through the lens of the slum redevelopment scheme because it is essentially a transformation of not only the physical space but also the life and living of the slum dweller. How this transition is happening or how this transition is impacting the life of the slum dweller, that is something that we can ask.
Ahmedabad As a Success Story?
RAJAGOPALAN: Ahmedabad oftentimes is pointed out as a major success story. The reason for the success story is, first of all, unlike many other cities, the rehabilitation is actually thought out. All the processes are followed basically, right? There’s a tender put out, people are invited, the plans are evaluated, the people are moved out, not always with some compensation, but temporarily.
The most important part of Ahmedabad’s success story when it comes to it: rehabilitations actually happen, which is not a guarantee in most Indian cities. Private developers get these contracts, the slum is never built. In Delhi, we have this huge problem right now where they physically look like they built a housing colony, but it doesn’t have water, it doesn’t have electricity.
That’s the good news. In everything that you studied, largely the physical infrastructure that was promised actually exists. Now, there are problems beyond physical infrastructure, but is that a good way to evaluate these projects, that the reason they are touted as a success is because other cities just do so much worse even on the basic construction and moving people back?
CHATTERJEE: That’s a very valid point. That is something I’ve observed that, yes, Ahmedabad is a city which has actually executed the rehabilitation scheme, even though they’ve been implemented in few slums, but they have implemented it. It has received wide attention, particularly from the city policymaker, politicians, the urban scholar, and also the individual person.
RAJAGOPALAN: It doesn’t seem to be rife with corruption. I’m sure none of these deals are completely noncorrupt, but it doesn’t seem to be one of those situations where everyone was cheated and the private developers ran away. That sort of stuff, the base-level stuff is taken care of.
Consent and Coercion in the Redevelopment of Slums
Now, what you write about, which I found super interesting, is that one of the major issues you find is that slum dwellers are coerced into accepting this housing, oftentimes which is substandard or doesn’t have the adequate services or the cost is much higher than what they were promised, and so on and so forth.
I want to dig in a little bit into this idea of consent and coercion because this is a weird situation where initially, there were no property rights and these people were basically encroachers or squatters. Technically, they don’t have the standard rights that require consent for them to be evicted or moved, and so on.
Nobody thinks anymore that slums should be demolished and people should be evicted and thrown out, that thinking has gone out. Now, how is one supposed to think of consent in this setting given that by most standards, an additional entitlement is being provided that didn’t exist before?
CHATTERJEE: Again, I’m saying that you need to read these two policies separately. In the 2010 policy, there is a clause on consent and in 2013 policy, state removed the consent clause. Under the 2013 policy, developers do not have to take consent. It’s more of a tender-based policy. In 2010, consent means developers will have to take consent on this and 75% consent from this community.
RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, because unanimity is impossible, so that’s the threshold that we use?
CHATTERJEE: Yes. Then I was interested to know what is actually happening, particularly in the consent-seeking exercise, because a lot of things happened in Mumbai, it is well documented.
What I found in Lakhudi Talavadi—multiple developers visited them and tried to lure them to give consent. This is because of the fact that local government gave them a free hand, “Okay, you go and give us the consent letter. We will approve the project for you.” Now, how did developers actually take consent from the slum developers? They first approached the community leader. Those are influential and leader-like persons in the settlement.
RAJAGOPALAN: There’s a big literature on this, Adam Auerbach, Tariq Thachil, on how slum leaders emerge, the governance function they play, how they coordinate, to help us with collective action. They become very important in this situation.
CHATTERJEE: Yes, but what happened, this slum leader who used to play a very important role when it came to negotiation and also accessing citizens’ civil rights for the residents, they become the intermediary in this new scheme. They work on behalf of the developer, and the majority of them have their vested interests.
Sometimes they force the residents to give consent, particularly those residents who did not want the rehabilitation to happen. Why? Because they were playing out with limitations in the policy, like the majority of the slum dwellers living in a house which is more than 36 square meters. What to do with those houses?
Why would they give consent? Many of them have an emotional attachment to this settlement. Many of them thought that this was an eviction strategy. Why should we trust the developer so they can grab our land and we will be displaced? All of these things played out.
Interestingly, Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation did not formally communicate these schemes with the slum dwellers. Initially, there was a lot of alienation and anxiety over, “What is actually happening with us? Who are these people that are coming to us?”
RAJAGOPALAN: Got it. Basically, it’s not a trusted party. You don’t know if people are swindling you out of a slum dwelling, which actually is quite expensive and has resale value, as we know in the informal market. Or, are they just evicting you? Are they bribing you? There’s a trust deficit.
CHATTERJEE: Trust deficit.
Public–Private Partnerships and Participation in Redevelopment Schemes
RAJAGOPALAN: This is where I thought the public–private partnership element becomes very important, right?
CHATTERJEE: Yes. What happened in the 2010 policy, there was no mention that an NGO or the community that is an actor or stakeholder in this process. What developers did, particularly in the initial two schemes, Kailash Nagar and Abhuji Na Chhapra B-Safal, who implemented the rehabilitation system in Lakhudi, collaborated with MHT, Mahila Housing Trust, a very popular NGO in the area.
On behalf of the developer, MHT actually mobilized the communities for slum redevelopment. The places where MHT was involved, things were a little bit participatory, but where MHT was absent, like Lakhudi Talavadi, like Sanjaynagar, things were not very easy, meaning a very complicated process. They were a community that felt their concerns were not caught by the developer and the community leader.
RAJAGOPALAN: That is the communication aspect of the redevelopment, right?
Challenges in Adjusting to In Situ Redevelopment
Now you also talk about how when everything goes according to plan, the original plan, which is they moved out for a short period of time, new housing is built, and they are actually moved back in, which is about the best-case scenario we have in places like India for slum development. After that, there are still problems.
Sometimes this is just they’re not used to living in an apartment complex. They’re not used to as much distance between them and their neighbor. They’re used to more communal living. They feel isolated. They have a disruption in social networks because they don’t understand how to navigate people on the third floor versus the 15th floor. There are all these kinds of social things, which I can’t imagine how one would solve them. There are other kinds of coercion which are taking place, even in moving people back in.
CHATTERJEE: Yes, yes. I think one thing that you have mentioned for why Ahmedabad is in that sense successful [is] because there is active involvement of the Mahila Housing Trust, particularly in the implementation of the 2013 policy, [initially] Laxmi Nagar and Kailash Nagar.
What I found in the post-implementation scenario [is] that many other issues started unfolding: the lack of or the poor quality of basic services. Now there is a huge gap between expectation and reality. Citizens started feeling, “why do we not have access to a 24/7 water supply?”
RAJAGOPALAN: That’s not just them, right? That’s everyone.
CHATTERJEE: That’s everyone, yes. But I think there is also a sense of dependency that you need to understand. So far if there was anything, slum dwellers knew whom to approach. Sometimes their community leader bargained for their basic rights. Now the whole relationship has changed. Now there’s a community fund which is insufficient to maintain the settlement.
When the community or resident welfare association is asking for money: “Okay, we need to repair this, or we need to do this, we need to do that.” Community [members] are thinking, “Why would we pay? Because you gave us free housing, now you are asking for money. You never said that we will have to contribute for our operation and maintenance.”
There is a huge lack of this whole capacity building or sensitizing the community about post-living in the resettlement colony. That is something that communities are not able to digest.
Expectations of Living in a Post-Redevelopment Colony
RAJAGOPALAN: This is the part I found quite difficult to comprehend. Some of it just sounds like middle-class complaining.
Even in non-slum settlements, for instance in Delhi and Bombay, the moment the government says, “We’re not going to subsidize water anymore, you have to actually pay the market tariff for water,” people are up in arms saying, “We were always promised this entitlement, we were promised free water. Now you’re charging us for water. Water is God’s gift and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
How much of it is just complaining about, “Oh, we thought everything was free and now we have to pay,” which is again a very urban middle-class gripe versus they’ve been cheated out of something.
CHATTERJEE: What I feel with initial communication aspects, the community was complaining, “Okay, we have been promised a lot of things, particularly 24/7 water supply, good housing and so on and so forth.” Again, I’m saying what I tried to make sense of in this whole transition—
RAJAGOPALAN: No, it’s very disruptive. That I totally understand that the way they live is completely different now.
CHATTERJEE: Now the way they used to live, the way they used to access water—although sometimes the lack of water and lack of basic amenities, the access to service was not there, but they were still happy. Now this sense of ownership came with a lot of other expectations, which I found, particularly in the resettlement colony.
Basis for Evaluating the Success of Rehabilitation
RAJAGOPALAN: Is that how we evaluate public policy, whether people are happy and satisfied and if their new expectations and aspirations have been matched?
Let me give you an example. I don’t mean to belittle the slum rehabilitation at all. Let’s say there was a government policy that said we want uptake of farmers to have mobile phone services so that they can check prices and so on, and they give a subsidy, and they start giving free cell phones to everyone.
Now you can say, I expected an iPhone because when I go on social media, everyone else is using an iPhone, but I just got a basic phone. That doesn’t seem like a public policy problem to me nor does it seem like a public policy failure to me. At best, it’s a failure in communication or something else that’s going on, right?
CHATTERJEE: I think the state is only focusing on improvement in the physical environment and looking at the rehabilitation from the perspective of profit, which I have seen. The whole model is like this: That part of this slum will be rehabilitated, and that part of the slum can be used for other purposes so the developer and state can earn profit out of it. But looking at it only from this improvement in physical infrastructure, like giving them houses, is not enough.
The state is not talking about capacity building or empowering the communities to take care of [themselves]. It is not that the communities do not want to take care of it.
RAJAGOPALAN: Got it.
CHATTERJEE: Things have happened like Baan Mankong in Thailand, which is a very successful case, where you are actually building community associations. Same thing is happening in Odisha, that they are focusing on building capacities of the slum dwellers’ association.
In this case, you are not focusing on building their capacity. What is happening? Things are more chaotic post-implementation.
RAJAGOPALAN: Got it. It’s a transition problem, which hopefully can be fixed.
Allotment of Homes and Ownership Restrictions
Here I have a couple of questions. Can you tell us some of the details in these four different slums on how the allotment was done? From what I understand, it’s a lottery or a draw system, which people in slums are not accustomed to but as an economist or as a public policy person, we tend to think that’s the most fair because it’s totally random. It’s based on luck. It has no human manipulation or exploitation. You may be better off, you may be worse off, but it’s not meddled with.
Once they get the lottery, what happens? Do they get a clean title to the new housing? Can they sell that title? Can they sublet it? What is that process like of allotment?
CHATTERJEE: There are 15 years of restriction. After that, it will be a freehold right. Now they haven’t received the ownership rights certificate, so many of them are anxious about it. If you read the policy guidelines, after 15 years they will get that ownership rights certificate.
Particularly in Ahmedabad, there are no such issues when it comes to allotment. Except Lakhudi Talavadi where a lot of scams and corruption happened, as B-safal single-handedly implemented it. CAG also reported that.
What happened in Ahmedabad, I think, thanks to Mahila Housing Trust—they set up the mechanism that even though we have randomly allocated the houses, internally you can exchange the houses. That happened in Lakhudi, in Sanjaynagar, and many other places. Internally, they exchanged their houses. There was always dissatisfaction, but it never came out as big as we thought it would in the allotment process.
RAJAGOPALAN: This seems like a relatively easy fix. We have so much mechanism design literature on this, on how the original lottery happens and then what are the rules under which people can exchange. That’s pretty straightforward.
Questions Regarding the Resale of Allotted Homes
Do you think this entire system can be improved if they could sublet these spaces or they could sell them in under 15 years? Is that the main problem?
CHATTERJEE: Yes, because if you read the larger literature, you will find that this is definitely an issue that slum residents of the space where slum dwellers are living are subject to the real estate market. Eventually what happens—the whole place will gentrify. The whole idea is to keep them out of the market.
RAJAGOPALAN: I don’t understand, why would that be the whole idea to keep them out of the market?
CHATTERJEE: Because the whole intention is to improve their living condition, to give them basic living standards. When you are redeveloping a slum in the central area where the land value is very high, and you know that now your house is an asset and you can sell it—what will happen then? They will eventually sell those houses, and they will move back to some other places.
RAJAGOPALAN: Why is that a problem? Again, what I’m trying to understand is, why is that such a terrible thing? If the idea is maybe they sell this house and they find better housing, maybe somewhere else—they’re complaining that this is not good quality; this is substandard; there are all these problems; there’s this huge disruption; the association doesn’t work well. What’s the harm in selling and moving to a place where it does work well?
CHATTERJEE: We’re not talking about the integration of rehabilitation or housing policies with the larger urban economy, because we are talking about low-income households, particularly, the people who cannot afford to live in the city, or the income is very meager. Eventually, what happens is they will not move back to middle-class housing complexes. They will move to slums or they will form slums some other place. Eventually, what your whole intention was started with--you will not achieve it.
RAJAGOPALAN: There seems to be some dissonance here, which I can’t exactly understand. On the one hand, we say some slum dwellers don’t want to live in a slum setting. They want to live in sensible urban areas that give them access to labor markets and economic opportunity and allow them to participate, but they don’t want to live in a place that has no electricity, no water, open sewage, their kids are falling sick, and so on, so we need to improve the physical infrastructure. So far, I completely understand.
The next stage of the problem that you very well document is, once you improve the physical infrastructure, they say, “No, we don’t like this version,” either because it doesn’t meet our expectation or because some of the networks are disrupted or that life we used to live where everyone used to sit together in the courtyard has now gone away and so on. If they wish to move back to slums, then the first aspiration of them wanting to not live in a slum setting is wrong.
Why are we so worried that they’ll sell their allotment and move back to a slum? That doesn’t quite add up. If they move back to a slum, then they didn’t want the rehabilitation in the first place, which means all this complaining is not really about the rehabilitation. It’s about a different way of living because it can’t be both. It has to be one or the other. What is going on with these slum dwellers that even the terrible physical infrastructure in slums seems like a better alternative than good physical infrastructure?
Issues that Impede Residents’ Adjustment to Communal Living
CHATTERJEE: What I found is that the way slum dwellers live in a settlement, the way they use their housing, the way they make decisions, the way they navigate the city, and sometimes the whole aspect of incrementality, the way, as time permits, as their economy improves, they extend or develop their houses—that’s more of an organic development that we are talking about. Slum redevelopment is definitely a better alternative when it comes with other benefits, not only improving their physical infrastructure.
We also have to think about [how] once they move to those new houses, they should sustain their living in the new housing because you are not improving their economy. When their operational maintenance costs increase, they face a major hurdle.
Second, you are not sensitizing them to a new [way of] living that they are going to encounter once rehabilitation takes place. I have found that the lack of socialization, lack of access to gender space—this issue is largely related to the design aspect. You are not involving the community in the design. What you think is best for the community, you are doing. Unless and until you’re involved, “Okay, fine, we need a park. Can you do our design in this way? Can our house be like this?” Why are you not involving the community, because they are the ones who are going to live in those settlements?
There is a huge disjuncture between the need and aspiration. It is not that they do not want to live in those rehabilitation colonies, but the mechanism that you have created is making it very difficult for them to live in the new environment.
RAJAGOPALAN: You are talking both at the design stage, how is this building designed? How is the common space designed? Then the second part of it is the maintenance. How is the housing association formed? What are the first few years? What is the plan? When does the developer hand over to the community? Things like that.
CHATTERJEE: Also sensitizing them to the new living: more of a communal living to more of an individualistic living.
RAJAGOPALAN: Maybe this is just a gap in our view of what is the role of the state, right?
CHATTERJEE: Yes.
The Role of the State in Facilitating Transitions to Redeveloped Housing
RAJAGOPALAN: I think the role of the state absolutely is, it needs to make sure that property rights are enforced, contracts are enforced, basic public sanitation, water, access to what we typically call public goods. I don’t think making people happy is the role of the state. Forget slum redevelopment. I think in general, making people happy is not.
CHATTERJEE: Making them owners and that sense of belonging and sense of ownership should come with this development.
RAJAGOPALAN: I don’t think this is a slum issue. This is any redevelopment, any disruption, any change in living. How family homes in Chandni Chowk, which have these huge courtyards in the middle, start getting partitioned into smaller and smaller lots. This happens everywhere.
It is just a transition issue and so on. For me, the policy issues are the other things you’re pointing out, which is how do they get their allotment? Are they in a place which gives them the connection to the economic services they had before? How is this building association actually going to run itself? Do they have to contribute monthly maintenance expenses? Those are serious public goods coordination questions. I think there I’m a little bit more concerned about what’s going on.
CHATTERJEE: Two issues I would highlight here. The first is the way we define housing.
Mechanisms for Creating Successful Redevelopments
I think what we are creating is a house, only a dwelling unit. I think there is a consensus that housing is beyond a dwelling unit. It is about privacy. It is about access to services. It should be affordable. It should be adequate. What is happening in rehabilitation schemes, when you are trying to evaluate rehabilitation or redevelopment, this parameter, “Is it really affordable? Is it adequate?” [In] many cases, the rehabilitation scheme is not qualified to be called adequate or an affordable option for the urban poor household. Once you create that mechanism where it is adequate and affordable for the urban poor household, it will serve the purpose, I think.
What Odishaa state is actually doing, because Odisha state has a widely known scheme called Jaga Mission. They first provided them with a land right, which is mortgageable, which is inheritable, but not transferable so that the land remains for the urban poor household. Then they integrated these land rights with access to basic services and amenities and also an upgradation program.
The second phase of Jagga Mission is talking about participative upgradation. I think there are many options that we can think of. So far we are only talking about one size fits for all.
RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, absolutely. That is so clear in what you’re saying, that one size fits for all, at least the way I understood it in your dissertation, is really coming from the developer. The developer is [asking], what is it I can build quickly and deliver? That seems to be the driving force rather than, what would be the longer-term, best solution, which we can maybe fix at the design stage. Then, we can partition the houses or the dwelling sizes accordingly. Did I understand that correctly?
CHATTERJEE: Thedeveloper and also the local government.
A Participatory Approach Versus a Top-Down Approach to Redevelopment
RAJAGOPALAN: Okay. Can you tell me a little bit more about that one-size-fits-all problem, which is actually leading to all these other problems, which is showing up in this weird complaining about problems that can’t really be fixed from a policy lens. Maybe you’re right. They can be fixed at an earlier design stage. What is that design stage other than participation? Participation in the original design or the architectural plan? What is that gap which needs to be met early on?
CHATTERJEE: Definitely [from] the beginning of the project, [from] the beginning of the project [until] end, there should be thorough community participation. What is happening here is more a top-down policy approach. That there are few things neither the developer nor the local government can change. In slum redevelopment, this problem is going to remain.
RAJAGOPALAN: Can you give an example of that? What are the things that can’t be changed because it’s top-down?
CHATTERJEE: The major issues that slum dwellers are facing is definitely the size of the houses because they are getting a uniform size. Even though I have a 60-square-meter house, I’m getting the 30-square-meter house. This is written in the policy guidelines that you cannot, even if you have houses more than 30-square meters, you will not get more than a 30-square-meter house.
Can we fix that limitation? Later they fixed that problem, particularly in the case of Kailash Nagar They call it a project-affected person (PAP). If someone is living in another house—the son and daughter 18 years age and above—if they can so document or if they can pay three lakhs of rupees they will get an extra house.
RAJAGOPALAN: Got it.
CHATTERJEE: Many such inherent policy issues.
Second, as you have said, in the initial implementation process, the trust issues were there. MHT set up a mechanism: Shall we issue a photo identity card? Shall we have an agreement with the developer that before they leave for transit accommodation, they’ll have that photo identity card, and they’ll have that letter? It’s an assurance that so many of those mechanisms worked, particularly in gaining consent and trust.
Third, definitely, we are not talking about capacity building of the community association.
Building the Capacity of Community Associations
RAJAGOPALAN: On the capacity building of the community association, this is the part that surprised me the most in your dissertation. The reason it surprised me the most is the kind of coordination and capacity that is shown within slums because [they’re] basically outside of the limits of state services. It’s people picking up their own garbage, people figuring out there are these weird loose hanging electricity lines because someone has jigged the electricity supply to that place. The water pipes are all in weird locations. They don’t make sense. There’s a communal bathroom.
To me that sounded particularly crazy because I was like, these are people who actually know how to run a building association in the worst of circumstances. In fact, they are providing sewage, sanitation, garbage, they’re providing everything. How is it that these people are not able to run a simple apartment building condo association. I’ve lived in more than half a dozen different cities—everyone is able to do this. Of all the people I thought capable, I thought those who were coming out of slums would be the most capable. What is this gap that I am completely missing?
CHATTERJEE: One thing is that there is again the attitude, that communal attitude to a more individualistic attitude: That is my house. I’ll take care of it.
The second attitude is that we got a free house. Somewhere and somehow some individual person will come and fix all those things. Third, that we have a community association, and the association has money. I think that I have missed that some portion of money…
RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, there’s a corpus that is initially given.
CHATTERJEE: All of them know that there is money. Even if something happens, our association or the cooperative housing society will take care of it.
There is an issue that when cooperative housing is not functioning, they are forced to do a few things even though they do not want to. This whole thing puzzled me during my stint.
RAJAGOPALAN: This is a little bit crazy because slum dweller governance, when I read the literature and the case studies on this, they move mountains. Sometimes mountains of garbage, but they move mountains to make things work in their particular community.
Grounds for Optimism
Here actually what you’re telling me surprisingly is making me a little bit more optimistic. Some of this sounds like bad expectation setting, and bad communication. Hopefully, as we have more in situ rehabilitation and redevelopments, we learn from this. Even the NGOs and other trusted parties who’ve been involved in it, there’s a lot of learning that takes place. With each model hopefully, it gets better.
For instance, the first one that you pointed out—this is the Lakhudi Talavadi—there were so many problems in that particular rehabilitation which the later ones seem to have managed well. That part is really making me optimistic.
The second part that’s making me optimistic is these are people who are incredibly entrepreneurial, who can actually really do a lot of groundwork when it comes to coordination, public goods, delivery systems, solving collective action problems.
To me, some of this also seems like a transitional problem. Initially, they come in thinking this is someone else’s problem. As the problems start mounting up, they’re going to have a big meeting and a big protest. They’re going to sack whoever is the original person who was running the cooperative society building. They’re going to nominate their own leader and things will surely get better.
Is there some design flaw that gets in the way of that, or these are just growing pains? This is going to happen in any disruption and redevelopment, so they will just have to sort this out.
Improvements of the Institutional Framework Through Community Empowerment
CHATTERJEE: It is the problem of institutional framework that the policy is not talking about. The policy is saying, “Okay fine, we are giving them houses. We are giving them free houses, and that’s fine. Our work is done.” Then nobody is looking at what is happening in those post-rehabilitation colonies because now those places are no longer slums. Those are cooperative housing societies. Those are middle-class housing complexes.
People are not used to those lives. Although you have a cooperative housing society or you have a community association, but they don’t know there are responsibilities. They don’t know how to make sense of this new living, how to make sense of this management. When I was talking to MHT, the majority of the cases MHT said were fine. We should now focus on building the capacities of the community association, so that once they move in, all of these issues should be taken care of. This community empowerment and this whole institution-building aspect should be present in the policy formulation.
RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, because there’s no exit.
CHATTERJEE: Yes, in Jaga Mission which I have seen. The Orissa government hired Janaagraha, the Bangalore-based NGO, to build the capacities of these. Now long-term operation and maintenance can be taken care of. It’s not about two, three years but long-term operation and maintenance. That effort is somewhere and somehow missing.
The Potentially Supportive Role of NGOs
RAJAGOPALAN: I have a question on that. Isn’t that easy to introduce even after all the physical rehabilitation has been done? This seems like a much easier fix, which is the local municipality, the local NGOs, they get together, they help do some workshops, they set up a decent model, they get some community acceptance on, “Hey, this is how a cooperative society works. These are the six models you pick from.”
Isn’t this now a much smaller policy problem, somehow it doesn’t seem that insurmountable. Especially, given that there’s no exit for 15 years, so they have to all live with each other. Which means they have to build a cooperative society but now that the physical infrastructure is in place, what is stopping this from happening even after the redevelopment? This can happen at any point, right?
CHATTERJEE: Local government is shying away from its responsibility because they are just only focusing on redevelopment and somewhere and somehow the larger responsibility that the state has—that okay fine we need to take care of this settlement, we need to take care of this resident—they’re not talking about it. It’s the developer who is always profit-minded. Also, they’re not sensitized and they’re not aware enough of what to do with those residents.
I think in that case, what you are saying is very interesting because the NGO can play a very important role which [it] is somewhere and somehow playing, but that partnership is somewhere and somehow missing. The residents should be given some time to adjust to their living [situations], and within that time the local government and NGO can build their capacities. Within that time, the local government can take care of everything. Once you do that, I think things can be easily fixed.
No Quick Fixes but Revised Platforms
RAJAGOPALAN: Or at least there’s some mechanism. They’re not even hoping to fix everything. You are basically saying that the platforms to discuss these problems and fix them is what is missing. Not that everything will be perfect from day one and everything will be magically fixed. It’s more, they had a particular way of coordinating and governing in the old setting, and now we just have to figure out what that coordination and governance mechanism is in the new setting.
CHATTERJEE: And how to lead it.
RAJAGOPALAN: Some of it can be introduced but most of it just has to be built. There’s no quick fix, it just takes time to build these systems. I’ve lived in condos in New York City, and we’ve had the same problems there by the way. It just takes a long time to figure this out.
This dissertation was hugely illuminating. You show the contrast of the different models over time. The case studies are really interesting. Thank you so much for doing this. This was such a pleasure.
CHATTERJEE: Thank you. Thank you, Shruti.