Half of the 14 million people in Mumbai, India's commercial capital,  live in slums.  A number of non-governmental organisations  ( NGOs )  are working to help these communities but one NGO that stands out for its work with slum and pavement dwellers is the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC).   

Since 1984,  SPARC has successfully followed a multi-pronged approach :  Working with the homeless and slum dwellers and forging partnerships with other organisations so that the urban poor can participate directly in how their city is managed.

Mumbai (India) : 14 million people live in Mumbai, the country's commercial capital. Half of them - migrants from other cities and towns -- in slums, clinging to dreams of making it big in this metropolis.

It isn't easy. At periodic intervals, the administration tries to relocate those living near railway lines, airports and other strategic locations. Once they are thrown out, these people return often to hostile conditions as they fight for any place that they can find to build a shelter. Some of them live in the huge water or sewage pipes left over from civic projects while others live in flimsy shanties on the pavements.

"The city had 50 per cent slums even in the '70s. But today the situation is slightly different because the government has started accepting the fact that it alone cannot solve the problems of these people and so it has started working with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like ours."
sheela patel

Started by like-minded social workers, researchers and professionals, SPARC believes that the poor must be organised and their skills developed for sustenance if they have to achieve social justice and equity. So this NGO creates a physical, emotional and social space for people to pool their resources.

The term 'Area Resource Centre' was coined by SPARC to describe such a space. This may not be a physical, tangible space but could be a psychological space created by the community for itself. The initiative begins with the community deciding on the issues that it considers important. When SPARC started work, it took a decision to allow only the communities to identify the issues that they wanted to work for. The only thing that the organisers were clear about was that SPARC would work with the poorest of the poor.

Why concentrate on the urban poor? When SPARC started its activities, India had just gone through its biggest wave of urbanisation. This had lead to a massive proliferation of slums and pavement settlements and NGOs were struggling to respond to this problem. Their responses were clearly inadequate.

In such a scenario, SPARC wanted to create a process of NGOs working hand in hand with poor communities. SPARC's reasons for working with pavement dwellers were obvious: In Mumbai, the headquarters of SPARC, the plight of pavement dwellers is most glaring - to those who want to see - and they are the most vulnerable of the urban poor. Yet this section is the least acknowledged by policy makers. By beginning to work with this section, SPARC could ensure that the poorest of the poor were acknowledged. And if a solution worked out for them became a success, then it could well work for other segments of society as well.

From here, deciding to focus on women was just a step away because in any vulnerable group women bear the consequences of deprivation, and yet they have the capacity to create innovative means of survival with available resources.

SPARC concluded that any successful alternative must ensure the central involvement of women in designing solutions and implementing them. For instance, when women from pavement settlements stated categorically that secure shelter was their main priority, SPARC decided to take up this issue. This demand by the women was amply justified after the 1985 Supreme Court of India judgement decreed that the Bombay Municipal Corporation could evict pavement dwellers and demolish their houses.

But secure shelter was an issue which neither the pavement dwellers nor those from SPARC understood very well. And so began the process of learning about land, development planning, housing norms and construction.

SPARC then developed its own settlement model plan and began to initiate ways to be heard by city and government officials. At another level, savings groups for housing were started and construction skills acquired. It was on this foundation that a movement of the urban poor was built.

Says Patel, "We are working together with the government to relocate the slum dwellers but it is a process which is decadal and not something that can be done in a year."

And Patel should know, having helped in one year to relocate 8,000 households from tenements along the railway lines. There have been many hurdles on the way in achieving this. For starters, there has been a huge backlog that SPARC has had to deal with. "Then there is a lack of faith in almost everyone that change is possible and one also has to deal with a corrupt and exploitative larger environment which destroys any project in this state," adds Patel.

Despite these problems, SPARC has been making progress in other directions. For instance, having organised the first pavement dweller census in 1985, SPARC has stressed the importance of accurate information about communities and settlements. A group of the women involved in collecting this information has visited other settlements in Mumbai as well as in other cities in India and abroad to share their ideas.

New methodologies were also evolved for project planning and evaluation, community organisation and participation and recognition of the crucial roles of women as teachers, decision-makers and managers of water and sanitation services. Significant progress was made in the development of low cost yet appropriate technologies such as hand pumps that the local community could repair and sanitary latrines that could be constructed by individual households. The recent establishment of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council has been another step forward.

Another lesson that SPARC learnt well was that any project should be seen as a marathon, not a quick dash. "There needs to be time for development," says Patel, "Sometimes without strict outcomes. Projects need to grow and they won't necessarily develop as expected."

Over the years, SPARC has also formed partnerships with two organisations headquartered in Mumbai: The National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and Mahila Milan (Women's Collective). NSDF was started in the mid-'70s by slum leaders from several cities who wished to participate in all policy discussions affecting the poor. On observing the work done by SPARC and Mahila Milan they sought to align themselves with this partnership.

As a result, several objectives were fulfilled. SPARC wanted to expand its work, and while maintaining its thrust of work with pavement dwellers as its nucleus, it also recognised that unless other groups of the poor linked with them, pavement dwellers would continue to be isolated. NSDF saw the power of women's participation and SPARC's advocacy as a major sustaining factor of slum mobilisation.

The roles of the partners of this alliance emerged clearly. Mahila Milan would be a network of women's collectives from the communities which were affiliated to NSDF. Mahila Milan would help women members get recognition and support from the settlements and train them to undertake activities and skills needed for them to play a central role in the community's decision-making process.  NSDF, on the other hand, would organise and mobilise the social and political environment which would create conditions for the poor to negotiate with resource-providing institutions. And SPARC would train, educate, advocate and lobby to set up this process.

According to Patel, it is vital that in the long run, communities of the poor 'own' their process and become central to its expansion and growth. Consequently, the overall goal of the work that the alliance of SPARC, Mahila Milan and NSDF is to create institutional arrangements which mobilise large numbers of the urban poor, create and strengthen their organisational arrangements so that they become a vital part of the city structure and can participate directly in how the city is managed.

The strength of SPARC is its broad vision -- reaching out to other organisations with its skills, and in turn being enriched with new inputs. For instance, SPARC is involved in the exchange between the NSDF in India and the Homeless People's Federation in South Africa, now in its tenth year. Groups of Indian pavement dwellers have been to South Africa while groups of South African squatters have visited India. Both groups have learnt from each other about mapping, hut counting, social surveying, house modelling and house savings schemes.

Sadak Chhaap (slang for street children) is another project that SPARC is associated with. A loose but fast-growing federation, Sadak Chhaap operates for children who have run away from home and seeks to create networks for and by the street children, and initiate all rehabilitation on the basis of the children's aspirations.

SPARC wanted to create a process of NGOs working hand in hand with poor communities in cities to create equity in the oasis of resources, create mechanisms by which those who migrate to cities have organisational networks to fall back in times of crisis or when they sought to fulfil their aspirations. Ten years on, this mission has never been more relevant as India urbanises rapidly and the problems of human settlements magnify manifold.