The Story Of Kanjur Marg

                                                 Sundar Burra

                                           PROJECT PROFILE

Name of Project/initiative: Voluntary resettlement at Kanjur Marg, Mumbai
Location: Mumbai
Sectors that initiated the project:
· Indian Railways; the State Government of Maharashtra;
· CBOs: Railway Slum Dwellers Federation (RSDF), National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF)

· NGO: the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC).
Other sectors involved:

· Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai
· Slum Rehabilitation Authority of Mumbai
· The World Bank

Issues/problems addressed: Resettlement and rehabilitation of the urban poor
Start date: 1998 onwards
Types of information disseminated:

· The nature and extent of encroachments by slum-dwellers living along the
  railway tracks in Mumbai using cadastral maps;

· Socio-economic surveys of slum-dwellers affected by the Mumbai Urban
          Transport Project – II;

· Information about the wishes of the community of slum-dwellers in the
          matter of slum rehabilitation and resettlement.

Main dissemination channels:

· Meetings and training and exposure visits to Kanjur Marg by slum-dwellers
   from other areas of Mumbai, other towns and cities in India and other countries;

· Meetings and correspondence with State agencies and the World Bank and site visits for officials of these organizations

Main learners:

· CBOs RSDF, NSDF and slum-dwellers from different places as also the NGO SPARC

· State Housing and Urban Development Departments, Railways and other para-statals

· World Bank

Main lessons:

· The importance of the policy environment,
· The importance of women-centred community participation,
· The importance of a two-phase resettlement strategy,
· The importance of partnerships,
· The importance of a realignment of roles between State agencies and NGOs/CBOs
· The importance of flexibility and negotiating skills, and
· The importance of institutional networks for replication.

CONTENTS
PROJECT PROFILE
SECTION 1 - BACKGROUND
1.1 The Actors
1.2 Historical and administrative context
1.3 The railway settlements

SECTION 2 - THE PROJECT
2.1 The Objectives
2.2 Historical Development
2.3 The Project

SECTION 3 - THE INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION AND LEARNING PROCESS
3.1 Knowledge and Information
3.2 Transfer and Dissemination
3.3 Learning
3.4 Impace and Use
3.5 Replicability

SECTION 4 - LESSONS
4.1 The importance of the Policy Environment
4.2 The importance of women-centred communication participation
4.3 The importance of a two-phase resettlement strategy
4.4 The importance of partnership
4.5 The importance of a realignment of roles between State agencies and NGO’s/CBO’s
4.6 The importance of flexibility and negotiating skills

SECTION 1 BACKGROUND

1.1 The Actors

The public agencies and departments involved are the Central Government through the Indian Railways, the State Government through the Housing and Urban Development Departments the Slum Rehabilitation Authority and the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai.

The people's organizations and NGO involved are the Railway Slum Dwellers Federation (RSDF), the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF), Mahila Milan and Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC).

The Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) is an NGO founded in 1984 by a group of professionals who had previously worked with more traditional and welfare-oriented NGOs in the neighbourhood of Byculla in central Mumbai. Prior to forming SPARC much of the work of the founder group was with the pavement dwellers of Byculla area, and once established, the women pavement-dwellers became SPARC's main constituency. These women had repeatedly born the brunt of demolitions of their homes and loss of their meagre belongings, and observing the failure of welfare-oriented NGOs to deal with the demolitions, SPARC began to work with the women pavement dwellers to better understand the effects of the demolitions and how they could be countered. Training programmes were then established so that the women could learn how to survey
their own settlements and start to use the data generated to campaign for secure title to land. From this work, the CBO Mahila Milan (see below) was formed and its alliance with SPARC was expanded through the formation of an alliance with the National Slum Dwellers Federation (see below). Within this alliance, the role of SPARC is to design and develop strategies to enable its partners to undertake administrative tasks and raises funds needed for its work. Currently operating in over 20 cities throughout India, the SPARC/NSDF/Mahila Milan Alliance now works with similar NGOs and CBOs in Asia and Africa helping to build up effective networks in Cambodia, Thailand, Philippines, South Africa, Namibia, Kenya, Nepal and Indonesia.

The National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) is a CBO whose membership is made up of slum-dwellers. Established in 1974, NSDF has a history of organising the poor against demolitions, as well as attempting to secure the basic amenities of water, sanitation and such like for the urban poor. While the Federation was initially a male slum-dwellers' organisation, in 1987 it began working in partnership with Mahila Milan and SPARC and since then the number of women members has grown, with around half of NSDF's community leaders now being women. Within its alliance with SPARC and Mahila Milan, NSDF is mainly responsible for the organisation and mobilisation of slum-dwellers and homeless families throughout India as well as in Africa and Asia. Membership of NSDF remains restricted to slum-dwellers, and currently the Federation spans 21 cities in 5
states in India. The NSDF has constituent federations: the Railway Slum Dwellers Federation, the Airport Authority Slum Dwellers Federation, the Pavement Dwellers Federation and so on.

Mahila Milan (Women Together), the third partner of the alliance, is a CBO made up of collectives of women pavement and slum-dwellers whose central activity is the operation of savings and credit activities. Set up in 1986, as a result of SPARC's work with the Muslim pavement dwelling women of the Byculla area of Mumbai, the rationale behind the formation of Mahila Milan lay in the recognition of the central role of women in the family as well as the enormous potential that women's groups had in transforming relations within society and in improving the lives of poor families. Mahila Milan now conducts informal training and support activities, as well as savings and credit groups, and aims to empower women to play a greater role in community management and to work with NSDF
on broader policy issues at state and city levels. Mahila Milan thus represents both an opportunity to satisfy the credit needs of poor women and a strategy to mobilise them towards taking a more pro-active role in relation to their own poverty. The organisation lays less emphasis not so much on concrete achievements and outputs as on the learning process and the building of confidence among poor women. In the Byculla area, approximately 600 women are members of Mahila Milan, but together with NSDF, Mahila Milan now has a total of over 300,000 households as members across the country.

The Railway Slum Dwellers Federation (RSDF) is a constituent unit of the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and is made up of families living along the railway tracks in Mumbai. One of the organizing principles of the federating units of NSDF is that they are developed according to who owns the land. In this case, the land occupied by the RSDF members belongs to the Indian Railways, a department of the Central Government, and negotiations to secure entitlements of this group would have to be primarily conducted with the Railways. In keeping with this organizing principle, slum-dwellers living on lands belonging to the Airport Authority have formed a federation of their own, pavement-dwellers who live on pavements owned by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai have a separate federation, and so on.

1.2 Historical and administrative context

Mumbai (earlier Bombay), the commercial hub of India, is also the capital of the western Indian State of Maharashtra and has a population of over 11 million people. The suburban railway system of the city is crucial to its daily functioning because of the geographical configuration of the city: most offices are in South Mumbai and most of the population lives towards the north of the city. In a day it is estimated that 7.4 million passenger-trips are made on the suburban railway at an average distance of 25 kms per trip. The vast majority of the city’s commuters use the railways and most of the rest use buses. There are those commuters who own their own vehicles as well. The poorest sections of the city’s population walk to work as they cannot afford public transport of any sort.

For a variety of reasons, the land market in Mumbai, as in other major Indian cities, is highly skewed and it is not only the poor but also sections of the lower middle and middle classes who cannot afford to buy housing in the open market; governmental efforts to provide housing for those who lack effective demand are minuscule in relation to the size of the problem. Over a period of time but more particularly in the nineteen-sixties and ‘seventies, there had been considerable migration into the city both from other parts of the State of Maharashtra and from the rest of India. Studies have shown a pattern to the migration: places of origin have been areas of drought and poverty and those who migrated h had few or no assets and opportunities of earning a livelihood were severely limited. Census data show that in later years the rate of migration decreased, one explanation being that the kinds of work opportunities in the city changed as Mumbai started to de-industrialise.

Slums in Mumbai are located both on land belonging to government and private landowners. With its colonial past and the State-centred paradigm of development that India adopted at independence, large tracts of land in the cities are owned by para-statal agencies such as the Airports Authority of India, the Port Trusts, Indian Railways and the Armed Forces through Cantonment Boards: these are all bodies owned or controlled by the Government of India. In addition, local bodies such as Municipal Corporations, Housing Boards, Development Authorities and Improvement Trusts are also owners of land. Both the Central and State Governments have vast powers to acquire land for public purposes as well as powers to control its use through Town Planning Acts and similar legislation. Instruments such as Development Plans for cities are used for purposes of zoning and reservations can be made on different tracts of land for different uses: industry, public housing, commerce, and so on.

When India became independent in 1947, its birth as a nation-state was marked by the violence and bloodshed of Partition. There were strong fissiparous tendencies fueled by religious extremism, sectarian conflict, ethnic movements, regional aspirations and caste divides. Jawaharlal Nehru, who, for more than two decades, molded the direction of India’s development, had been influenced both by Fabian socialism and Soviet-style planning processes. The mixed economy that emerged with the State controlling its commanding heights concentrated power in government. Specifically, in the Constitutional scheme of things as also through the agency of central planning, the Central government was far more powerful than State Governments. Public sector undertakings of the Government of India such as the Railways and the Port Trusts were accountable only to their headquarters in New Delhi, even though they functioned within the geographical jurisdiction of different States. Centralized party politics accentuated the unequal division of powers between the Centre and the States. It is with this backdrop that the present study looks at the problem of slum-dwellers living along the railway tracks in Mumbai and an initiative to deal with it.

1.3 The railway settlements

There are three suburban rail lines in Mumbai: Central, Western and Harbour that link the central business districts of Bombay Island with the so-called ‘suburban’ areas in the North of the city: the Central line from Victoria Terminus (VT) to Thane has about 8,000 families living on the reserve alongside the track; the Western line from Churchgate to Dahisar has about 3000 slum families and the Harbour line from V.T. to Mankhurd around 13,000.

These families have been living along the tracks for more than two decades. In some cases, their huts are hardly a metre away from the tracks and the passing trains. One consequence of their location is the number of accidents that take place, particularly affecting young children, who cannot be kept on a tight leash throughout the day. But injury and death is not confined to children. Neither is it the only consequence of the location. The constant anxiety to parents and partners for the safety of their families has a severe and demonstrable impact on the railway slum dwellers. Yet, they are forced to continue to live where they do in the absence of any affordable alternative.

The presence of a large number of slums along the tracks also has an effect upon the speed of trains. The Commissioner of Railway Safety has stipulated that trains must not travel at more than 15 kilometres per hour when traveling through these densely inhabited sections of track. This restriction must be viewed in the light of the fact that trains are normally capable of running at more than 40 kilometres per hour. Simple arithmetic tells us that the productivity of the system is severely affected in terms of the frequency of trains. In turn, the number of passengers who can be transported in a day drops sharply. When commuters do not reach their places of work on time, the productivity of all those establishments where people work is affected as is the economy of the city as a whole. According to a Report prepared by the Slum Rehabilitation Authority, because of slow movement of trains in slum areas, daily trips have been were reduced by 40%; the productivity of the city is reduced proportionately.

The motormen, who drive the trains day in and day out, are under severe psychological pressure. When an accident takes place, the train is stopped, the injured person assisted if possible and the journey is then resumed. Bodily harm or death might result but another consequence is more delay. The motormen at the driving seat take home these images and find it difficult to deal with them even when they are not at fault. Their confidence is impaired as they live with the damage they have caused, albeit unwittingly.

For the families living along the tracks, injury or death are the worst things that can happen to them. But daily life is also made difficult in the absence of the basic amenities of water, sanitation and electricity. The women spend long hours fetching water and the entire family faces the repeated indignity of having to relieve themselves in public, in the full view of commuters in passing trains. What stands in the way of civic authorities providing the basic amenities of public toilets and bath houses?

The answer lies in the fact that the land is owned by the Indian Railways, a department of the Central Government. Even though the Government of Maharashtra has a policy for providing basic amenities to slum-dwellers under certain conditions, since the ownership of this land is vested in the Central Government, the local civic authority -the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai- cannot provide any services or construct any amenities without the permission of the landowner. And the Central Government, as a matter of policy, decided that it would not issue No-Objection Certificates (NOCs) for such works within 30 feet of the railway tracks. The reason for its reluctance lay in the fear that the giving of such permissions would be a tacit acceptance of the legitimacy of the occupation of its land by encroachers. As a result of this obstructionist attitude, there are hardly any basic amenities and where these do exist, they are usually illegally obtained and at a high cost.

The stance of the Indian Railways was ironical insofar as another arm of the Government of India, the Ministry of Urban Development, had for decades been giving financial assistance to State Governments under a scheme called the Slum Improvement Scheme for the environmental improvement of urban slums. Each year, grants were made available to provide water supply, sanitation, electricity, pathways and drainage according to a formula based upon a per capita sum. This scheme has never been implemented on any lands belonging to the Central Government in Mumbai, the Railways being only one of the landowners to refuse NOCs. Thus the slums on the lands of the Airports Authority and the Port Trust in Mumbai have also been denied these services. As a result, the condition of people living in slums on Central Government lands in Mumbai is much worse than that of those slum-dwellers on lands belonging to the State Government of Maharashtra or the public agencies it controls. (For a more detailed account of evolution of slum policy in Mumbai, see Appendix I).

This background has been sketched in some detail because it brings out the attitude of many Central Government agencies both towards slum-dwellers and the narrow legalism of its approach to the land it owns. It is a similar attitude that informed its stance towards the issue of resettlement and rehabilitation of the slum-dwellers living along the railway tracks. For years, the Railways have argued that they have no part of the responsibility to shift slum-dwellers: it was urged that since these persons were encroachers, it was the job of the relevant authorities -such as the demolition squads of the Corporation or the Government- to remove them from railway land. In fact, there was a certain contrariness in their stand: on the one hand, they would not agree to implement the local government’s policy for slums on the grounds that it was their land but, on the other hand, they sought State Government intervention to clear their lands of encroachments. Officials of the State Government of Maharashtra argued that it was the responsibility of the Railways, in the first place, to protect its land.

Legal hair-splitting aside, the attitude of the Railways was in part conditioned by the remoteness of its top management from the pulls and pressures of political or community mobilization at the city or state levels. Noises from the street reverberate louder in the meeting halls of Municipal Corporations and the chambers of State Legislatures than in the distant offices of the Railway Board in New Delhi, the highest executive forum of the Railways. Access to Members of Parliament or the high-ranking officials of the Railway Ministry is more difficult than approaching corporators, members of the State Legislative Assembly or municipal officials in the city. The compulsions of proximity and local accountability explain the greater responsiveness of local and State administrations. The voices of the poor become muted as they are filtered through different layers of authority and traverse the terrain from the slum to the seat of power.

Yet, the pressures on the suburban railway system in Mumbai continued steadily to mount. The late running of trains would ignite the short fuses of weary, long-distance commuters and their ire would even take the form of setting fire to, or otherwise vandalizing, railway property. There was urgent need to improve the functioning and efficiency of the system and also to lay new lines. Improving the turn-around time of trains would by itself LEAD to huge gains and be far less expensive than the capital cost of laying new tracks. But the turn-around time could be bettered only if those families living close to the tracks could be shifted farther away. If that were done, the speed restrictions imposed by the Commissioner of Railway Safety would be lifted. However, the Railways disclaimed any responsibility and pointed a finger at the State Government, whilst the latter would argue that the responsibility had to be shared by the Railways because the State Government by itself did not have the resources or the land to resettle all the slum-dwellers on railway land.
 

SECTION 2 THE PROJECT
 
 

2.1 The Objectives

The objective of the Kanjur Marg resettlement and rehabilitation project were:

   a.To ensure resettlement and rehabilitation of 900 families of slum-dwellers along the      railway tracks to facilitate the laying of new tracks between Thane and Kurla;

   b.To perform the above task in a low-cost, participatory manner with the willing      consent of the community and the cooperation of the relevant governmental      agencies;

   c.To demonstrate a model of resettlement and rehabilitation that addresses the needs      of affected communities at the same time as supporting, even enhancing, the      economic, transport and engineering objectives of the Indian Railways and the      World Bank, the project funders.

2.2 Historical Development

The history of resettlement and rehabilitation policy in Maharashtra suggests that while it was well-developed and had a statutory basis with respect to persons affected by irrigation projects in rural areas, in urban areas it was neither statutory nor comprehensive. If slum-dwellers had to be relocated because the lands they occupied were needed for public purposes, they would be given small plots of land at locations selected without any consultation and with a minimal infrastructure. Not surprisingly, the disruption of community social and economic ties often resulted in resettled people going back to the same or nearby locations.

In the late eighties and early nineties, the construction of a rail link between Mumbai and New Mumbai was held up because of a slum in the way of the tracks at Mankhurd. New Mumbai, conceived as an alternative magnet to Mumbai, could not take off without the rail link being completed and expensive infrastructure remained unused. The Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA), a public agency, proposed resettling some of the slum-dwellers in walk-up apartments but not all could afford them. RSDF and NSDF had been working in this area and proposed that a piece of land be given for poor slum-dwellers to build their own houses by taking loans from a housing finance company. This alternative was accepted and the Jan Kalyan Housing Cooperative Society was born
and served as an exemplar of people-controlled, women-centred, self-help housing. The experiment, however, did not LEAD to policy change, despite demonstrating a viable option.

For nearly a decade, the World Bank and the Government of Maharashtra (GOM) have been negotiating the Mumbai Urban Transport Project II (MUTP-II), which has a number of rail and road sub-projects involving the displacement of 25-30,000 households in the city. The World Bank, after international attention focused upon the plight of Project Affected Persons (PAPs) in different countries, made resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) a necessary component of MUTP-II and the GOM appointed a Task Force, under the chairmanship of a retired Chief Secretary (Mr.Sukthankar), to formulate a policy. SPARC and NSDF representatives were associated with the Task Force and its sub-committees. The recommendations of the Task Force were accepted by the GOM in 1997 and a comprehensive, progressive R&R policy was worked out. (see Appendix).

For a variety of reasons, there was a delay by the World Bank in clearing MUTP-II so that by the time of writing (May 1999), negotiations between the Bank and GOM were still in process. Since the sub-projects for the upgrading of the suburban railways were getting delayed, and in view of public impatience, it was decided by Indian Railways to lay the fifth and sixth corridors between Kurla and Thane on the Central Railway using its own budgetary resources. For these lines to be laid, 1980 families living along the railway tracks would have to be rehabilitated. Since this project was originally included in MUTP-II, it was decided to follow the R&R policy so that retroactive financing would be possible as and when MUTP-II was cleared. There was also the feeling amongst some officials that if R&R was not taken care of, the MUTP-II sanction itself might be jeopardized.

According to the World Bank’s directives, all PAPs have to be resettled before any engineering work on the project can begin. Thus when a particular piece of land is cleared by getting people to relocate, it is handed over to the Railways whose task is then to protect it from new encroachments and begin work.

A plot of government land measuring about 2.28 hectares was identified at Kanjur Marg in the suburb of Ghatkopar on which to temporarily relocate 900 families. With the approval of the community to be resettled, the Task Force sub-committee on land, that included the President of NSDF, identified and selected this plot, which was ideally located only a few minutes away from the railway land to be cleared. It was a condition of R&R policy that communities should be associated with the process of selecting the site for their relocation. As NSDF/SPARC had been instrumental in conducting the base-line survey of communities and households affected by MUTP-II, they were in an ideal position to mobilize the community, particularly the women, and to secure their approval for the site for relocation. In view of this and its long-standing involvement with issues affecting the urban poor, GOM issued an order in March 1998, appointing SPARC as facilitator for the R&R operations.

Box 1

Community Base-line Surveys

Hut counting

When the community gets visited for the first time, a large number of NSDF and MM men and women hold meetings with the residents, and talk about themselves, their work and what they have come for. In most cases, the communities know of or have heard of the Federation's work, and credibility is generally easily established. To trigger the process of participation, the Federation leader, together with community residents, take pieces of chalk and begin to mark the doors of houses, marking each and every house door and area. Very quickly the community becomes discerning and suggests that criteria should be established to number the houses. All the structures have developed incrementally and there is no clear-cut demarcation of the completion of one house and the starting point of the next. So, often what might be two houses can be marked as one and what are two sections of the same dwelling can be marked as two. By encouraging a dialogue to occur about the numbering, the foundation is laid for communities to participate in the redress of any future grievances or disputes concerning property rights and entitlements.

Rough mapping

Then the group together with involved residents begins a rough mapping of the settlement. This is as much to help the plane-table surveyors later, as it is to help communities understand what surveys represent, and while this is done, much of the community and slum profile is also completed. Toilets, water taps, balwadis, services, amenities, etc. are all accounted for and how people get their goods and services, where they shop, etc, is also observed. This also creates a direct link between the investigators and the active members of the community, and in preparation for the formation of a nucleus of women's collectives, which later can be strengthened as part of the on-going process of community strengthening.

Numbering

Next house numbers are matched with the map and the chalk numbers on each dwelling are re-done in more permanent paint. Communities are informed that government and city officials will be checking on this process, and ensuring accuracy is essential to establish good faith and the credibility of the communities.

Cadastral survey

With numbers in place, the surveyors take over and mark and measure the sites. In most settlements community leaders, especially those individuals who feel threatened by this process or wish to obstruct it for political or other reasons step forward. Normally, surveyors just leave if obstructed and do not attempt tackle the situation or to defuse it. Hence, NSDF/SPARC workers of that area, whose presence brings reassurance, but tends to slow down the surveying process, normally accompany the surveyors.

The household survey

The survey begins using the painted numbers as an interview schedule number, which from this stage onwards is a useful identification number. This information is fed into the incomplete data.