Cities of the chosen few

In 1981, Bombay’s Municipality was planning to evict pavement dwellers from downtown areas of the city when Olga Tellis, a journalist, filed one of the first public interest petitions. In 1986 the Supreme Court gave a landmark judgement. It said that under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, the Right to Life included the Right to Livelihood and hence pavement dwellers could not be arbitrarily evicted. At that moment urban planning seemed to have taken a radical turn-- from the exclusionary process of removing the poor to the more inclusive process of providing basic services and livelihoods. Yet, some years ago, the government in this city moved with massive armed force to evict 73,000 families in response to Court orders in yet another ‘public interest’ petition filed by the Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG), to protect a ‘National’ Park reserved for ‘tourism’. No one seemed unduly bothered by the sundry religious ashrams inside the Park or the proliferating private apartment houses on its boundary. It appears that in two decades, notions of ‘public interest’ and of a‘planned’ city have dramatically changed. This phenomenon is not confined to some governments. Chennai, where 40 per
cent of the population is living in slums, is relocating 69,000 families to areas far removed from the city.Kolkata launched Operation Sunshine in 1996 to evict over 50,000 hawkers. In Delhi, judicial activism has been evicting vendors, rickshaws, beggars, industries and shopkeepers with alarming regularity. Hyderabad was distributing land titles and housing loans to the urban poor in 1977 but is now leasing large tracts of land at heavily subsidised prices to corporate groups. Bangalore is in keen competition as it builds lounges, pubs, parks, apartment complexes, malls and layouts, through collusion between bureaucrats and corporates. Chandigarh displaced almost 40 villages when it was built, then it demolished the construction labour camps, and is now evicting the service class from the occasional slum. In Ahmedabad, the closure of textile mills in the 1980s led to workers being laid off and its slum population has doubled. Jaipur wants to become a national hub for economic activities.

It has over 100,000 casual workers of whom 40,000 live on the footpath. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) was launched in December 2005 without any debate or discussion in Parliament, with the promise of providing Rs1.26 lakh crores to 63 million-plus cities and towns for a massive and comprehensive programme of urban renewal. But it is not clear how JNNURM will ease the pressure on infrastructure and provide services to the poor. In fact, JNNURM deliberately separates the two by setting them up under different ministries. But there are a set of compulsory ‘reforms’ attached to the Mission that are clearly designed to improve the ‘efficiency’ of the money market and benefit those who own money, land and property. An overview of the City Development Plans (CDP), prepared under the JNNURM by consultants, provides several clues about the ‘vision’ of the future, even for smaller cities and towns. Chandigarh wants to offer ‘world-class services to its investors’. Ludhiana has decided that it would ‘become a leading economic centre of the country’. Jaipur wants to be ‘a vibrant, 21st century renaissance city’. Lucknow’s vision is articulated as ‘a city with a dynamic economy driven by service sectors such as knowledge-based education, health, tourism and information technology thatprovides … an attractive investment destination’. Indore shall ‘enter an era of prosperity with spatially restructured environment,

improved urban infrastructure to … becoming a world class commercial city.’ Raipur wants ‘a beautiful eco-friendly city for all, providing high quality of civic services’. Guwahati is visualised to be ‘one of the most admired state capitals of India’, with the aim to ‘create a city without slums’. The vision for Coimbatore, though, is ‘to achieve improved service levels and a better quality of life for the citizens of Coimbatore, including pucca houses for all slum households and education for all in slums’. Similarly Pune expresses its desire to focus on the basic needs of citizens rather than create showpiece infrastructure projects to attract foreign investment. The Union government’s Urban Poverty Removal Strategy (UPRS) lays great emphasis on ‘people’s participation’ and facilitating access tolivelihoods or employment through the National Policy for Urban Street Vendors and the SJSRY. In contrast to the Master Plans and the CDPs, prepared by public sector authorities and private consultants, the UPRS has to be undertaken by NGOs in a period of six months. This underscores the thinking that governments and consultants do not possess the ability to dialogue with the poor any more. It is also another reflection of the gradual withdrawal of the state from service provision, the concurrent attack on work and shelter, and the annihilation of democratic functioning so that corporate structures can take over decisionmaking and policy formulation. The UPRS is currently being prepared for 12 cities – all of which are listed under JNNURM.

An examination of the Inception Report for the UPRS prepared for Pune reveals the gulf between what has been articulated as strategy and what is actually being prepared. Different estimates have been provided about the number of urban poor, and the Report avoids the issue by stating that ‘migration, livelihood, proximity to work are no longer the only indicators of poverty’, and so looks for other parameters such as housing, access to better sanitation facilities, and capability to function in society. For livelihoods, the Report cites the 2001 Census to state that the service sector industry forms a major source of employment but provides no independent city level data to back this claim. This gives a qualitative picture of slums and livelihoods, but there is no quantitative assessment of urban poverty– which is necessary for planning purposes. On the other hand, since the CDP has decided that ‘all settlements presently located in vulnerable areas are to be relocated’, the UPRS for Pune conveniently ignores the whole issue of livelihoods and merely focuses on relocation of slums and the provision of basic services at new sites. Similar patterns are discernible for the UPRS for other cities. Three trends become apparent when we look at this recent history of urban reform. First, large sections of the urban poor working in the informal and service sectors are being displaced by every government. Their displacement has as much to do with the space they live in as with the work that they perform. It is being promoted by bilateral and multilateral funding agencies. Secondly, the geographical and occupational space that the urban poor occupied is being transferred to larger private corporate entities or wealthier groups, such ascommercial complexes and residential layouts. Thirdly, while the driving force behind these changes is manifestly the new globalised economy, it is offered on an environmental platter of ‘cleanliness’ and ‘beautification’.

There appear to be three paths that are emerging from the rising dust of destruction. First, there are those well-meaning souls who feel that the working poor can be housed in resettlement colonies far away from the periphery of the city, forgetting that neither livelihoods nor services exist in the periphery, paving the way for the eventual ‘illegal’ return of the resettled. Secondly, there is the demand for a legal place for the informal sector families within the city in accordance with provisions in urban plans, asking for the poor to be housed in multi-storied complexes, or on land reserved for ‘weaker sections’, but tragically ignoring the ‘free play’ of market forces that enables the wealthy to acquire and maintain property. Thirdly, the activists acknowledge that there is little choice other than to challenge the changing order being promoted by global forces, requiring larger federations of the working people, to resist the demonic slaughter being carried out under the banner of reforms. Questions of unity and political alliances stare them in the face.

Dunu Roy is an activist with the Hazards Centre in New Delhi

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