Women and Property in Urban India

Women and Property in Urban India

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Bipasha Baruah


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© UBC Press 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca. 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

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Printed in Canada on FSC-certified ancient-forest-free paper (100% post-consumer recycled) that is processed chlorine- and acid-free. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

I e-book ISBNs: 978-0-7748-1929-9 (pdf); 978-0-7748-1930-5 (epub)

UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing program of the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. UBC Press The University of British Columbia 2029 West Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 www.ubcpress.ca

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Contents

Acknowledgments / xx List of Abbreviations / xx Map of India / xx 1 Minding the Gap: Gender and Property Ownership / xx 2 Locating Gender and Property in Development Discourse / xx 3 Place Matters: Orientation to Research Location and Context / xx 4 Complicated Lives: Urban Women and Multiple Vulnerabilities / xx 5 Gendered Realities: Property Ownership and Tenancy Relationships / xx 6 Women and Housing Microfinance / xx 7 Partnership Projects for Urban Basic Services / xx 8 Conclusions: Seeing the Forest and the Trees / xx Appendices 1 Case Study Slums and Slum Networking Project (SNP) Status in 2003/ xx 2 Summary Profiles of Non-upgraded Slum Communities / xx 3 Housing Microfinance Tables / xx Notes / xx References / xx Index / xx

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Acknowledgments

Writing this book was a solitary exercise; fortunately, researching it was not. The collaborative and consultative nature of this book was made possible by many. In India, I owe my biggest debt of gratitude to the women, men, and children who call the slums of Ahmedabad home. Their heartfelt hospitality and unfettered generosity toward me made researching this book an experience that I will cherish and look back upon with fondness for the rest of my life. In opening their homes and hearts to me without expectation of reward or compensation, they taught me valuable lessons about dignity, hope, and resilience that continue to enrich and humble me. I would like to thank Renana Jhabvala for inviting me to work with SEWA. I am beholden to the entire staff at the Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) for supporting me in my research, and I would like to specifically acknowledge Bijal Bhatt and the MHT field team not just for informing me about the activities and aspirations of the organization but also for being my friends and companions during my time in Gujarat. I would like to acknowledge the International Development Research Centre of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for funding this research through graduate and post-doctoral fellowships. Funding received through the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) and the York University Graduate Fellowship for Academic Distinction (GFAD) also facilitated successful completion of my doctoral studies. I was fortunate to have Dr. Bonnie Kettel at the Faculty of Environmental Studies as my doctoral supervisor. As well as critiquing my writing and helping me develop my research ideas, Bonnie provided the genuine encouragement and optimism that made getting through the doctoral program seem less like a test of stamina and endurance and more an investment in learning and self-development. The keen insights and critical comments of Drs. Fahimul Quadir and Ellie Perkins also motivated me during the research and writing process.

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viii Acknowledgments

Finally, I cannot thank enough my friends and family for their enthusiastic support of my work. Radhika Johari not only tolerated my research- and writing-related ramblings for four years but also patiently edited my work and constantly reiterated, even when I believed there was no end in sight, that there would be a light at the end of the tunnel after all. For his love, solidarity, patience, and nurturing, I owe my husband, Paul Perret, more than I could ever hope to capture in words. Although there may well be a woman behind every successful man, women everywhere are richer and more fulfilled by having men like him beside them! My parents, Monica and Anil Baruah, gave me the security to ask questions and the independence to find my own answers. To them, I owe everything.

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Abbreviations

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BJP

Bharatiya Janata Party

CBO

community-based organization

EDP

exposure and dialogue program

GAD

gender and development

MFI

microfinance institution

MHT

Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA Trust

Saath

Initiatives for Urban Equity

SEWA

Self Employed Women’s Association

SNP

Slum Networking Project

TLA

Textile Labour Association

UCC

uniform civil code

USAID

United States Agency for International Development

Vimo

SEWA insurance cooperative

WAD

women and development

WCD

women, culture, and development

WID

women in development

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1 Minding the Gap: Gender and Property Ownership

Faridaben lives in a two-room house in a “regularized” slum in Ahmedabad, India, with her husband and five young daughters. She works as a seamstress sewing sari blouses for women in the neighbourhood. Her husband is an auto rickshaw driver. Faridaben admits that business is frequently not steady and consistent enough for their combined incomes to meet the growing needs of the family. Her oldest daughter is sixteen years old and helps Faridaben with her tailoring business. Faridaben wanted her daughter to finish secondary school but was forced to withdraw her from school when she completed grade five to help supplement the family income. The younger girls still attend the local elementary school, but Faridaben is unsure whether they would all be able to continue. A neighbour persuaded Faridaben to open a savings account with a local cooperative bank three years ago. After a year of regular saving, she qualified for a small housing loan. She used the six thousand rupees (US$150) she received to install floor tiles in her home. The previous dirt floor had caused Faridaben a lot of trouble, dirtying any blouses she was sewing that dropped on the floor. She frequently lost a portion of her income to the extra cloth she had to buy to replace the blouse pieces that fell – no matter how careful she was. Matters were made worse during the rainy season when water entered the house and the floor turned muddy. The first loan enabled Faridaben both to improve the physical quality of her home and to protect her income. She was able to repay her first loan in small monthly instalments. She used a second loan to install a sturdy iron door that could be locked from the inside of the house. Ensuring the physical security of their young daughters had become a serious concern for Faridaben and her husband. Locking the door at night, they said, helped them sleep a little easier. Faridaben is now applying for a third loan, which she hopes to use to plaster the brick walls of her house and to install a tiled roof to replace the tarpaulin sheet that currently covers the house. The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) recently approved household-level infrastructure upgradation for Ambedkar Nagar, an unserviced

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4 Minding the Gap

slum in the city. Although they are somewhat distrustful of the AMC’s intentions, the residents of Ambedkar Nagar are anxious and eager to receive the benefits promised by the slum upgradation project, including secure land tenure, which they emphasize will motivate them to attempt to upgrade their homes incrementally. Ratnaben lives in a straw hut in the slum with her husband, a factory worker, and four young children. She wakes up at five o’clock every morning to stand in line for water. The community of 150 households shares one water tap, which works for only one or two hours each morning. There is no municipal garbage removal service in the community, so residents pool money to pay a private contractor to rid the area of its refuse on a monthly basis. There is also no electricity in the community. Since kerosene is expensive, most residents, including Ratnaben, who embroiders wedding saris on contract, must finish their daily activities before sundown to minimize the use of lanterns. None of the families in Ambedkar Nagar has toilets in their homes. There is one public toilet in the community, but whenever there is a storm, the shallow drains clog up and render it unusable. All residents are forced to use railway tracks, riverbeds, and other public areas as toilets. They are subjected to ridicule, and women are vulnerable to sexual assault. That secure land tenure and adequate housing, or the lack thereof, have a significant impact on the lives of people does not require justification. This book was not motivated solely by the desire to demonstrate the relevance of land tenure, housing, and sanitation services in the lives of low-income urban populations. There is a large body of literature produced by policy makers, planners, architects, and designers within governments and international agencies that addresses the importance of adequate and appropriate housing in improving the quality of lives of low-income families in the developing and developed world. The increasing concern with housing lowincome populations in the developing world has placed shelter prominently on the agendas of research and development agencies (Hoy and Jimenez 1991; Jimenez 1984, 1985; Satterthwaite 2003a). However, far less attention has been paid within such discussions to the specific land and housing needs of low-income women. Thus, whereas research and scholarship on housing policy, for example, focus explicitly on why it is necessary to distinguish the housing needs of developing world populations on the basis of income, there is less emphasis on understanding shelter needs on the basis of gender. Similarly, although 1 billion people – or about 32 percent of the world’s urban population – live in slums (UN-Habitat 2003), very few efforts have been made to understand the causes and consequences of urbanization from a gender perspective or to engage with the lived realities of women in slum communities in the developing world. How important is landed property in women’s lives? Do women such as Faridaben and Ratnaben have land and housing needs that differ significantly

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Minding the Gap 5

from those of the men in their lives? What specific factors impede or facilitate women’s ability to access and control landed property? How can state agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) support women’s attempts to acquire land, housing, and sanitation services? What specific skills, opportunities, and legislative and policy changes do women need to empower themselves vis-à-vis men in the ownership of landed property? Do women in slum communities face social and economic challenges that differ from those faced by men? How do social hierarchies of class, caste, ethnicity, literacy, and other markers intersect and influence women’s entitlement, or lack thereof, to landed property? This book seeks to answer these questions in the context of urban contemporary India. It explores the challenges and opportunities facing women in securing access to and control over land and housing in low-income settlements in Indian cities. I chose to focus specifically on urban low-income women in this book because of the central role that land tenure, housing, and infrastructural services such as water, electricity, and sewerage can play in their lives, and because of my observation that their needs have been marginalized even more than those of their rural counterparts both in academic scholarship and in development planning. Women and Property Ownership: Why It Matters The study of the social, economic, emotional, and cultural significance of land and housing in different societies has had a long history, and much has been written about the complex, frequently contradictory, meanings of “property.” Many scholars emphasize the “situated nature of property” (Moors 1995, 5) by documenting how the significance of wealth and resources can be revealed only through an understanding of concepts of persons, things, and valuables within specific cultural systems. Writing mostly about the Latin American context in the early 1970s, John Turner maintained that housing is not so important for what it is as for what it does for people. He emphasized that the worth of the physical product cannot be assumed to lie in its physical qualities but, rather, in the relationship between the object and the user (Turner 1972). Turner found too that in their search for shelter, low-income households were motivated by economic opportunity – reflected primarily by the desire to secure shelter close to sources of employment; by security in the form of legal tenure and protection from eviction; and by status – as an outward manifestation of improved economic condition. There are several critiques of the political and economic implications of Turner’s ideas (see, for example, Burgess 1978, 1982; Harms 1982); however, none draws attention to the complete lack of any gender analysis in his work. Drawing upon Turner’s findings, it is easy to understand that Faridaben’s home does not simply provide shelter for her and her family; it also strongly influences her ability to make a living as a seamstress. However, the fact that women’s incomes tend to correlate more strongly and positively with the

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6 Minding the Gap

adequacy of housing, since they are much more likely to be engaged in home-based work, finds no mention whatsoever in Turner’s work. Similarly, Ratnaben and her husband’s excitement about water taps and toilets is understandable from Turner’s perspective, given that such basic services not only improve the standard of living for the urban poor but also provide de facto tenure security and protection from eviction. The enormous improvements such services would bring to the lives of women in the household – by reducing the daily drudgery of procuring water and the indignities of relieving themselves in desolate public spaces – do not even appear in the form of a footnote in Turner’s scholarship, or, thus far, even in its criticisms. Like men, women acquire property through inheritance, purchase in the market, and/or distribution by the state. However, unlike men, women in many societies face specific gendered constraints that limit access to land and housing. This acknowledgment has emerged much more recently in policy debates as a result of academic scholarship in gender and development as well as activism around land tenure and housing. As its title suggests, this book attempts to engage with both the closed doors as well as the windows of opportunity that women encounter in seeking access to land and housing in urban contemporary India. Issues related to women’s access to land tenure, housing, and property rights have acquired prominence in research and in development organizations in South Asia only in recent years. It has since been documented through multiple sources of evidence, mostly in the rural context in South Asia, that women’s ownership of land and housing offers a vital form of security against poverty and associated economic and social status that other forms of income do not (Agarwal 1994a; Chen 1998; Nussbaum 2000). Since private ownership rights in landed property hold a privileged position in the South Asian context, it has been suggested by several researchers that property ownership strongly influences gender relationships both within and outside the household, and that women’s struggles for a legitimate share in landed property have the potential to become critical entry points for women’s overall empowerment. S. Basu (1999), for example, writes that property often emerges as the cornerstone of women’s self-empowerment to challenge numerous actors: the state, contractors, landlords, husbands, and parents. Documented benefits of women’s property ownership include increased intra-household bargaining and decision-making power; reduced levels of domestic violence; greater control over the education and welfare of children, especially girls; and reduced anxiety about abandonment and physical security. Researchers in the southern state of Kerala, for example, found that 49 percent of women with no property reported physical violence, compared with only 7 percent of women who did own property (Panda 2002). Protection of land rights is also stressed for widows and unmarried women in urban and rural India because it has been repeatedly observed

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Minding the Gap 7

that property-owning widows living alone or with their children were treated with much greater respect and consideration than those who did not own property (Chen 1998; Chen and Dreze 1992; K. Singh 2004). Despite such compelling evidence, governmental responses to women’s needs in South Asia have continued to concentrate almost exclusively on health, nutrition, and income-generation schemes over gender-focused reform of landed property rights, legal literacy, and political equality. Barring some notable exceptions, NGOs in the region have also shown unwillingness to involve themselves in the complications of addressing issues of land and property for women – issues known to be controversial in any country but that are especially sensitive in India, with its strong patriarchal culture and religious or cultural laws that influence and “normalize” inequalities – despite continued assertion by scholars and practitioners, that in addition to economic opportunities, women need independent and equal rights in land and property ownership to be able to empower themselves to have equal footing with men in society (Agarwal 1997, 2002a; Baruah 2003; Basu and Rajan 2006; A. Sen 1999). Even feminist organizations with explicit goals to improve women’s social and economic status have engaged much more actively with employment and wages as the vehicles for change than with property ownership (Baruah 2004a, 625). Unfortunately, although access to land and housing is one key issue, women’s control over, and ownership of, such assets is quite another. Gender equality in legal rights to own property does not guarantee gender equality in actual ownership, nor does ownership guarantee control. Despite de jure national constitutional guarantees to women of equal property rights, issues of ownership, access, and control are confounded in practice by antiquated gender discriminatory laws and public policies; assumption of congruence in interests within the family; strong male vested interests in land and property; gaps between the central government’s policy directives and their multiple interpretations at the state level; entrenched patriarchal notions of “appropriate” gender relations; and the associated resistance to women’s inheritance and ownership of land and landed property. Women’s ownership or rights of use can be guaranteed only through land and property rights that relate to an enforceable claim, ensuring women’s freedom to rent, bequeath, or sell the property (Strickland 2004). Even in countries where property rights are legally conveyed, differences in the application of the statutory and customary laws mean that women’s property rights still may not be guaranteed. A 2001 household survey in Pakistan revealed that women owned less than 3 percent of the plots, even though 67 percent of the sampled villages reported that women had a right to inherit land (Mason and Carlsson 2004). In her research in Kerala, arguably the most socially advanced state in India, Arun (1999) found that lack of direct access to productive resources

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8 Minding the Gap

is common even in households where women own land. This is a significant factor in perpetuating not only household poverty and economic inequality between women and men but also social and cultural inequalities both inside and outside the household. Arun’s findings in Kerala echo a study from northwestern India, where many women who inherited land had only minimal control over the land they officially owned (U. Sharma 1980). Women’s organizations in India have aligned themselves strategically much more actively around issues such as dowry and the elimination of domestic violence against women than around advocacy for housing and equal property rights. Consequently, although these groups have mobilized quite successfully over the years to pressure the government into reforming rape and dowry laws, for example, mobilization on the issue of women’s property rights has been scattered and limited. This may be partly attributable the women’s movement in India, and in the rest of the world, having been forced to prioritize issues of “recognition over those of redistribution” (Fraser 1997, 12). Much attention has been focused on the unique identities of developing-world women and the influences on them of differences in class, race, ethnicity, and nationality (see, for example, Mohanty 1988, 2003). The rise of identity politics in the global North and South has to some extent shifted the focus of gender justice away from issues of political economy and redistribution and toward those of cultural identity. As a result, the relationship between fundamental factors affecting the lives of poor urban women, such as gender and property, and the potential for transforming gender relations through the material basis of women’s ownership of landed property has not been sufficiently explored. Therefore, one of the primary goals of this book is to explore the continuing importance and implications of issues of redistribution and to demonstrate their interconnection with issues of recognition. Women’s rights to land and property have been emphasized at the national and international levels as a critical prerequisite for gender equality, even if, as Tinker (1993) argues, nowhere is the move toward equity more difficult than in policies to change women’s rights to land and housing. Numerous organizations and researchers have documented challenges that women encounter in seeking to register land and houses in their names or their daughters’ names instead of in the names of their spouses or sons. Even a simple step such as securing joint land and housing titles for women is in practice fraught with difficulties since most property laws in India continue to reflect the old assumption of the unitary male-headed households where titles were granted principally to men. Female-headed households, divorced or separated women, unmarried women, widowed women, migrant women, and disabled women experience their own sets of stumbling blocks, frequently compounded by the interaction of other factors such as class, caste, religion, language, level of education, legal literacy, place of origin, and male

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Minding the Gap 9

migration. In the study of women and property, the total is more than the sum of its parts precisely because most women face complex interrelated vulnerabilities in their lives. In this book I grapple with this complexity by addressing women’s needs for land and property not just in legal and economic terms, as other researchers have done, but also in the context of their day-to-day social lives and realities. The exploration and unpacking of the interconnected vulnerabilities that impact women’s ability to access and control landed property – over and above the legal, socio-economic, and cultural impediments – is a prominent theoretical and conceptual contribution of this research. Housing is widely accepted as a vital indicator of quality of life (Payne 2001; UN-Habitat 2003). Ownership and control over assets such as land and housing provide direct and indirect benefits to individuals and households, including a secure place to live, the means of a livelihood, protection during emergencies, and collateral for credit that can be used for investment or consumption (Doss, Grown, and Deere 2008). Inadequate housing is an extremely visible dimension of poverty and vulnerability. Poor urban residents typically identify adequate housing as being among their top three priority needs. Lack of access to formal sources of housing finance and building support is emerging as one of the most significant obstacles to the reduction of urban poverty, hampering both the improvement of shelter conditions and local economic development (Malhotra 2003). That quality low-cost housing and basic services are difficult to deliver is perhaps best borne out by the miniscule number of organizations involved in this sector as compared with those involved in health and microcredit interventions, among others (Baruah 2004b). South Asia and other regions of the developing world have witnessed a veritable explosion of organizations seeking to support the “income generating” activities of low-income women in the informal sector. The portfolio of the microfinance sector has grown to include interventions such as financial planning, counselling, and microinsurance services. On the other hand, very few microfinance institutions have explicit mandates to provide financial services or technical support for the improvement of living and working conditions of low-income women. Therefore, one of the other major objectives of my research is to narrow the glaring information and research gap between the overwhelming focus in South Asia on the study of women’s access to microcredit for entrepreneurship and the corresponding scant attention paid to the study of microfinance as an enabling tool for securing adequate land, housing, and basic services. Since so many microcredit programs have mushroomed around the world in the last few decades, and so much energy has been expended in researching and evaluating them, a substantial body of literature has been generated that points to the sector’s most prominent accomplishments and failures. In recent years, there have been calls from credit practitioners and scholars

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alike to broaden the sector’s portfolio from solely credit provision for selfemployment to include other activities in support of women’s economic activities, for example, entrepreneurship training, appropriate technology development, market strategy, provision of work protection, social security benefits, and housing programs (Carr, Chen, and Jhabvala 1996; Gilbert 2004; Remenyi and Quinones 2000). A few organizations have taken on new responsibilities with varying levels of success. SEWA Bank, for example, identifies scaling up its housing microfinance programs and securing suitable policy instruments to increase urban women’s access to adequate housing and basic services as among its most prominent current challenges (B. Bhatt 2003; Vyas 2007). One of the goals of this research is to provide a broad and critical assessment of the potential for employing credit as an intervention for developing housing and basic service delivery. Gender-related research on land and property in South Asia has almost overwhelmingly focused on rural women and their unmet needs for agricultural land (see, for example, Agarwal 1994a; A. Cooper 1988; Custers 1987; Gupta 1993). The corresponding land and housing requirements of urban women in terms of financial services, tenure, planning and design of living space, physical comfort, sanitation, space for income-generating activities, and access to public services have received low and woefully inadequate attention in research and policy formulation. A few women’s organizations in South Asia have independently taken on issues of women’s shelter and housing. The Nari Udyog Kendra in Bangladesh, for example, provides low-cost housing for families and affordable hostel facilities for single working women in Dhaka, and the SEWA Bank in India provides housing loans for women and advocates on their behalf for relevant policy implementation. However, a review of the literature reveals no broad-based concerted effort on the part of state agencies or NGOs to put housing issues, particularly for urban low-income women, on the agenda for priority attention. This neglect mirrors a parallel gap within academic scholarship where the relationship between poor urban women and landed property has remained virtually unattended and little theorized. Therefore, the case for raising the visibility of these issues and building capacity for research and action is pressing indeed. By focusing on land tenure and housing for lowincome women in urban areas in India, this book stands to fill not one but several gaps in theory, research, capacity building, and policy formulation. Organization of Affiliation To conduct this research, I sought an affiliation with an organization that had a specific mandate to improve the living and working conditions of low-income urban women. I chose the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a trade union founded in 1972 to organize women in the informal

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Minding the Gap 11

sector in the western Indian state of Gujarat, partly because of the tremendous success it had enjoyed in promoting the causes of informal sector women, and partly because of the organization’s ability to employ empirical research about its membership to support its activities and advocacy.1 SEWA memberships are open to urban as well as rural women engaged in the informal sector. In the international development community, the name SEWA has become synonymous with the organizing and mobilizing efforts of selfemployed women. The SEWA model of unionizing women through cooperatives has been replicated in Turkey and Yemen, as well as in post-apartheid South Africa through the efforts of the Self-Employed Women’s Union (SEWU) in KwaZulu-Natal. My personal and professional commitment to social justice goals and feminist principles also influenced my decision to affiliate with SEWA. Since the empowerment of low-income informal sector women is the overarching objective of this book, and certainly of SEWA, I wanted to ensure that the objectives I set for the book, as well as the research methodology I employed to meet them, were connected in principle to feminist struggle. SEWA’s articulation of housing, housing infrastructure, and landed property rights for urban low-income women as one of its most pressing priorities further convinced me to select it as an organization of affiliation. Discussions with women in leadership positions within SEWA revealed that despite issues of ownership of land and property being crucial to much of its urban membership, this was an area toward which SEWA was just beginning to turn its attention. Thus, although SEWA has attempted to meet the shelter needs of its membership indirectly through its microcredit services for over three decades, and more directly through its slum upgradation and housing advocacy activities since the establishment of the Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA Trust in 1992, the momentum has been building up over the years for a grounded case study to explore the specific opportunities and constraints low-income informal sector women face in securing access to and control over landed property. Thus, the opportunity to fulfill such a timely research gap not just within academic scholarship but also within an organization committed to empowering women influenced my decision to conduct the study in collaboration with SEWA. More than four decades of “development” in the so-called Third World have not resulted in the predicted absorption, or even the significant displacement, of marginal small-scale economic activities by large-scale technology-intensive ventures, even in countries that have witnessed dramatic economic growth and rapid industrialization. Brisk population growth, increasing landlessness, inadequate social support programs, and growing rural-urban migration are presumably some of the factors that have ensured that large enterprises are unable to create enough jobs to absorb the swelling

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12 Minding the Gap

supply of labour. Under these circumstances, increasing numbers of urban and rural people have been forced to, or have chosen to, create alternative sources of employment. All such unregistered, and therefore unrecognized, manufacturing, service, and petty trade activities have come to be known collectively as the “informal sector,” the sector of economic activity that is not registered with government agencies and does not comply with regulations governing labour practices, taxes, and licensing (Dignard and Havet 1995). In countries such as India, the informal sector accounts for 93 percent of the total labour force and 64 percent of gross domestic product ( Jhabvala and Subrahmanya 2000). Because it is contradictory and unjust to describe such a large dynamic workforce in terms that relegate it to a peripheral position, many authors and activists prefer to use the term “self-employed,” arguing that these workers are essentially entrepreneurs since they assume all the risks of their businesses (E. Bhatt 1995; Jhabvala 1994). I support the use of the term “self-employed” to describe people who attempt to generate independent livelihoods under various circumstances over other terms with pejorative connotations, for example, “casual” work; illegal connotations, for example, “black economy” – derived from the Italian lavoro negro, traditionally used to describe people with connections to the mafia; or “marginal” economy, which utterly fails to capture the significant economic contributions of the sector. My concern with the use of the term “self-employed” arises from the possible confusion of the meaning attributed to it by Western capitalism. Self-employment in the context of the developed world implies informed choice to pursue independent livelihoods in the presence of other opportunities, whereas in developing countries an overwhelming number of people, especially poor women, are driven to it not out of a desire to be entrepreneurial but because of lack of options and unmet household subsistence requirements. I use the term “self-employed” to describe workers in the informal sector in this book, but within the context of the developing world as described above. In her study of the women’s movement in India, Leslie Calman (1992) sees two major ideological and organizational tendencies within the movement: one, largely urban based, that focuses on issues of rights and equality; the other, both rural and urban based, that emphasizes empowerment and liberation. According to Calman, the women’s rights advocates see women’s concerns as issues of civil and political rights – the rights of women as equal citizens with men – and aim for equality under the law. The women’s empowerment advocates, on the other hand, see women’s concerns as issues of economic and social rights – the right to a livelihood and to determine one’s own future – and aim for the personal and community empowerment of poor women. Calman further observes that those women’s organizations that seek to empower women focus on the material conditions to which

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women are subject and make consciousness-raising central to their organizing. The first step in organizing for empowerment is to get groups of women to analyze their common problems and then to seek solutions collectively. Based on their common understanding of a given situation, the women’s group sets the agenda for action. Under Calman’s classification, SEWA is a leading example of an empowerment organization because of its focus on the material conditions of women’s lives and on organizing and conscientizing both rural and urban informal sector women. With a membership of over 500,000 in Gujarat and over 1 million across India, SEWA is currently by far the world’s largest women’s trade union (Chen 2008). In addition to constantly expanding and adapting its activities and services to suit the needs of its membership, SEWA has established strong links with national and international policy, research, and advocacy organizations. The International Labour Organization’s Convention on Home Workers and the Supreme Court of India’s recognition of the right to vend as a basic human right and to a just licensing policy for street vendors, for example, came about largely as a result of SEWA’s advocacy. SEWA’s founderleader, Elaben Bhatt, spearheaded the establishment of Women’s World Banking, based in the Netherlands and the United States, with an aim to empower low-income rural and urban women by improving their participation in sustainable livelihood activities through access to financial services. It was also largely SEWA’s work that inspired the inception of Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing, a global research-policy network based at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University that seeks to improve the status of the working poor, especially women, in the informal economy through better statistics, research, programs, and policies, and through increased organization and representation of informal workers. The availability of these external resources, as well as SEWA’s considerable experience in collaborating on research projects with academic researchers and international development agencies, motivated me to select it over other organizations in the region. Therefore, my research was completed through a case study selected and conducted in collaboration with SEWA and its sister organizations, the Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) and the Shri Mahila SEWA Sahakari Bank (SEWA Bank). Given the collaborative nature of my research and my dependence on MHT for research assistance, I was compelled to address the issue of how I would maintain my intellectual independence and critical edge during my time in Ahmedabad even before I embarked upon the research. This was a serious concern, especially since SEWA’s reputation as a widely celebrated showcase institution within development circles made it almost impossible to find non-hagiographic literature on the organization. The work of Lamia Karim (see, for example, Karim 2004, 2008), who has written extensively

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14 Minding the Gap

about the challenges of conducting critical research with showcase institutions such as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee and the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, influenced my thinking and enabled me to design strategies to maintain my intellectual autonomy and critical skills during the research process. I was acutely aware as a result of engaging with this literature that immersing myself in the work and culture of a primarily grassroots organization such as MHT for an extended period, albeit as an independent researcher, carried with it the implicit threat of involuntary conversion into a high-level staff member. During my time in Ahmedabad, I frequently received requests for writing funding proposals, designing surveys, and making presentations at conferences on behalf of MHT. This underscored for me the need to develop strategies to optimize my fieldwork experience by agreeing to participate in initiatives and projects outside of my own research that could enrich my findings while staying true to the objectives I had set for the study. With this in mind, I agreed to participate in conferences and research activities that were centrally relevant to my research goals and politely turned down offers to participate in those that were not. This strategy seemed to serve its purpose, and although I benefited significantly from participating in activities such as an MHT-sponsored workshop on urban low-income housing and designing a pilot survey for initiating slum upgradation in the smaller city of Ankleshwar, I was happy to decline an offer to evaluate the appropriateness of MHT’s disaster response and preparedness activities in the rural areas of the Kutch district in Gujarat. My fluency in Hindi obviated the necessity for translation services and enabled me to interact directly with my research participants, yet I initially felt dependent on my research assistants for my orientation to the slums. I was able to find my bearings after the first or second visit to each slum. To ensure that all my interactions with research participants were not taking place in the presence of the research assistants, I frequently stayed behind in the slums and interacted individually with slum residents after the focus groups were completed and the MHT fieldworkers had headed back to their offices. SEWA’s Exposure and Dialogue Program, described in Chapter 4, as well as tea and dinner invitations to the homes of research participants, gave me an opportunity to interact directly and independently with women in slums without MHT’s mediation. I used the library facilities at SEWA Academy and the archives at MHT extensively during the course of the fieldwork. I appreciated the opportunity to immerse myself in the literature on SEWA and its activities, but I was aware of the need to familiarize myself with more than just internally produced documentation and evaluations of the organization’s programs. I made the effort to find external evaluations of SEWA and MHT’s work at the Gujarat Institute of Development Research and other organizations in the city. Some

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Minding the Gap 15

of the insights into MHT’s work provided by NGOs such as Ahmedabad Study Action Group, Disha, Saath, and World Vision offered me a new analytical lens through which to examine its work vis-à-vis other organizations in the city, and these perspectives feature prominently in this book. Roadmap for the Reader: Organization of Chapters In Chapter 2, I frame and locate the questions my research posed about women’s need for land, housing, and basic services within different theoretical approaches to gender and development, ranging from the welfare, efficiency, and anti-poverty approaches of the 1970s and 1980s to the more recent empowerment, rights-based, and capabilities-based approaches of the 1990s and the new millennium. Based on a review of literature on gender and land rights in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, I also identify the factors that are most likely to facilitate or impede women’s attempts to inherit, purchase (or receive from the state), and control landed assets in contemporary India. In Chapter 3, I provide a general orientation to the context in which the study was conducted, including background on the city of Ahmedabad, its major industries, cultural and religious composition, and recent events that have had dramatic impacts on the city’s mood and milieu. I also provide a detailed introduction to SEWA and its sister organizations, most notably the organizations that collaborated on the research project, namely, the Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) and the SEWA Bank. I end the chapter with a description of the key characteristics of the communities in which the research was conducted and their implications for the research process and outcomes. Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 report the major findings of the research. Chapter 4 deconstructs the complex interconnected vulnerabilities women experience while performing their duties in the market, the family, and the community. I examine these vulnerabilities in the context of implications for access to and control over land, housing, and housing infrastructure. Chapter 5 explores the nature of land tenure and property rights in urban areas and their implications for women. I raise key issues that need consideration in developing a gendered vision of urban land rights, tenure, and reform. Chapter 6 provides a synopsis of shelter finance sources in India and of the potential for housing microfinance to meet the shelter needs of lowincome households. In this chapter, I make policy recommendations to improve the accessibility and affordability of housing-related services and financial products for low-income women in the informal sector. I also emphasize conflicts and complications that may arise from unquestioningly accepting, as much of the development practitioner community does, that providing women with microfinance can promote gender equality within and outside the household. Chapter 7 dwells upon institutional issues in partnership projects. It is based on information derived from formal and

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16 Minding the Gap

informal interactions with the staff and fieldworkers at MHT, other local NGOs, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, private sector representatives, and funding agencies. Using MHT as a case study, I elaborate on challenges and opportunities NGOs engaged in housing activities may face in collaborating with partners with different core philosophies, motivations, working styles, strengths, and constraints. I also briefly explore the potential of organizing women around their housing needs to secure more strategic gains in political participation, community leadership, and transformation of gender relations within and outside the household. Chapter 8 concludes the book with a summary of major research findings, their broader policy implications, and a reflection on the theoretical and conceptual anchors that provided the most appropriate frameworks for conducting exploratory interdisciplinary research on gender and landed property in the context of urban India.

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2 Locating Gender and Property in Development Discourse

Much of the scholarship on landed property, and especially on gender and property, attests to the tremendously empowering yet complex and contradictory nature of such property (see, for example, S. Basu 1999; Deere and Leon 2001; Hirschon 1984; Kishwar and Vanita 1990). Many scholars have addressed property almost entirely as an economic relation, though some have also contributed to the debate on the importance of property as a social relation. Virginia Woolf’s musings in 1929 about “a room of one’s own” spoke to the enormous power of the concept of property because it held out for women the desirable vision of having one’s own space, one’s own property, and enough economic resources to afford women the freedom to immerse themselves in self-development independently of the men in their lives. Woolf’s thesis, considered radical at the time, is inadequate and too simplistic to capture the experiences of all women, but it does have a visionary quality that resonates as well today with the experiences of a vast majority of the world’s propertyless women as it did then. Similarly, very few who live within the capitalist world system would attempt to dispute Engels’ contention – and Mies’s more recent assertion – that women’s subordination is connected to men’s accumulation of private property at the cost of women’s labour, and that the solution lies in women accumulating resources with exchange value (Engels 1985; Mies 1998). Agarwal (1994a) and S. Basu (1999) independently assert that in the contemporary world where few people live outside capitalist relations, women have a lot to gain if they control their own labour and own or have access to financial resources on par with other family members. Although acknowledging that the significance of property and other economic resources cannot be overemphasized within the capitalist world system, Hirschon (1984), in the edited volume entitled Women and Property, Women as Property, and Moors (1995), who studied contemporary property relations among Palestinian women, warn against circumscribing property by narrow definitions of capitalism and commodity, and encourage scholars to also consider specific ideas of kinship and ideologies

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of personhood in their analyses of property. These contributions strongly influence explorations of women and property in my research. In this book, I attempt to contribute to contemporary debates on gender and property not just on issues such as women and land tenure, urban housing, and the role of the state and civil society in housing provision or advocacy but also to larger issues such as the social, cultural, emotional, and ideological significance of landed property in women’s lives. The challenges and opportunities women face in seeking access to land, housing, and basic services can be explored through a range of theoretical lenses and disciplinary affiliations. One of my primary anchors in seeking to unpack the relationship between women and property was the literature on the different approaches to gender and development, namely, women in development (WID), women and development (WAD), gender and development (GAD), and women, culture, and development (WCD), propounded over the last three decades. I begin this chapter by attempting to locate women and property in each of these theoretical approaches to gender and development. In addition to exploring contemporary debates on gender and development to gain an understanding of how each treats women’s entitlements and claims to property, I review the literature to identify the factors that are thought to most strongly facilitate or impede women’s attempts to inherit, purchase, and control landed assets in contemporary India. Because the research and scholarship on urban women and property is limited, I also draw upon relevant literature on rural women and land rights in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America to construct an appropriate framework of analysis. Theoretical Anchors for the Study of Gender and Property Welfare, Efficiency, Equality, and Empowerment: WID, WAD, GAD, and WCD Welfare-based approaches to development emphasize that ownership of landed property would reduce the risk of poverty and destitution for women and their dependants. Efficiency arguments, on the other hand, have perceived women’s potential as an untapped resource and asserted that giving a woman title to property would improve her access to credit, technology, and information, which in turn would enhance her productivity and incomeearning potential. The efficiency argument is especially potent and continues to strongly influence the practice of development since women are widely considered to be better equipped and more ingenious than men in tackling the hardships of day-to-day poverty to make ends meet (Boserup 1970; Rose 1992; Rowbotham and Mitter 1994). It is much more common for men to remain unemployed for long periods when “work” is in short supply. Women,

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Locating Gender and Property in Development Discourse 19

on the other hand, are known to combine many jobs and occupations simultaneously, bringing in small amounts of cash, while also trading for food grains or clothing; exchanging services for access to a small dwelling or vending space; selling small quantities of consumer goods; collecting wood, fruit, vegetables, or recyclable waste from common lands; and using any specialized skills they may possess – tailoring or embroidering, for example – to earn additional income. Having pieced together the family income out of necessity and ingenuity, women are also known to spend almost all of their earnings on the needs of the family. Research conducted to inform Shramshakti, the report of India’s National Commission on Self-Employed Women, for example, attested that women spent their entire meagre earnings on food, clothing, and shelter for the family, whereas their husbands contributed a much smaller part of their earnings to the household – if there was a husband to begin with and if he had any earnings at all. The same report documented that up to 30 percent of poor families are supported solely by self-employed women (National Commission on Self-Employed Women 1988). Although the efficiency-based scholarship and activism of the WID approach led to the design and implementation of many programs to strengthen women’s economic productivity, until recently, far less attention has been devoted to women and their needs for land and housing in general and to their needs for infrastructure and neighbourhood- or community-level facilities in particular. Some scholars did argue for women’s independent access to land and housing even within the WID framework. Bina Agarwal (1994a), for example, emphasized the importance of land rights in terms of women’s welfare, efficiency, equality, and empowerment using economic, legal, and anthropological analyses in her pioneering book A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Her welfare argument stressed that given intrahousehold gender inequalities in the distribution of benefits, the differences in how men and women spend their incomes, and the positive links between children’s nutritional status and income controlled by mothers, the physical well-being of a woman and her children could depend significantly on whether she has direct access to income and productive assets such as land, and not just access mediated through her husband or other male family members. Other scholars writing about property have confirmed the need to rectify Indian women’s marginality in land ownership through research on widows and poverty (Chen and Dreze 1992; Gulati and Gulati 1993), and accounts of women’s struggles to acquire land in tribal and Christian communities (Kishwar 1987; Visvanathan 1989). These arguments highlight that ownership of assets, even for a poor woman, expands the range of income-generating activities she may engage in, increasing her options and available coping strategies.

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The move away from welfare and efficiency and the focus on equality and empowerment was reinforced by the distinction, first propounded by Maxine Molyneux in 1985, between women’s practical and strategic needs. A similar distinction was made by Kate Young in 1988 between the condition and position of women in different societies. Molyneux (1985) identifies practical needs as those that arise from the concrete conditions of women’s positioning, by virtue of their gender, within the sexual division of labour. Therefore, in many contexts, needs such as adequate housing, clean water supply, or child-care facilities may be identified as the practical gender needs of low-income women, both by development planners as well as by women themselves. In reality, these resources are needed by the entire family, and their identification as “women’s needs” merely serves to preserve and reinforce the sexual division of labour. By contrast, strategic needs are identified from a deeper analysis of women’s subordination and envisage the formulation of an alternative, more satisfactory organization of society in terms of the structure and nature of relationships between men and women. Depending on the socio-political context, meeting strategic needs may include the abolition of the sexual division of labour, the alleviation of the burden of domestic labour and child care, and – of particular relevance to property – the removal of institutional forms of discrimination by creating equal rights to land ownership or to access to credit. The evolution of scholarship and activism in the field demonstrated with increasing clarity that women could not be lifted out of subordination merely by manipulating conditions of employment or national accounting. The power dynamics between men and women needed to be addressed, necessitating cultural, economic, and political changes. These ideas were clearly articulated by the Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) network of Third World women theorists and activists. Empowerment, in their view, required transformation of structures of subordination through radical changes in law, property rights, and other institutions that reinforce and perpetuate male dominance (Sen and Grown 1988). Since these approaches concern themselves much more explicitly than the welfare or efficiency approach with women’s position in the household and in society vis-à-vis men, they support the view that entitling women with landed assets would strengthen their ability to challenge social and political gender inequalities in addition to increasing economic security and reducing vulnerability. It is important to reiterate, as Molyneux (1985) and Young (1988) have, that even efforts directed at meeting women’s practical needs sometimes lead to improvement not just in women’s condition but also in their position in society. The neatness of the theoretical distinction between practical and strategic needs is often confounded in practice. Group organization for wage increases and better working conditions are excellent examples of the process of fulfilling practical needs having transformed into fulfilling strategic needs.

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The core ideas of the women, culture, and development (WCD) approach coincide quite closely with those the DAWN network articulates. WCD had its roots in the observation feminist scholars made that aid agencies and development practitioners use the concept of gender in reductionist ways that fail to address issues of power and conflict as well as the larger social, cultural, and political contexts that frame women’s ability to resist conditions of oppression. Despite proponents of the WCD approach being sympathetic to the critiques of WID, WAD, and GAD, they assert that none of these previous approaches took culture adequately into account. On the rare occasion that culture was drawn upon as a vehicle for discussing women’s realities, it was constructed not as an evolving concept but as a static one from which women needed to be rescued. WCD scholars posit that to approach culture as lived experience rather than as a static set of relationships permits an opening of new avenues for development because a lived experience approach to culture highlights how production and reproduction are interconnected in women’s lives and ensures that women’s agency is visible (Chua, Bhavnani, and Foran 2000). Consequently, the twin assertions that production and reproduction cannot be separated in the lives of most women and that the agency of women may not just perpetuate inequalities but might also challenge them are central to the WCD approach. Through a WCD lens, ethnicity, religion, age, sexuality, literacy, and livelihood become aspects of women’s lives that cannot be omitted from any analysis or practice. A WCD perspective argues that to speak of “culture” simultaneously with development encompasses more poignantly the everyday experience, practice, ideology, and politics of Third World women, and thus may provide clearer ideas for a transformative development that attests to aspects of people’s lives beyond the economic (Bhavnani, Foran, and Kurian 2003). This transformative approach to development enables WCD scholars to assert land and housing rights for women as a central nonnegotiable issue that cannot be compensated for by providing skills training and other related interventions. Further, the work of feminist scholars illustrates how women’s control over economic resources is crucially mediated by non-economic factors such as access to common property resources, social support networks, and civil society organizations (Agarwal 1995; Kabeer 1996). This incorporation of non-economic aspects of people’s lives at par with economic factors is unique to the WCD thesis because it provides an opportunity to retain the material basis as a key means of grappling with the subordination of poor women in the developing world while not privileging it above other aspects of people’s day-to-day lives. Some writers, including Fraser (1997), have argued that the WCD approach swings the pendulum too far in favour of the cultural basis of women’s subordination, thereby diluting the cogency of the material basis of their oppression. However, I believe the introduction of culture as a vehicle for achieving social

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change and producing knowledge offers new and interesting possibilities for exploring an area as suffused with religious and cultural ideologies as land rights and property law. Cooperative Conflict and Intra-Household Bargaining One of the other major currents in the evolution of the concept of empowerment is the notion of economic autonomy and how it influences the bargaining positions of men and women within the household, community, and society. Although household bargaining dynamics had been discussed by some feminist scholars, including Beneria and Roldan (1987), one important contribution in understanding the dynamic and political nature of households was Amartya Sen’s application of game theory to the household and his view of the household as a site of cooperative conflict. Based on a critique of neoclassical models on the grounds that they could not explain the systematically inferior position of women in many societies, Sen’s bargaining model (1990) underlined the notion that conflicts of interest between men and women are unlike other conflicts – for example, class conflicts – since gender conflicts exist and persist across class, caste, religion, language, and other social differences. His emphasis was on understanding the possibilities for cooperation and conflict that result from the conditions in which women and men are immersed and which derive from their different bargaining power. This led to an understanding of the factors that could increase women’s bargaining power and agency, and women’s well-being. Sen’s formulation was subject to feminist critiques for not focusing directly on gender relations, yet it was conducive for raising questions about the factors behind women’s subordination, powerlessness, and low bargaining power. As such, it has subsequently been used by other scholars, including Seiz (1991) and Kabeer (2000), with a more explicitly feminist lens. Agarwal (1992), for example, builds upon Sen’s approach to focus more directly on intra-household gender relations. She identifies the most important elements of a person’s fallback position in a rural household as ownership and control of property, particularly land; access to employment or other means of income generation; access to forests, grazing pastures, or other communal resources; access to traditional external social support systems within the community or extended family; and access to state support or that of NGOs. She emphasizes that a person’s ability to physically survive outside the family corresponds with his or her bargaining power in relation to resource sharing within it. In another work, she discusses how social norms set limits on what can be bargained about, as well as how they determine bargaining power and influence the way bargaining is conducted (Agarwal 1997). She demonstrates too how social norms can themselves be bargained over and are, therefore, subject to negotiation and change. Similarly, Kabeer (2000) employs a bargaining approach to analyze women’s choice and negotiations

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with patriarchal conjugal contracts, including renegotiations around purdah and inheritance in different geographical settings. These analyses are important because they enable us to clarify our conceptions not just about how gender relations are constituted, maintained, and reproduced over time within the household and in wider society in general but also about how they may be altered. Like Agarwal, other authors writing on the topic focus more explicitly on rural women and their entitlements to agricultural land, but many parallels can be drawn between urban women and how their fallback positions and bargaining abilities are strengthened by ownership of property and assets such as housing, land, and work tools. In the South Asian context, private ownership rights in landed property hold a privileged position. Agarwal (1994b) argues that effective independent rights in private land could strengthen rural women’s fallback position in ways that employment alone may not. This is not to diminish or discredit strategies to enhance women’s employment opportunities but to assert that property ownership provides more than employment can, including a stronger base for social and political participation, and consequently for challenging gender inequality within and outside the home. This proposition is equally relevant for urban self-employed women, given the low unreliable wages as well as the frequently seasonal and vastly unprotected nature of employment in the informal sector. The concepts of cooperative conflict and intra-household bargaining also provide us with the theoretical foundations and the language to articulate that the fallback positions of both rural and urban women, and hence their ability to plan secure futures, are influenced as much by the social and economic factors documented by the researchers mentioned above as they are by multiple vulnerabilities resulting from their day-to-day struggles for survival. Since the legal, socio-economic, cultural, and political factors that impede women’s ability to empower themselves vis-à-vis men in the ownership of landed property have been researched and documented fairly extensively, at least in the rural context, in my research I sought to grapple more strategically with, and to unpack the relationships between, the more quotidian struggles for security and survival that influence the ability of lowincome urban women in the informal sector to acquire landed assets in their names. The literature on economic autonomy, intra-household bargaining, and cooperative conflict served as potent conceptual anchors to engage with women’s experiences of interrelated vulnerabilities while performing their duties within the household, community, and market. Women and Human Capabilities The human capabilities approach, first pioneered in development economics by Amartya Sen, is one of the newer approaches of relevance to the gender

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and development discourse, offering a fresh perspective on women’s claims to landed property. This approach is based on an understanding of central human functions and capacities. It focuses on the ability or the substantive freedom of people to lead the lives that they have reason to value and to enhance the real choices they have (A. Sen 1999). Because the capabilities approach focuses on the agency and freedom of individuals, it offers less scope for people to be perceived as mere recipients to whom benefits must be dispensed through the process of development and who must, in turn, respond in the manner predicted. The emphasis on civil and political liberties in the capabilities approach suggests that although the empowerment of women through employment opportunities, credit, educational arrangements, property rights, and so on may give women increased bargaining power within the family and community, it is finally up to the woman herself to choose to exercise that power. The human capabilities approach also introduces and links justice and the role of the law into discussions about equality, development, and peace in a more forceful and convincing manner than previous approaches that left the law relatively untouched. It demands legal justice for women in addition to social and economic opportunities and stresses actions such as enforcing women’s constitutional rights, reviewing and repealing discriminatory laws, applying the principle of affirmative action, and providing gender-specific legal education to practitioners as vital components in the process of achieving gender equality. It asserts that justice should take priority in social reflection and not be relegated to something that, as some economists believe, is mentioned when there are no rational arguments to be made. This focus on the law is especially relevant for a region such as South Asia, where vast gaps remain between stated principles of gender equality under the law and practices of the state, as revealed, for instance, in the deep-rooted pervasive male bias and the lack of conceptual clarity on ownership rights in the design of state land redistribution and titling programs. This meshes well with the arguments made by Bina Agarwal, among others, who emphasize that unless institutionalized forms of discrimination against women are eliminated, opportunities offered in lieu of these rights will merely be prolonging the status quo. In the context of South Asia, the lack of a uniform civil code in which fundamental human rights take precedence over gender-discriminatory religious customs also remains a major obstacle to the achievement of women’s equal rights under the law. The assertion of the capabilities approach that the longevity of a custom does not necessarily make it right and that contributions made by religious traditions must be assessed against the harm they do provide better opportunities for rectification of covert legal injustices against women. The human capabilities approach provides a useful framework for grappling with issues of gender and property because it highlights

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the continuing relevance of the legal basis of women’s marginalization in the ownership and control of landed property. Women and Property Ownership: Actors, Institutions, and Interventions Before discussing the actors, institutions, and interventions that influence women’s inclusion in and exclusion from property ownership, it is important to make a distinction between the use of the terms “rights” and “access.” Agarwal (1994a) defined land rights as the ownership or usufruct (that is, rights of use) associated with different degrees of freedom to lease out, mortgage, bequeath, or sell land. She clarifies that even though rights are claims that are legally and socially recognized and enforceable by an external legitimized authority, such as community or state, access to land includes not only land rights but also informal means of obtaining land, for example, borrowing it for a cropping season from a relative or neighbour. She asserts that it is consequently rights, as opposed to access, that imply a measure of security tied to an enforceable claim. Wanyeki (2003) similarly describes land rights as the rights to use (usus), enjoy (fructus), and exploit (abusus) land. Taking gender analysis into account, land and property rights are conceptualized in this study not only as the rights to access and control land and housing acquired through inheritance, market purchase, and state redistribution or resettlement but also as information about land rights and decision making around mortgaging, leasing, selling, or bequeathing land and houses. The principal means of acquiring land and property for both men and women are inheritance, purchase in the market, and distribution by the state. A review of the literature supports the view that gender inequality in property ownership in South Asia is attributable to the family, community, state, and the market, and that the mechanisms that exclude or disadvantage women are legal, cultural, structural, and institutional. A review of the African, Latin American, and South Asian literature identifies the following factors as most likely to influence women’s ownership of property. Patrilineal Inheritance The practice of patrilineal inheritance, where property passes through the male lineage, is common to most Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Zoroastrian social groups in India. The Constitution of India guarantees women equal rights to inheritance of parental property, but most social groups in India practice customary law rather than statutory law, which ensures that women have very limited property rights as daughters but are widely acknowledged to have use rights to their husband’s property or maintenance rights from a share of their husband’s property in the event of divorce or

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death. Contemporary inheritance laws in India emerged through a complex process of interaction between the colonial and pre-colonial systems and different segments of the population, the interplay of varying ideologies and interests, and the conflicting pulls of scriptural rules and local custom. Under current circumstances, these complexities necessitate that we distinguish between statutory law, customary law, and actual practice to examine inheritance rights for urban as well as rural women. A review of the literature revealed similar contradictions in the African context. Wanyeki (2003) writes that the practice of customary regulation of land, including inheritance, has almost without exception been accommodated by religious regulation of land, to women’s detriment. Similarly, and without exception, customary law in Africa is accommodated by statutory law, again to women’s detriment. Within statutory law itself there are unresolved tensions, with implications for women’s land rights. The effects of patrilineal inheritance – or of the violation of bilineal and matrilineal inheritance practices – can be similar to those of forced evictions or other forms of displacement. A small sample of single women residents in a large slum in Nairobi, Kenya, revealed that close to 40 percent of them had been disinherited of their marital homes after the death of their husbands. Similarly, a survey conducted in a slum community in Accra, Ghana, showed that approximately one-third of the women were residing in the slum because they had in some way been victims of disinheritance (COHRE 2004). Patrilocality The system of patrilocal residence is practised in most Hindu and Muslim communities in India. It dictates that a woman leave her parental home at the time of marriage to join her husband in his home. Much of the literature on land and property rights for women concurs that patrilocality is a fundamental source of gender inequalities because it isolates women from their natal homes and plays a crucial role in depriving them of their share in parental property (S. Basu 1999; Chen 1998; Jacobs 1998). This is especially true in some Hindu communities of northern and western India, where marriage rules prescribe alliances outside the village, thereby drastically alienating a married woman from her natal home once she is settled in her husband’s family. Since Indian women typically enjoy far less mobility than men, marriage into a distant state or city often translates into permanent separation from their natal families. Strong social norms that deter parents from accepting support from married daughters during times of crisis also contribute to their unwillingness to endow daughters with property at par with sons. Limited Access to Employment and Credit Because of the gender division of labour and their overwhelming presence in the lowest paid, vastly unprotected ranks of the informal economy, Indian

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women face severe restrictions on employment opportunities that in turn strongly undermine their ability to acquire property. Women are at a disadvantage as buyers in the property market because the ability to participate in this market is a function of savings and access to credit, which depend on the nature and remuneration of the economic activities they engage in. Women are weaker participants in the property market compared with men because they earn less, have fewer economic activities available to them, and are considered less creditworthy than men. Harris-White (2002) emphasizes that women must face the reality of the market’s discrimination against them. In her study of women’s roles in agriculture in Kerala – frequently talked about as the most socially advanced state in India – Arun (1999) encountered farmers who stated that they could not bargain with men in the market because of the entrenched social norms of society. Similar constraints are reported in the African and Latin American literature on women and land. In her study of the unfolding land reform process in South Africa, Sunde (1997) identifies lack of access to technical skills and economic resources as key variables inhibiting women’s ability to purchase land or to benefit from land reform. Writing about the Latin American context, some authors cite case study evidence of women paying higher prices than men for similar plots of land. They suggest that even when economic factors are held constant, women and men are not on a level playing field when it comes to negotiating in this market, since gender role socialization makes it difficult for women to bargain as equals with men (Deere and Leon 2001; Moser and Peake 1987). A general review of the literature suggests that there has been insufficient research conducted from a gender perspective on land and housing markets in South Asia. The intense pressure on both rural and urban land in the region makes it a topic worthy of exploration from the perspective not just of who owns what in terms of land and housing but also of how, from whom, and on what terms women and men acquire property. Male Bias in State Programs of Land Distribution and Titling I have discussed elsewhere how the legal, cultural, structural, and institutional mechanisms excluding women from owning property are interrelated and interdependent. They have as their basis patriarchal ideologies embedded in constructions of masculinity and femininity and the “proper” gender division of labour between and within the public and private spheres. Women are often excluded from owning land because property rights are ceded by communities and the state only to household heads, the great majority of whom are male. In the post-independence agrarian reforms in India, for example, it was assumed that the benefits of titling the male household head with land would be shared equally by all members of the household (Agarwal 1998a; A. Basu 1992). This practice was supported by civil codes under which

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the husband represented the family in all external matters and was the administrator of the household’s common property. Therefore, land reform may bring a change in control over the land from a landowner, village elder, or other more-distant patriarch to the husband. These practices are supported by the social recognition of men as farmers or primary breadwinners, whereas women were relegated to helper status regardless of the amount of time or effort they dedicated to economic activities. The persistence of such genderbiased public laws and policies is based too on the belief that land redistribution to women will reduce farm sizes, lead to fragmentation, and in turn decrease farm productivity (Agarwal 1994a). Consequently, redistributive land reform programs continued to be modelled on the notion of the unitary male-headed household, even in redistribution and resettlement schemes in parts of South Asia where customary inheritance systems have traditionally been bilateral or matrilineal. In Sri Lanka’s Mahaweli resettlement scheme, for example, women lost customary land rights and decision-making power because of the “housewifisation” of their roles (Lund 1978). Single mothers and other female-headed households are even more easily overlooked in land reform and redistribution, as they do not conform to the patriarchal nuclear family norm. The literature reveals similar findings in the context of Latin America, where laws and policies targeted at household heads sometimes undermine women’s pre-existing land rights. The Peruvian land reform of 1969, for example, facilitated the distribution of legal tenure to male heads of households. This effectively obliterated the pre-existing formal and informal land access rights held by women in the bilateral inheritance system, as well as the relatively equitable land access under traditional usufruct in most Andean areas (Deere 1987). As well as undermining the traditional access rights held by women in male-headed households, laws and policies targeting household heads marginalized single women, especially those without dependants, who were not viewed as household heads. Even where land redistribution takes place as a result of widespread popular struggle, as in the 1940s Telengana movement, led by the Communist Party of India, issues of gender equity may not be given priority, despite women’s prominence in the movement (Sanghatana 1989). In fact, many land reform movements, often unwittingly, have further entrenched what Wiergsma (1991) terms “peasant patriarchy” in research conducted in Vietnam. The mechanisms of women’s exclusion from property ownership apply as much to urban women as they do to rural women. This is evident from recent struggles for access to adequate housing and to women’s ownership rights in several countries. As part of urban housing movements in Asia and Latin America, women are participating in land takeovers and assuming responsibility for legalizing their claims to landed property (T. Mehta 1996; Varley 1994). They are also contributing their savings and their labour to

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self-help housing schemes (Sagot 1997). As is the case with rural women, when it is time to title these properties, officials frequently give preference to male household heads and issue titles in the name of the husband only. In effect, in urban areas, the negotiation of both de jure and de facto land rights remains primarily a male enterprise (Roy 2003). This renders women vulnerable within marriage and consensual unions, and in the event that they are abandoned, separated, or widowed, they may not have any legal claim at all to the property. Social Norms, Perceptions, and Kinship Ideologies Agarwal (1994a) cites the following factors as most influential in determining a daughter’s ability to successfully claim a share in inheritance of parental property in South Asia: her level of literacy; her knowledge of legal rights; the social legitimacy of her claim within the community; her access to the legal machinery to enforce a claim; and her access to resources for survival outside the support systems provided by contending claimants – for example, brothers. These factors are interdependent and influenced by other economic and non-economic factors. A daughter’s use of the legal system to press entitlements to parental property, for example, is strongly influenced by the social norms of how common and acceptable it is for women to inherit property in a particular community, by whether she can afford the direct monetary costs and time of the litigation, and by how economically and emotionally dependent she is on members of the family, who may contest the claim. Perceptions based on gender, age, and marital status can strongly influence the social legitimacy of a person’s claim to property. For example, in societies where women marry out patrilocally and at a distance, daughters are often perceived to be less able to take care of parents in their old age and therefore less deserving of inheritance than sons. Such perceptions are clearly not based on the practical or logistical difficulties of supporting parents from a distance, since work-related migration by sons, for example, is rarely seen as a constraint to inheritance of property (A. Sen 1990). Alternately, women are constructed as dependants rather than as active economic agents and therefore are perceived to be less in need of independent access to landed property. Similarly, women’s abilities to engage with matters outside the household, including interacting with legal and administrative institutions, are frequently underrated, and younger unmarried women are often thought to be less competent than their older married counterparts (Agarwal 2002a). Norms can strengthen the implicit bargaining power of those parties whose interests they favour. For instance, in communities that subscribe to the ideology of female seclusion, women are less likely to be in a position to protest gender inequality or to affiliate themselves with institutions beyond the household and the family. They are also more dependent on mediation

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and support from men and less likely to contest their share in family property against those of their brothers or other male relatives. That women in South Asia frequently give up their claims in their father’s property in favour of their brothers without even being asked by the brothers to do so speaks to the greater implicit bargaining power of the latter. It is important to consider too the ideological significance of property and the intricate negotiations of kinship, as well as the optimization of social and economic needs, when attempting to understand women’s decisions not to stake claims to parental property. In her study of inheritance among middle-class and low-income women in New Delhi, S. Basu (1999) writes that refusing legal shares of property can be as important in revealing the meanings of self and community as attempts to acquire property would be. Moors (1995), whose study included numerous women who did not initiate property claims, similarly contends that although inheriting property is not always an indication of gendered power, neither is refraining from taking one’s share necessarily an expression of total subordination. It is worth emphasizing that norms and perceptions can serve as both enabling and disabling factors in women’s claims to property. Norms that encourage matrilocal residence and women’s participation in the labour force, for example, can be seen as enabling, whereas those that prescribe patrilocal residence and female seclusion can be seen as disabling. Similarly, social perceptions that women are capable of independent economic and political action are enabling, whereas those that construct women as dependants are disabling. Whether norms and perceptions tend in one direction or the other can vary culturally across regions and religious groups. Traditionally, for instance, it is from south India and to a lesser degree from west India that we find evidence of women possessing landed property, such as from temple inscriptions of the medieval era (Agarwal 2002a). Opposition to daughters inheriting property is much lower even today in southern, western, and northeastern states of India (Agarwal 2002a; Mukund 1999). In other words, enabling social norms such as matrilineal inheritance and equal educational opportunities may have given women greater bargaining power in these states, whereas disabling social norms in northern and central states, referred to as the “patriarchal-patrilineal-patrilocal” belt by Sudha and Irudaya Rajan (1999), may have had the opposite effect. Social perceptions shape attitudes and ideologies among families and communities as well as among legislators and legal institutions. They shape understandings of the likely impact of property ownership on women’s roles in society; fuel fears that if women inherited property the family would break up; and caricature women who advocate for gender equal property rights as Westernized, privileged, superficial, and self-seeking – the “lavender, lipstick and vanity bag variety” (Agarwal 1994a, 210).

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Several authors, B. Cooper (1997) and Jackson (2003) among them, have suggested that some women’s inability to secure entitlements to landed property may be less an outcome of their oppression and more a result of the fact that the men in their lives are also unable to acquire control over landed property. Jackson (2003) discusses how women’s ability to access and control property is significantly eroded in communities that subscribe, as some Indian and African communities do, to a system of primogeniture, where the eldest son inherits all his parents’ property. In such circumstances, not being the wife of the eldest son of the family can significantly erode a woman’s ability to demand even access rights to landed property belonging to her husband’s parents. Similar constraints obviously also exist for women whose natal and marital families are landless – as are millions of rural farm workers and urban squatters in India – to begin with. Women’s Ability to Organize, and Support from Civil Society Groups Women’s ability to organize themselves into large cohesive collectives significantly improves their ability to muster support from civil society actors seeking reform and to bargain with the state for gender-progressive legal change. In the early part of the twentieth century, women’s organizations such as the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) and Womens India Association (WIA) strategized and campaigned consistently in favour of women’s property rights. They upheld their interests in the face of attempts by Congress nationalists to argue that women were being divisive and even anti-national for pushing for reform at a time when the independence movement was gaining impetus. The perseverance of AIWC, WIA, and similar organizations in the face of such criticism is admirable, since the argument that gender interests are divisive has been made not just in independence and civil rights movements but also in class-, religion-, and ethnicity-based political struggles. The legislative changes brought in, for example, by the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, which sought to transform major inheritance systems governing the Hindus from a position of gross inequality to quite substantial equality, was a result of the efforts of AIWC and WIA, among others (Agarwal 2002a). Despite the huge gap that remains between the acceptance of gender equality as an idea and its actual realization, there is widespread recognition of the need to address gender inequalities on many interrelated levels. This came about largely as a result of campaigns carried out by women’s organizations in South Asia and elsewhere, as well as of the growth of feminist research and analysis of gender. The women’s movement in India has grown significantly in size and form over the decades. It is currently representative of a wide variety of issues, strategies, and approaches. Even though in recent years there has been some recognition of the importance of property ownership

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in securing women’s economic and social security, it has yet to build a critical mass among the activities of women’s organizations. Agarwal (1994a) writes that one important reason for this neglect is that most women’s organizations that are concerned about women’s economic situation are largely preoccupied with employment, wages, and income-generating schemes as the sole means to enhance women’s well-being. Women’s lack of property ownership has received comparatively minor attention. The successes enjoyed by SEWA and the Chennai-based Working Women’s Forum, among other organizations, in mobilizing and unionizing large previously isolated groups of women to press for better working conditions and gender-progressive policy change substantiates that women’s collective group functioning and sense of group identity constitute critical elements in effecting change toward gender equality, both by giving weight to women’s claims and by challenging gender-regressive norms and perceptions. The number of civil society groups in South Asia has grown dramatically over the past two decades. There are an estimated 2 million citizens organizations in India today (Mitra 2001), and estimates of development NGOs range from 3,000 (Development Alternatives Inc. 1998), to 25,000 (Volunteer Action Network India 2000). These numbers are impressive, but as I indicate above, very few organizations have taken on issues related to women’s property rights or inheritance laws, except in a limited way around the mobilization for a uniform civil code (UCC) that would apply to all religious groups and communities in India, which are today governed by a diversity of religious laws and cultural practices. On the other hand, there are today some notable civil society actors who are deeply interested in women’s access to land for productive livelihood purposes, albeit through strategies other than legal reform. For example, since 1989, the Deccan Development Society in Andhra Pradesh has been helping poor low-caste women purchase or lease land in groups and cultivate it collectively, using the state government’s scheme of subsidized credit for this purpose (Agarwal 2001; Menon 1996). Similarly, there are NGOs in Kerala helping poor women lease land seasonally for vegetable cultivation, and several NGOs in different states working with tribal women in their struggle for land rights. More recently, Action India, a New Delhi-based NGO, along with other groups in north India, has begun to focus on women’s land rights (Bharti 1999). Nijera Kori, an NGO founded by development activists in Bangladesh, does not distribute material resources to women but seeks instead to build their organizational capacity to enable them to press claims on public institutions for redistribution of unclaimed publicly owned land (Kabeer 1994). Several NGOs working in rural Gujarat are also actively engaged in advocating on behalf of women for access to agricultural land. There are also a smaller number of urban groups seeking to enhance women’s rights to urban land and adequate housing. Some such groups, including the Society for the

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Promotion of Area Resource Centres and the National Slum Dwellers Federation, have links with larger international initiatives through the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UN-Habitat). These organized efforts indicate that there is growing awareness of the significance of women’s rights to housing and to arable land for economic security and empowerment. Although these groups have yet to organize themselves strategically to bargain effectively with the state to amend women’s legal rights or to institute affirmative action policies to optimize women’s access to land and housing, they hold the promise of becoming potential forces for mobilization on such issues. Support from the State The successes enjoyed by women organizing and mobilizing around their needs highlight the importance of sustaining strategic alliances between women’s organizations, civil society, and the state. It is now widely acknowledged that the women’s movement cannot afford the luxury of ignoring the state, since the latter has the power not only to enact laws and formulate policies in women’s favour but also to increase women’s access to productive resources. Regardless of the political leanings of the government in power, it must be held accountable to constitutional and international commitments to gender equality assumed by the state. On its part, the state would have an interest in cooperating with gender-progressive organizations and responding positively to their demands for a variety of reasons, including political pressure from women’s organizations, their supporters, and the media; loss of votes from gender-progressive individuals; international pressure from donor agencies, development organizations, and women’s networks and coalitions; and concerns about the country’s image beyond its borders. The state’s marked dependence on civil society actors for fulfilling social objectives such as female adult literacy and poverty alleviation may also be used by the latter as a point of bargaining – though the state may be willing to cooperate much more enthusiastically in projects seeking to deliver services in health care and education than in programs that call for significant redistribution of highly politicized resources such as land. That the state is frequently known to reward demands by civil society organizations based on their political affiliations is another important factor to consider in the state-NGO interface. In highlighting the role of the state as decision makers in matters of legislation and governance, it is important to acknowledge, as Sangari (2000) does, that governments are not static monolithic structures of inherent and uniform patriarchy. It is more appropriate to conceptualize the state as an arena of cooperation and conflict between parties with varying degrees of commitment to gender equality. This conceptualization reinforces the possibility of the state itself being subject to challenge and change. It also creates

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the opportunity for women’s organizations and other gender-progressive civil society actors to align themselves with the elements of the state more committed to gender equality even while being in conflict with other elements. During my fieldwork in Gujarat, I encountered officials in municipal and state governments who were extremely committed to goals of gender equality even where the overall state structure was patriarchal and gender regressive. Other researchers, including Agarwal (2002a) and Goonesekere (2004), note the presence of key gender-progressive individuals within state departments in every South Asian country. Conclusion The range of factors identified in the literature as impeding or facilitating women’s ownership of landed property provides this study with the theoretical foundations and a framework of analysis to accommodate not just the more well-established legal, economic, and political sources of women’s disenfranchisement from landed property but also the predicaments presented by their poignant struggles for security and survival on a daily basis. I have used these conceptual anchors to develop my research methodology and to examine the grounded empirical data emerging from my case study of informal sector urban women in Ahmedabad.

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3 Place Matters: Orientation to Research Location and Context

Much has already been written about the city of Ahmedabad. American historian Howard Spodek, for example, has written extensively about urbanization in India, with a special emphasis on Gujarat and Ahmedabad (see, for example, Spodek 1980, 1989). The Ahmedabad Chronicles: Imprints of a Millennium, published in 2002 by the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for Studies and Research in Environmental Design, eclectically threads together the city’s representative legends, socio-political history, culture, folk and fine arts, crafts, architecture, festivals, literature, industries, prominent individuals, and institutions. Novelist Esther David, one of the best-known chroniclers of the Jewish community in India, has chosen the city as the backdrop for most of her novels. Her first novel, The Walled City, told the story of three generations of Indian Jewish women in Ahmedabad. By the Sabarmati, her collection of short stories, captures the lives of women in the slums of Ahmedabad. Speaking even more directly and recently to the topic of this book, two urban planners have compiled an anthology about poverty and vulnerability in Ahmedabad in the context of economic globalization (Kundu and Mahadevia 2002). I do not aspire to provide a comprehensive description of Ahmedabad in this chapter. Instead, I would like to provide the reader with a brief history of the city and a general orientation to the context in which I conducted the research for this book. I have chosen to highlight very selectively those aspects of the city’s history, culture, composition, and institutions that most significantly influence the lives of poor urban communities. A Brief History of Ahmedabad City Social and Civic Institutions in Pre-Independence Ahmedabad Ahmedabad is the largest city in the western state of Gujarat and the seventh largest metropolis in India, with an urban agglomeration population that stood at over 5 million in 2006. (Director of Census Operations 2006).

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36 Place Matters

Historically, the industrial economy of Gujarat has been centred on the city. For much of the twentieth century, cotton textiles comprised its major industry. In 1921 and 1941, for example, the textile mills in the city employed 43,515 and 76,357 workers respectively, when the total population of the city for those two years was 274,007 and 591,267 (Census of India 1961). Assuming an average family size of five or six, these numbers suggest that anywhere from 65 to 95 percent of the city’s population was partially or completely dependent on the textile industry. Because this sector was so economically dominant in the city, its capital and labour organizations strongly influenced the civic life of the city. Organizations such as the Ahmedabad Mill Owners’ Association, formed in 1891 by leading city industrialists, and the Textile Labour Association, founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1920 to mobilize and unionize working-class textile workers, came to play a major role in shaping the economic and political character of the city. Gujarat was Mahatma Gandhi’s domicile state. When he returned to India from South Africa in 1915, he chose to adopt Ahmedabad as his home. He established his ashram and a large number of civic, political, voluntary, and charitable institutions in Ahmedabad, and the city quickly became a stronghold of the civil disobedience movement and independence struggle. Gandhi and his enormous group of followers built the foundations for the Congress Party in Ahmedabad and were instrumental in building labour unions and an entire array of organizations for social change to address issues related to education, women, welfare of tribal people and “untouchables,” and prohibition, and to promote the swadeshi and khadi movements symbolizing self-reliance and pride in local industry and products over imported goods. Although the pre-independence era was a period of organization building elsewhere in the country as well, the historic presence and creativity of Gandhi gave Gujarat in general and Ahmedabad in particular an edge. Gandhi’s national movement grounded itself in the twin aims of political independence from the British and social transformation of India. The Congress Party clearly became the vehicle for securing the first goal, whereas its affiliated voluntary and charitable institutions were established to fulfill the latter. An additional unique feature in the civic life of Gujarat was, and continues to be, the strength of its business community. Even though Mumbai (formerly Bombay) has become India’s premier commercial city, Gujarat continues to be the nation’s leading business state, benefiting from a commercial and trading tradition that spans centuries. Because of Gandhi’s direct stewardship of the independence movement in Ahmedabad and the support his causes enjoyed from the business community, it contributed significant financial resources not just to the Congress Party but also to its associated civil society organizations.

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Place Matters 37

The social institutions that were engaged in promoting Gandhian philosophy and ideology through nationalist education, campaigns for prohibition of alcohol, promotion of homespun clothes, and the conscientization of marginalized classes and castes declined significantly following India’s independence from the British in 1947 and continued to erode in significance over the decades. The Gandhi Ashram at Sabarmati, for example, is more a tourist attraction today than a centre for community building. The printing press Gandhi established, which during the independence movement published the newspapers Navjivan (in Gujarati) and Young India (in English), introducing political concepts such as civil disobedience, swadeshi (selfreliance), and khadi (local production and consumption) to the working classes and the elite alike, now merely supports the academic requests of researchers and libraries for Gandhian literature. Gandhi’s university, the Gujarat Vidyapith, is no longer a place for thousands of young people to learn the values of non-violence and communal harmony, nor is it a site for building networks of ideologically committed students and teachers. It is instead a university most students avoid, since its ideologies and programs are considered obsolete and inappropriate for securing employment opportunities in the contemporary job market. The loss of civic vibrancy of Gandhian social organizations in Ahmedabad and in Gujarat in general corresponded with the decline of the Congress Party and its associated labour unions. The organizational decline of the Congress dates back to 1969, when the party formally split into two factions. One faction went away with Indira Gandhi, and the other went with those who had greater control over the civic organizations. The party remained in power even after the generation of leaders involved with the independence movement passed away; however, it began attracting politicians more interested in the pursuit of power alone than in ideological campaigns, organizational work, or mass mobilization (Varshney 2002). The Congress Party remained at the helm of political affairs in Gujarat for decades after independence, but public disillusionment with its loss of civic vigour is evidenced by the rising political and organizational strength of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the 1950s, when Mahatma Gandhi was no longer alive but Gandhian ideology was still strong, Hindu nationalists were hardly visible in Gujarat. In the 1960s, they polled less than 2 percent of the popular vote. In the 1980s, their share of the state vote rose to approximately 15 percent. In 1990 and 1995, this climbed to 27 and 42.5 percent respectively (G. Shah 1996). The BJP came to power in the state in 1995. In the late 1980s and 1990s, it also captured control of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (D’Costa 2002). The ability of the BJP to attract cadres committed to Hindu nationalism was in some ways reminiscent of the Congress Party’s ability to generate

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38 Place Matters

secular nationalistic fervour among its cadres during the pre-independence era. Varshney (2002) suggests that the BJP did indeed slip into the organizational and ideological void created by the Congress and succeeded in infusing it with the flavour of right-wing Hindu nationalism. Between 1983 and 1992, the Hindu nationalists, represented by the BJP and its sister organization, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, succeeded in organizing several mass mobilizations aimed at repossessing the birth place of the Hindu god Rama, represented by a temple in Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh. They claimed that the Babri Masjid (mosque), which stood at the site until 1992, when it was pulled down by their cadres, had actually been built over a Hindu temple demolished by Muslim invaders in the sixteenth century. The numbers that the BJP mobilized in Ahmedabad during the late 1980s and early 1990s were reported to be comparable to those brought together by Gandhi’s monumental Salt March in 1930 (Varshney 2002). In light of how diametrically opposed Hindu nationalism has historically been to secular nationalism, what is most disturbing about this scenario is the absence of any counter-mobilization initiatives on the part of the Congress Party. Indeed, by the early 1990s, the Congress Party seemed to have lost much of its pre-independence ideology and organizational strength. The Demise of the Textile Industry Ahmedabad’s economy was almost solely based on the cotton textile industry. At its peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it employed 125,000 to 135,000 workers, and the Textile Labour Association (TLA) had more than 100,000 members (Textile Labour Association 1958-62). By the mid-1990s, there were only 30,000 to 35,000 workers left in the industry, and only 25,000 to 28,000 were members of the TLA (Varshney 2002). Leadbeater (1993) and Breman (2004) have traced the long-term decline of the textile industry to the mid1960s, when Gandhian institutions and labour associations were also in decline, but the industry’s problems did not reach a crisis point until the 1980s and 1990s. Cheaper synthetic textiles appeared in the market after import restrictions were abolished following India’s economic liberalization in 1991. The local industry’s inability to compete with automated mills that were inundating the market in the 1980s and 1990s contributed significantly to the collapse of the textile industry (Breman 2004). The year 1984, for example, witnessed the closure of seventeen textile mills; another fifteen mills closed down between 1985 and 1990 (Patel 1987). An estimated 40,000 workers joined the ranks of the unemployed in the years between 1983 and 1985, comprising the largest shock to the city’s labour market in the twentieth century (Roy-Chowdhry 1995). More mills closed during the 1990s, and the numbers rendered jobless increased further. Jan Breman and Parthiv Shah have captured the massive job losses in the textile industry during this period in graphic detail in their 2004 book titled Working in the Mill No More.

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Place Matters 39

The impacts of mill closures on the local economy were disastrous. Very few retrenched workers received compensation, and most entered the already bloated informal sector. Since mill workers were predominantly male and workers in the informal sector predominantly female, it meant that men laid-off from work in the mills found themselves competing with women for low-end economic activities such as paper recycling and rag picking. Data available on informal sector activities indicate that incomes earned are low and inadequate to keep households out of poverty, since they operate with virtually no capital assets and very low levels of technology. Furthermore, because of the frequently seasonal nature of informal sector activities and the limited irregular hours or days of operation, a large majority of workers are very vulnerable to market fluctuations (Mahadevia 2002). The changing business fortunes of the city had an impact on labour organizations and industrial associations. With the decline of the textile mills in Ahmedabad, the Ahmedabad Mill Owners’ Association (AMA), the TLA, and other such organizations were also weakened considerably. In the late 1950s, there were seventy-one mills in Ahmedabad; sixty-six, including the largest, were members of the AMA. In the mid-1990s, only thirty-five mills were functioning, of which just twenty-eight were members of the AMA (Varshney 2002). The informal sector has become considerably larger than the formal sector since the collapse of the cotton industry. SEWA membership, for example, has grown dramatically over the decades. By 1995, it had fifty-five thousand members in Ahmedabad alone (SEWA 1995). It is currently the city’s largest union, far exceeding the numbers organized under the TLA in the 1990s. Ethnic Conflict: Hindus and Muslims in Ahmedabad The city of Ahmedabad, where the seeds of the movement of non-violent resistance to British occupation were sown, has counter-intuitively witnessed prolonged and recurrent spells of communal violence. At 12 to 15 percent of the population, Muslims make up the largest minority community in Ahmedabad. Although the proportion of Hindus and Muslims in the city’s population has remained relatively constant since independence, the nature of communal relations has changed dramatically over the same period. Barring minor incidents, the city was communally peaceful between 1920 and 1969, but since then it has become one of the most riot-prone cities in India. The 1969 carnage in Ahmedabad was the nation’s single worst Hindu-Muslim riot between 1950 and 1995. Approximately 630 people were killed in five days of mayhem, and many more were injured and rendered homeless (Varshney 2002). Similarly, in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992-93, when the country witnessed levels of communal violence not seen since separation from Pakistan in 1947, no single riot or city in India reported as many deaths as Ahmedabad.

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40 Place Matters

The impressive levels of civic activity in the city during the national movement, the strong influence of Gandhian social institutions, and the clout of labour organizations that frequently served as sites of large-scale interaction between Muslims and Hindus played a significant role in maintaining communal harmony in pre-independence India. The strong entrepreneurial culture of the city and the state had also traditionally brought Hindus and Muslims together in bonds of commerce, contributing to the city’s vibrant and integrated civic structure and reducing the scope for violent elements in either community to foment communal violence. The Congress Party, with its commitment to Hindu-Muslim unity as a basis for nation building, also served as a strong vehicle for inter-communal communication and engagement. Hardiman (1988) has, however, noted that the Congress was able to mobilize fewer Muslims than Hindus in Gujarat, and that anti-Muslim sentiment was not uncommon even among the Congress leadership. This may be true, yet even a partial commitment to maintaining communal harmony on the part of the Congress Party was enough to keep the peace in the city until 1969. The escalation of communal violence in the city over the decades correlates strongly with the decline not just of the Congress Party but also of Gandhian voluntary organizations, labour unions, and business associations and the corresponding rise of the BJP and Hindu nationalism in the state. The TLA, which served as a major organizational site of interaction between Hindus and Muslims, has lost its stature as the city’s legendary trade union with the demise of the cotton industry. Muslim participation in business associations is extremely low too. Membership data for fifty-two associations registered with the Gujarat chamber of commerce in the mid-1990s indicate that Muslims make up a mere 4 percent of membership, though they constitute 14 percent of the city’s population. The Muslim proportion of the membership of professional associations, such as those for engineers, chartered accountants, and lawyers, is even lower. By the end of the millennium, large-scale business and professional interactions between the two communities were virtually non-existent. Once the vehicles of civic integration and commercial interdependence had been sufficiently eroded, provocations and skirmishes that in the past could have been contained through vigilance and mediation between the two communities resulted instead in repeated large-scale violence and rioting. Shrinking Democratic Space and Vulnerability of Minorities Ahmedabad now has the dubious distinction of being one of the most communalized cities in India. The past three decades have been marked by almost continuous general or localized communal violence. Even when no active violence occurs, as in the period during which the research for this study was conducted, the spectre of violence looms large over the city. The most

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Place Matters 41

recent carnage in the city took place in February and March 2002. There are multiple interpretations of what sparked off the riots that claimed more than 825 mostly Muslim lives in Gujarat over six weeks, but most concur that it was retaliation by Hindu extremists for an arson attack by an alleged Muslim mob on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims from the temple town of Ayodhya to the Gujarat town of Godhra. Most able-bodied men were able to escape the conflagration; forty of the fifty-eight deaths were of women and children charred on board (Spaeth 2002). The absence of political action following the incident at Godhra, the inexplicable delay both in sending in the army to restore peace and in ordering curfew in riot-torn cities, and the complete paralysis of the BJP-led state- and central-government machinery in the face of the pogrom that was taking place across Gujarat has led to convincing arguments for the collusion of the state in the carnage, motivating even mainstream media to describe the 2002 events in Gujarat as “statesponsored terrorism” against Muslims instead of as “communal riots.” The history of communal violence in Ahmedabad, as in all other places, is also a history of increased marginalization and vulnerability of the poor. The poor are always used as pawns by communal forces to promote their own agendas, and they are almost always the worst and most direct victims of communal violence. Slums and other low-income settlements are almost always overrepresented in the areas hit hardest by riots, and the poor always comprise the majority of people killed, injured, or rendered homeless by communal violence. Since homes in slums are frequently built of straw, grass, plastic sheets, tarpaulins, and other flammable materials, they are easy to burn and destroy and are almost always singled out as targets of communal rage. Stores and petty businesses run by the poor are easily ransacked and looted. The poor also bear the brunt of punitive and coercive action by the police and armed forces. Because they frequently lack the resources to secure their own physical safety, women and girls from slums and other low-income neighbourhoods are much more likely to be victims of sexual humiliation, abuse, and violence than are their counterparts from higher socio-economic backgrounds. Since the poor typically have no social safety nets, the longterm effects of such distress are especially severe. The displacement, ghettoization, and pauperization that almost inevitably accompany communal violence severely restrict access to livelihood opportunities. Poor people’s access to public amenities, including roads, transportation, hospitals, clinics, and other public spaces, tenuous at the best of times, is eroded even more. In addition to such direct impacts, one of the most disturbing outcomes of communal violence is the erosion and marginalization of democratic space of the minority Muslim community, which has no option but to resort to a defensive and aggressive brand of identity politics. The ghettoization of communities along religious lines significantly diminishes the possibility of establishing a progressive, secular, and democratic movement.

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As well as breeding fundamentalist politics and culture, such environments strengthen patriarchy, along with other non-egalitarian and non-progressive practices. Women from both Hindu and Muslim slums attest to significant loss of freedom of movement and erosion of income-generating opportunities in the wake of riots because of more aggressive protectionist attitudes of the men in their lives and communities. What emerges from such environments are the politics of vigilantism, vote banks, and minimal protection mongering. The opportunity for the poor to articulate their needs and to have any real political representation is eroded, and their democratic space for expression, organization, and struggle is all but destroyed. The communal riots of the last three decades have divided the city so dramatically that it is now segmented into “Hindu” and “Muslim” localities and referred to by the local population in exactly those terms. D’Costa (2002) writes that religious composition of the area was mentioned as the first factor households considered in deciding to settle in the city or relocate within it. The segregation of the two communities is as distinct in low-income slums and shantytowns as it is in middle-class neighbourhoods. Residents of the lower-middle-class neighbourhood that I called home during my stay in Ahmedabad openly admitted to not allowing Muslims to settle in the area, and I was “cautioned” by the family that rented an apartment to me about allowing a visibly Muslim friend to drop me home on his motorcycle on a few occasions. Several of the slums in which I conducted my research did have families from minority communities living in their midst prior to the riots of 2002, but all such families had relocated in the aftermath. Many were forced to move out of regularized slums to squat in new slums without any proofs of residence and under the constant threat of eviction and demolition. Ever the conscientious chronicler of social conflict in Ahmedabad, Esther David sets her latest novel, Shalom India Housing Society, in the eponymous fictional Jewish housing society formed after the communal riots of 2002. The novel weaves together the lives of its residents through a series of stories that capture the dilemmas of the last Bene Israel Jews in India. David’s fiction probes poignantly into the conflicts and contradictions posed by religious and national identities – of being a diminishing miniscule minority in a city openly at war with its largest minority community (David 2007). After the riots, the Jews, as a community of people who landed on India’s “safer” shores two thousand years ago, seem to find solace in being with each other despite their differences, in many ways -questioning whether this, like the Promised Land, was their safer shore. The Emergence of a New Civic Order in Ahmedabad The space created by the decline of Gandhian civil society organizations has over the decades been filled by the social organizations of Hindu

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nationalists, local chapters of global Christian charities, and new development-oriented NGOs. The first type of organization has no interest in forging peace between Hindus and Muslims in the city and, to the contrary, actively foments hatred of the minority community and fear psychosis among the majority Hindu population. Christian charities such as World Vision do not openly espouse conversion or hatred of other religious groups, but neither do they seek to promote communal harmony. With the rising popularity of the BJP in the state, Christian organizations have in recent years been the targets of a violent backlash from Hindu nationalists. The increasing number of lower-caste Hindus converting to Christianity threatened rightwing Hindu political factions and urged violent repression of the activities of Christian organizations, whereas in the past these organizations had enjoyed reasonable freedom to conduct their charitable activities with minimal resistance from such groups. Christian NGOs still have a strong presence in service delivery, education, and credit provision in slums and other lowincome settlements in Ahmedabad, yet they do not seek to fulfill any strategic peace-building functions in the communally charged environment of the city. Gujarat has a strong culture of organization and self-help, and Ahmedabad is home to a diverse array of homegrown and international NGOs. Many of these NGOs do not have explicit mandates to build bridges between the two communities, but a few, including Disha, a women’s NGO that works to improve women’s education and awareness about a wide range of social and political issues, and SEWA, with Muslim women and lower-caste Hindu women comprising one-third and two-thirds of its membership respectively, do have a clear interest in working for marginalized minority communities. Their workers have repeatedly played important roles in containing the spread of sectarian violence in the areas in which they live and work. In discussing the riots that ensued in Ahmedabad in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, Varshney (2002, 293) comments: It is difficult to estimate how many more lives would have been lost in the city if the moderating influence of SEWA had not been present in the neighborhoods. But it is necessary to raise this counterfactual scenario, if only to underscore the point that without SEWA, the loss of lives would undoubtedly have been greater, not smaller. It not only provided a better livelihood to the poor; it also saved lives during riots.

A Brief Retrospective of the SEWA Movement The Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) was founded in 1972 in Ahmedabad as a trade union of low-income women workers in the informal sector. The acronym SEWA translates into “service” in Hindi and Gujarati and represents the organization’s commitment to Gandhian principles of

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satya (truth), ahimsa (non-violence), sarva dharma (integration of all faiths and all people), and khadi (propagation of local employment) as the guiding forces for social change (Rose 1992). SEWA identifies itself as both an organization and a movement, though it is actually a confluence of three movements, namely, the labour movement, the cooperative movement, and the women’s movement. As its primary goal, SEWA is committed to the pursuit of what Mahatma Gandhi called India’s Second Freedom; that is, economic freedom or freedom from poverty and hunger (Chen 2008). Since SEWA’s overarching objective is the full employment and self-sufficiency of its members, all its activities are geared toward serving one or more of the following interests of its membership: employment, income, nutritious food, health care, child care, housing, ownership, organizing, leadership development, self-reliance, and education (Plattner 1998). The processes of struggle and resistance that guide SEWA’s activities take place at three levels. At the grassroots level, unionized women struggle against direct exploiters, for instance, piece-rate clothing contractors or extorting police officers. At the next level, they struggle against ineffective labour enforcement bureaucracy and the legal system; and at the third level, against unfavourable or absent national and international policies and laws. The organization’s consistent work at all three levels has helped to ground the changes it initiates within a sustainable evolving framework. Over the past thirty years, SEWA has grown into a wide range of sister organizations that perform trade union activities, cooperative activities, banking activities, and social welfare activities. Its 2008 membership in Gujarat alone stood at over 500,000 and in India at over 1 million (Chen 2008). The SEWA Bank was established in 1974 as a financial intermediary to promote the economic activities and improve the housing conditions of its members. SEWA was motivated to establish its own bank because low-income women without assets and without collateral have no access to loans provided by mainstream financial institutions and are forced to borrow money from moneylenders at exploitative interest rates that keep them mired in a vicious circle of poverty, hardship, and indebtedness. With over 275,000 depositors in 2005, it is currently SEWA’s largest cooperative (SEWA Bank 2005). In 1992, the SEWA executive committee decided that the housingrelated activities of SEWA, SEWA Bank, and its sister organizations, notably the Foundation for Public Interest, which offers technical assistance to poor women to improve their housing and surrounding environment, and Friends of Women’s World Banking, which organizes financial services for lowincome housing, required consolidation and expansion. This was largely prompted by internal research indicating that more than 50 percent of all loans taken from SEWA Bank since its inception had been used by members to repair and renovate their homes (MHT 2002a).

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The Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) was established in 1994 with the overall objective of improving the housing and infrastructure conditions of poor women in the informal sector. Within this general framework, MHT facilitates access to shelter finance, legal advice, technical assistance, information on the housing market, and shelter-related income opportunities for poor working women. Through its advocacy activities, MHT also attempts to influence housing- and infrastructure-related urban and rural development policies and programs to meet the needs of its membership. In keeping with SEWA’s commitment to self-sufficiency, none of its programs and services is free. Members are required to pay annual membership fees and the cost of other products and services they wish to use. Several SEWA institutions were initially dependent on grants and subsidies from the Government of India and multilateral funding agencies, though they have striven for self-sufficiency from their inception. A few, including the SEWA Bank, are now fully self-sufficient. Others, for instance, Vimo-SEWA – the social insurance program – and MHT, are aiming for self-sufficiency within the next few years, even in the face of repeated natural and humanmade disasters (floods, earthquakes, communal conflict in the state of Gujarat, and so on). Unlike financial services for microenterprise development, where competitive market rates for interest and high rates of repayment facilitate self-sufficiency, services such as health insurance, employment insurance, and housing finance tend to be more complex and challenging to deliver and evaluate. Financial sustainability is more difficult to achieve in these areas but not impossible if more members buy into the services and are organized into cooperative societies. As well, these organizations hope to be able to market their expertise as consulting packages to other organizations aspiring to pursue shelter and insurance activities. All such activities are intended to play a role in helping these organizations to break even financially over time. Mohanty (2003) writes that SEWA’s emphasis on the extension of cooperative principles to poor women, and its focus on legal and political literacy, education for critical and collective consciousness, and developing strategies for collective (and occasionally militant) struggle and for economic, social, and psychic development make its project a deeply feminist, democratic, and transformative one. Informal sector women are one of the most difficult constituencies to organize anywhere in the world. In addition to being socially and politically invisible in India, they are vulnerable economically, physically, and sexually. The simultaneous focus on collective struggle for equal rights and justice coupled with economic development on the basis of cooperative, democratic principles of sharing, education, self-reliance, and autonomy is what ensures SEWA’s success at organizing poor women workers (Baruah 2004a; Mohanty 2003). Jhabvala (1994, 135) captures all

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of this when she writes: “The combination of trade union and cooperative power makes it possible not only to defend members but to present an ideological alternative. Poor women’s cooperatives are not a new phenomenon. SEWA has a vision of the cooperative as a form of society that will bring about more equal relationships and lead to a new type of society.” Parivartan: A Partnership Project for Infrastructure and Social Development A survey conducted by SEWA in the early years of its operation revealed that 97 percent of its urban membership lived in slums, 93 percent were nonliterate, and on average, each woman had four living children (Rose 1992). A survey conducted by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation in the mid1990s revealed that 42 percent of the population of the city or approximately 1.2 million people live in slums that lack the most basic amenities (Kundu and Mahadevia 2002). The word “Parivartan” means “transformation” in Hindi and Gujarati, the two languages spoken most widely in the western Indian state of Gujarat, where a partnership project by that name aimed at transforming the physical environment of slums and improving the social and economic lives of its residents is underway. Also called the Slum Networking Project (SNP), it aims to provide a package of basic infrastructure services, including household connections for water supply, individual toilets, storm water drainage, paving of internal roads, street lighting, and sanitation, in an affordable manner through a partnership involving target communities and their representatives, the community-based organizations; the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC); local partnering NGOs; multilateral funding organizations (represented largely by the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); and participating private sector organizations. This package is provided on an equitable cost-sharing basis in which AMC bears the entire cost of taking services to the entrances of individual slums and each of the partners pays one-third of the total on-site capital cost of service provision. The physical services are clubbed with a community-development component to provide a host of social services in collaboration with the partnering NGO. These include forming neighbourhood groups, women’s groups, and youth programs; mobilizing community savings through savings and credit groups; creating non-formal educational opportunities for school-age children, school dropouts, and non-literate adults; and organizing community health education, health clinics, pharmacy services, daycare centres, and skills training for income-generation activities. Slums are identified for upgradation on the basis of need, and slums that have no amenities are prioritized over those that have at least partial public services. Because slum residents identify and prioritize their needs for infrastructure and social services, and because they pay for the

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Communitybased organizations (CBOs) Private sector donors and contractors

SEWA Bank Parivartan Slum Networking Project Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT)

Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) World Bank and USAID

Parivartan Slum Networking Project partnerships

services and play an active role in maintaining the infrastructure once it is delivered, they are expected to have a higher sense of ownership over the project compared with the more top-down systems of service delivery of the past, where they were rarely consulted about their expectations. By April 2006, the SNP had reached 35,500 slum dwellers in Ahmedabad with its services, and there were plans to extend services to another 20,000 people within the next year. In total, the Parivartan project had reached forty-seven slums in Ahmedabad. Having led the process in over forty slums, MHT has emerged as the major NGO partner in the SNP (B. Bhatt 2007). The SNP was launched in 1995 by the AMC in partnership with two citybased NGOs, the corporate sector, and slum residents. SEWA Bank participated as a community finance institution, opening bank accounts for slum residents, introducing them to the range of financial services and products available through SEWA Bank, and extending loans at market rates to residents who were unable to generate the financial resources necessary to buy into the project. Two NGOs, MHT and Saath, were involved in motivating and mobilizing slum communities, liaising among partners, facilitating implementation, and building the capacity of the community to monitor service delivery. The World Bank and the USAID have extended large soft loans to the AMC to facilitate service delivery and commission evaluations of the work completed on the project. Other than these functions, their participation in the project is somewhat limited. After the physical infrastructure is delivered, the AMC’s role becomes much smaller, but the NGOs

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continue with the community-development activities written into the programs. They also play an ongoing role in liaising with the AMC to maintain, replace, and repair the physical infrastructure as needed. The coordinator of the MHT, Bijal Bhatt, describes this succinctly when she comments that the NGOs have to stay awake long after the other partners have gone to bed (B. Bhatt 2003). By the summer of 2006, the SNP had reached 35,500 slum dwellers in Ahmedabad with its services (Baruah 2007). It was awarded the prestigious Dubai International Award for Best Practices to Improve the Living Environment in the same year. A slum networking cell was built into the AMC, and a special purpose vehicle of all stakeholders is being convened to scale up the project to cover all city slums within the next seven years. The World Bank and the Water and Sanitation Project of the United Nations Development Programme have committed financial and technical support to scaling up the program. The slum networking concept is not without its critics. Verma (2002) emphasizes that the proliferation of slums in India and around the world is a manifestation of the larger problem of inequitable land distribution among different socio-economic groups. Therefore, Verma continues, design-based strategies such as the SNP are merely cosmetic and tokenistic responses, since they do not address the larger structural issues of urban poverty. I am extremely sensitive and somewhat sympathetic to this criticism of the in situ slum upgradation philosophy. Neither proponents nor opponents of the SNP offer any gendered assessments or perspectives on slum upgradation. This is a gap I certainly intend to address in my research. The gendered analysis of land tenure issues presented in Chapter 5 highlight some of the contradictions and complexities inherent in the slum upgradation philosophy and process. Key Characteristics of Study Areas and Implications for Research Process The area of Ahmedabad that is under the AMC’s jurisdiction is spread over 190.4 square kilometres and was home to 3.5 million people in 2001. The AMC area was only approximately 98.15 square kilometres until 1986, when an additional area of 92 square kilometres, almost the size of the entire city, was incorporated into the city limits (Mahadevia 2002). The city of Ahmedabad is divided into its eastern and western areas by Sabarmati River. The new areas added to the city limits are almost entirely in the eastern sector. Because these areas were previously occupied only by industrial units and not residential developments, they were without water supply, sanitation, sewerage, or other such physical amenities. When the AMC made public its decision to expand the city limits to include the previously peripheral eastern regions, industry did not support the move for two primary reasons. First, expansion

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would bring many industries within the city limit, increasing their tax liability. Second, industries would be required to pay city allowances to their workers, leading to a steep increase in expenditure. AMC, on the other hand, was motivated by the opportunity to greatly increase its tax base, its main source of revenue, and in 1986, despite intense pressure from the industrial lobby, the AMC went ahead with its decision to expand the city limits. A comment on the spatial growth within the city will help explain the distribution of slums and logistical implications for the research process. Ahmedabad can be broadly divided into three parts: (1) the walled city, also called the “old” city, in the centre, from which the city began in AD 1511 and within which the city was confined until 1870; (2) East Ahmedabad, the portion to the east of the Sabarmati River but excluding the walled city; and (3) West Ahmedabad, the portion to the west of the Sabarmati River. Over the years, the population share of the city core has declined from 44 percent in 1951 to 37 percent in 1961 and 12 percent in 1991 (Mahadevia 2002). The spatial growth of cities around the world suggests that decline in the population share of the city core is inevitable when a city expands its limits and grows in population. The decline in the share of the walled city in Ahmedabad is partly because of out-migration to the newly industrializing peripheral areas. Increased commercialization of the city core and the repeated spate of communal violence in the city in recent decades, which frequently put the predominantly Muslim walled city under curfew for extended periods, are other reasons for the large wave of out-migration from the city core. The peripheral areas registered the fastest population growth during the last four decades because of low population size compared with the city core and the availability of land in the periphery to absorb the additional population. Since West Ahmedabad has always been within city limits, it is much more developed than the eastern sector. It is the commercial, financial, and entertainment hub of the city and also where most middleclass and upper-middle-class people reside. There are many underserviced slums and shantytowns even on the western side, but the lack of public amenities and services is not as severe as in the industrial eastern part of the city, which has over the years attracted a higher proportion of migrants from the city core as well as new migrants from other states and rural areas of Gujarat. I conducted most of my fieldwork in slums on the eastern side of the city. MHT had prioritized slums for upgradation based on the absence of amenities such as water supply and sanitation. Slums on the eastern side of the city, including many that did not have any services whatsoever, demonstrated greater need than those in West Ahmedabad. There were a smaller number of slums on the western side of the city that had either received only one or two services over the years or where the infrastructure that had been delivered was in such an advanced state of disrepair that they were in effect without

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any amenities. Several such slums had been included in the upgradation project and feature in my research. I worked in eight slums that did not have any public amenities. Five of these are in East Ahmedabad and three in West Ahmedabad. I also worked in five slums that had received the full package of amenities through the slum upgradation project. Of these, only one was in West Ahmedabad; the other four were in the eastern part of the city. The MHT office, located in West Ahmedabad, served as a base for my fieldwork during the seven months I spent in the city in 2003 and during subsequent visits in 2006 and 2007. I used the office to interact with MHT fieldworkers and other staff, to coordinate visits to the slums, and to access official SEWA documents and archives. I had a complete list of the project slums – including those in which upgradation had already been completed and those in which the process had been initiated – within my first week at the office. I selected the slums that would participate in my study in consultation with the MHT coordinator and field staff. I attempted to make the sample as diverse as possible in terms of the trades, occupations, religions, and ethnicities slum residents represented. I further attempted to include migrant communities as well as those that were native to Gujarat. All but one of the slums I selected was deemed to be on illegally encroached land. Therefore, I tried to make the sample as representative as possible of land ownership status by including slums that were on lands owned by the municipal corporation, the Government of Gujarat, and private owners. I expected that making the sample as diverse as possible would facilitate the emergence of rich and complex data. Size of Slums and Family Structure The slums in this study varied widely in size, ranging from only seventy-five households to those with well over eight hundred households. Families were generally large and intergenerational. It was not uncommon for couples to have ten or twelve children, though in recent years slum residents have become better informed about family planning practices. Birth rates are still much higher than replacement rates; however, more and more women are electing to get tubectomies after bearing three or four children. Joint families far outnumbered nuclear families. In some cases, parents divided their property among sons so that married sons could live semi-independently with their own families. Single male households were quite common in three of the slums. The men had moved to Ahmedabad in search of work from rural areas in Gujarat and neighbouring states. They hoped to have their families join them once they had managed to establish a foothold in the city. Households headed by widowed, divorced, separated, or abandoned women also comprised a distinct minority in the slums. My study was not designed to attempt to gather specific detailed information about such households or to determine whether they were poorer than other households,

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yet it seemed obvious even upon casual inspection of their homes and the experiences narrated by women who participated in my research that femaleheaded households were almost always the poorest households in the slums.1 MHT fieldworkers corroborated that female-headed households were disproportionately represented among families that were unable to contribute toward the cost of infrastructure upgradation. This was especially true for households that did not have one or more adult sons capable of contributing toward family income. Although Chant (1997) justifiably argues that femaleheadedness is not always a proxy for poverty, more grounded research on female-headed households is needed to better understand their circumstances, needs, and vulnerabilities. Religious Affiliation and Ethnic Origins of Slum Dwellers Research participants had their origins in many different regions of Gujarat and states in India, but they were less diverse in the religions they represented. Twelve of the slums were predominantly Hindu, though one had a sizable Christian minority and another a distinct Jain minority. Only one area in my study, an upgraded slum in West Ahmedabad, was predominantly Muslim. I had been eager to have as much representation of both Hindu and Muslim communities as possible in my study, especially since the first round of my research was conducted soon after the communal riots in early 2002. I was quite disappointed to discover that very few Muslim slums had been included in the slum upgradation effort, but I learned upon further probing that there was an explanation for this. An overwhelming majority of Muslim slums are located within the walled city. Since the walled city is the oldest part of the city, slums located within it have already been fully or partially serviced with amenities such as water supply, sanitation, and sewerage. When AMC and MHT identified and prioritized slums in the city based on need, Muslim slums did not feature often on their list because most had been provided at least with public water taps and toilets. This is not to suggest that a pro-Hindu bias does not exist within certain departments of the AMC, as has been suggested by D’Costa (2002), but to explain the difficulties I faced in attempting to work within the context of the slum upgradation project and seeking participation from Muslim communities in my research. Sometimes individual slums in the western part of the city had been overlooked for services, as in the case of the sole Muslim slum in my research. These were included in the project and prioritized for upgradation. Repeated waves of communal violence had motivated Hindu families to migrate out of the walled city, which is predominantly Muslim, and into the city’s peripheral areas. Likewise, Muslim families living outside the walled city had migrated into it in waves in the last few decades as a defensive security measure. I conducted the first round of fieldwork less than a year after the riots and massacres of 2002. By this time the city had become

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so ghettoized along religious lines that it was impossible to find Hindu and Muslim families living next to each other in slums, or for that matter in middle-class housing societies. With the exception of one slum, which had been settled for only a decade, all other areas in my study had been settled for at least twenty-five years. Among the settlers there were those native to Ahmedabad and others who had moved to the city from rural areas of Gujarat. There were also large communities of migrants whose parents or grandparents were from neighbouring states, namely, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh. They had lived in Ahmedabad their entire lives and considered themselves naturalized Gujaratis. Many older women had come to Ahmedabad to join their marital homes as young brides. Since Gujarat is an economically prosperous state, it has always attracted migrants from poorer states. Among research participants, ties to states of origin had mostly been severed, and visits for family reunification purposes were rarely, if ever, made. All slums demonstrated high caste-wise cohesion. Rigid hierarchies existed among slum dwellers even though they were forced to live in close proximity with one another. Lower Hindu castes were disproportionately represented in slum populations. Support and exchange networks were strongest among people of the same caste. Trades and Occupations The communities I worked in were extremely diverse in the trades and occupations they represented. Among the women, home-based workers who make or prepare products – garments, footwear, toys, bidis (hand-rolled cigarettes), handicrafts, incense, papads (lentil wafers), and so on – either on their own as artisans, or on a piece-rate basis for a contractor, featured prominently. Small traders or vendors who sell products such as vegetables, fruit, eggs, fish, deep-fried snacks, tea, coffee, and other food products or household goods from a pushcart or head load, either in the marketplaces in the city or in the slum, also comprised a large group of female workers within the study areas. Large numbers of women also worked as manual labourers and service providers in construction, cleaning, laundry, health, and catering or domestic help. People in the informal sector are rarely able to support themselves through their efforts in one trade or occupation; rather, performing various economic activities throughout the year is the norm. A woman who rolls incense sticks during the day would try to make a few extra rupees by working as a domestic cleaner in the evening, while another woman who works as a municipal cleaner during the day may wrap ten kilograms of tamarind balls every evening for the extra five rupees such a venture would earn her. I observed high levels of caste- and occupation-based cohesion in slum areas. The residents of one slum, who were originally from Rajasthan,

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described themselves as a colony of artists. All the men in the community made origami paper decorations that they exhibited and sold at schools and fairs all over the state and country. The women owned sewing machines and made embroidered tablecloths, bedcovers, and pillow and cushion covers. They sold these at fairs and exhibitions, though they almost never travelled outside the city. There were no other trades and occupations practised in this community. In another slum, almost all the women pounded broken glass to prepare the glass powder used to coat the string attached to kites. They worked long hours as a group in a courtyard in the slum in the months leading up to Makar Sankranti, the Gujarati kite-flying festival. During the rest of the year, they worked as cleaners or vendors. Similarly, the majority of residents of another slum fashioned idols of Hindu gods out of clay. The women sold their wares all over the city, and the men also travelled to neighbouring states to sell the statues during religious festivals. The production and sale of low-end, low-technology toys and other entertainment paraphernalia sold at fairs was the most commonly pursued trade in a Hindu slum in East Ahmedabad. On a random Friday afternoon visit, I watched women at work making party hats, hand-held windmills, plastic miniature swing sets, and charpoy ropes. At the time of my second visit in the second week of March, the area seemed almost deserted. A few older men and women and a handful of women with young children remained. They informed me that most people were away at fairs in different parts of the district and state. The period between Muharram (a Muslim festival) and Holi (the Hindu festival of colours) comprised one peak earning season, and men as well as women went to the fairs to optimize their income. The closure of hundreds of textile mills in Ahmedabad in the period following industrial modernization in the 1980s and economic liberalization during the early 1990s had serious impacts on the residents of slums, since thousands had moved to the city solely to work in the mills. Mill workers who lost their jobs were forced to turn to any occupation or trade they could enter with minimal investment and training. In the process they ended up competing with women and, in some cases, pushing them out of activities such as rag picking, newspaper recycling, and incense stick rolling that in the past were deemed too poorly paid or lowly for men to enter. In addition to people engaged primarily in the informal sector, a sizable number of male blue-collar workers – auto rickshaw and taxi drivers, for example – as well as low-income class IV government employees, also lived in the slums I worked in. Proximity to places of work and lower costs of living were mentioned as reasons for choosing to reside in slums. It was extremely difficult to gain reliable estimates of income levels of slum residents because very few people had jobs that ensured a regular daily or monthly wage. Based on AMC and MHT surveys and my own enquiries,

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it appears that family incomes in the study areas vary roughly from Rs.4,000 (US$100) per month for municipal cleaners, drivers, and other government or industrial employees down to about Rs.800 (US$20) per month for rag pickers and paper recyclers. Incomes varied especially widely for those who vended wares such as toys and statues during fairs and religious festivals because they earned larger amounts at such temporary events and then nothing at all or very little until the next event. Land and Property Ownership Status Seventy-six percent of all slums in Ahmedabad are on private land, 11 percent are located on Government of Gujarat land, and only 5 percent are on land owned by the municipal corporation (Saath 2002). I identified many interesting characteristics and patterns in the emergence of slums in the city over the decades. Some chawls were conceived of as low-cost hostel accommodation for mill workers who came from rural areas in Gujarat and other states to work in Ahmedabad. In some cases, the chawls were constructed by mill owners to house their workers. In other cases, they were constructed by private owners or quasi-landlords, and plots of land were rented or sold to mill workers and others. With the closure of the mills, thousands of people lost their jobs, but they entered the informal sector and continued to live in the slums. A large number of slums are on low-lying basin-like areas that, at the time of their initial development, were not being used for any commercial or industrial purpose. New migrants simply encroached on the land and made it habitable over the years by physically dumping loads of dirt, coal ash, and stone in order to raise the area above the level of the basin to avoid flooding during the rainy season. Many went on to “sell” plots of land to those who moved to the area later. Initial residents may have squatted on the land, yet I found very few homeowners who had paid nothing for the plots of land they are on. Although they may not have bought the land from the rightful legal owner, money had exchanged hands in amounts ranging from a few thousand up to about Rs.30,000 (US$750) between residents or their parents and the quasi-owners of the land. In a few rare cases, the Government of Gujarat distributed land to economically weaker individuals at highly subsidized prices. For example, current residents of Keshav Nagar, in East Ahmedabad, were almost all originally footpath dwellers. In 1992, the government offered them some land to live on, selling plots measuring twenty-five square metres on a first-come-firstserved basis at Rs.250 (US$6.25) a plot. Mechanisms of sale, purchase, rent, and transfer of land and houses were highly informal within the slum context. Slum residents either had no documentation at all to prove that they had bought or sold property or they had quasi-legal documentation in the form of promissory notes on Rs.10-20 (US$0.25-0.50) stamp paper that had been signed or thumb-printed by the

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parties involved in the transaction in the presence of four witnesses. It was extremely rare to find documents attested by a public notary. The Indira Gandhi government conducted a national slum census in 1976 to gain a more accurate idea of the number of people who lived in slums. Identity cards or “photo-passes” were issued to all residents who could prove that they had been living in the same spot since before 1975. The cards stated that holders of these “passports,” as they are rather sarcastically referred to in slum parlance, were legal residents of the area and that they were entitled to resettlement in the case of eviction. Only a small minority of residents retain such documents today, since many people lose their papers in the floods that ravage the city every year during the monsoons. Given the very high caste and religious cohesion in slums, rental arrangements are largely between acquaintances and based almost entirely on trust. Renters make up a large minority, amounting to up to 25 percent of households in four of the slums I worked in. The unique challenges renters faced in seeking access to affordable land, housing, and housing infrastructure added unexpected interesting dimensions to my research that are discussed in detail in Chapters 5 and 6. Understanding how slum residents acquire or sell a plot of land or a dwelling is imperative to my research. Therefore, I tried to explore ownership and tenancy in as much detail as possible. Because of the inherent complexity of these issues and their insecurities about land tenure in general, many slum residents appeared to not welcome questions on these topics. Since women, especially in non-upgraded slums, were more often than not less informed about the dynamics of land and property transfer, I had to frequently rely on the men to provide details of owner-tenant equations. Statistics on the proportions of each type were not available, but I discovered that four types of owner-tenant arrangements are most common in the city’s slums: (1) the resident is the owner of the land and the dwelling; (2) the resident rents the land but owns the dwelling; (3) the resident rents both the land and the dwelling; and (4) the resident is a subtenant who rents the dwelling from people who are also renters. Awareness about land tenure varied across and within the communities I worked in, yet I found that slum residents attached a great deal of importance to documents such as voter registration cards and ration cards because they strengthened their right of residence. Slum residents explained that because they had lived on the margins of society all their lives, they were eager to preserve all available symbols of entitlement or of the very acknowledgment of their existence. The quality of housing in slums is poor in general. In most cases, slum residents upgrade their homes incrementally. New migrants to the city generally find their way into settled slums after months or even years of living in highly precarious environments such as on footpaths or along

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railway tracks, rivers, or canals. If they succeed in buying, renting, or squatting on a piece of land in a settled slum, usually through kinship networks, they invest whatever resources they have at their disposal in creating a structure to call home. At its crudest and most insecure, this may be a precariously built shack of plastic sheets strung on sticks arranged in a square and a “roof” consisting of a plastic sheet or tarpaulin weighed down by bicycle tires or rocks. If they are fortunate enough to acquire a marginally stronger economic foothold in the city, they may be able to upgrade to a kuccha house – the Hindi and Gujarati term for huts with mud walls and a straw or tin roof. Depending on their financial resources, a few may over the years erect pukka houses – the local term for dwellings with cement and brick walls and cement or asbestos roofs. Kuccha houses are the norm in most slums I worked in, though some houses are creative combinations of both kinds; for example, it is not uncommon to find a thatched roof over a house with brick and cement walls. Only a handful of houses in the slums I worked in belong in the pukka category, though the number goes up quite steadily in slums that have been upgraded through the Parivartan project. Since the municipal corporation provided slums that had been selected for upgradation with a ten-year guarantee of non-eviction, it seems to suggest that security of tenure may strongly influence people’s willingness to invest available resources into housing upgradation. Many urban planners support this view. Himanshu Parikh, one of the chief architects of the slum networking concept in India, emphasized that if security of tenure and infrastructure such as individual water supply, sewerage, storm drainage, and landscaping were in place, slum dwellers themselves, inspired by their improved surroundings, would upgrade their dwellings corresponding to their needs and available resources (Joshi 2002). Improving tenure rights is critical for increasing security and stimulating improvements in housing and living standards. As property owners, householders are willing to invest larger percentages of their income – over 30 percent according to a study conducted by the Centre for Urban Development Studies at Harvard University – to acquire land and build or improve their homes. Conversely, they will spend less – no more than 15 percent of their income – on shelter without reassurance of security of occupancy as owners and renters (Centre for Urban Development Studies 2002). SEWA workers have spent long periods of time motivating people in upgraded slums to participate in the slum networking process as well as informing them about the availability of housing microfinance. This may also have strongly influenced the observed trend of betterquality housing in the five upgraded slums included in the study. Perceived Need for Facilities in Order of Importance The Parivartan project was designed to provide a package of the following physical infrastructure services to slum households: individual water supply

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connections, individual underground sewerage connections, private indoor toilets, paving of internal roads, storm water drainage, street lighting, solid waste management, and landscaping. The question was no longer relevant to the residents of the five study areas that had already received this infrastructure, but I asked residents of the other eight areas to identify their infrastructural needs in order of importance. Regular and reliable water supply emerged as the topmost priority for slum residents in all but one study area that is fortunate enough to be located near a river. Gujarat is a drought-prone state and even middle- and upperclass neighbourhoods in Ahmedabad face severe water shortages. Residents of the lower-middle-class neighbourhood I stayed in during the fieldwork had to purchase tanks of water to meet their daily needs during the summer because the water taps ran dry several times a week. The situation in slums is much worse. The small number of AMC-installed public water stands typically found in each slum are grossly inadequate to meet the needs of the community. It is not uncommon for slums in the city to have one public tap per three hundred or more households. The supply is erratic, lasting between one hour and two hours in the morning, and the water pressure is frequently extremely low. A few people may acquire an illegal supply by diverting water from underground AMC pipes or fire hydrants running nearby, but most slum residents are forced to venture out to nearby middleclass housing societies and bungalows in search of water, and frequent fights erupt over water both within and outside slum areas. Men, women, and children generally all participate in water collection, but women frequently shoulder a disproportionate burden in the water shortage since they undertake all or most of the cooking and cleaning tasks in the family. Begging for water from neighbouring bungalows and areas was considered so demeaning a task in a few communities that only women and girls performed it. When asked about the unwillingness of men in certain communities to involve themselves in gathering water, one woman explained that whereas women were accustomed to silently bearing the insults hurled upon them, men were much more likely to get into fights, thus jeopardizing the few sources of water available to them. The procurement of water featured again and again as being a huge burden on communities and its scarcity as a major source of health problems and poor standards of hygiene. One father elaborates, “When my children are hungry and I have no food to offer them, I can put them to sleep by getting them to drink some water, but what am I supposed to do when I don’t even have any water? Even animals don’t survive for long without water. How can we when we’re human?” Both men and women stressed that their incomes are affected because of the huge amount of time spent procuring water. Vegetable vendors, for example, have to reach the sabzi mandi (vegetable mart), which may be ten kilometres or so away, as early as possible to get the best vegetables. They

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58 Place Matters

often arrive late because the taps did not start running until a later hour than usual or because of the time it took to reach the front of the line to collect water. They lose out on acquiring the best vegetables and consequently earn less on these days. Construction workers find themselves in a similar situation. The earlier they arrive at the construction sites, the more likely they are to get a better daily wage because of the number of hours they work. Arriving at a construction site at 10 a.m. as opposed to 8 a.m. translates into a significant difference in daily earnings. Many children in slum areas attend government schools located nearby. They frequently arrive late or miss entire days of classes because they are unable to collect water from the water stands in their communities and have to wander out of the area with their buckets and drums. The lack of private indoor toilet facilities was felt very strongly in all the study areas. The Bombay Provincial Municipal Act of 1949, under which the AMC was formed in 1950 after the separation of Gujarat state from Bombay state, empowers the municipal commissioner to provide essential public services to all human settlements under the AMC’s jurisdiction. In keeping with this act, most slums in the city received partial services, including public or pay-and-use toilets but, like water, the toilet services provided were grossly inadequate for the needs of slum dwellers and so poorly maintained as to be unusable. For example, there were only two public toilets to serve 130 families in one study area. There were long lineups for these facilities, and most residents found it extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing to wait in line with their daughters, in-laws, and other relatives to use the toilets. Lack of toilet facilities is especially demeaning for women, since it is much more acceptable, at least in the Indian context, for men to relieve themselves in public spaces. Women, on the other hand, are forced to either control their natural urges and risk gastrointestinal and bladder problems or to seek out railway tracks, riverbeds, and other public places to relieve themselves. The latter option exposes women to humiliation, sexual harassment, and, quite frequently, sexual assault. The lack of basic amenities in slums was embarrassing and socially uncomfortable for all residents. One woman mentioned that it was hurtful when girls from marginally better-off communities refused to marry their sons because of the absence of water, toilets, and other hardships they were likely to face in the slums. Similarly, when daughters of slum residents married into slightly more prosperous communities, they did not want to return to visit their families because they were only too familiar with the harsh conditions of life in slum communities. Since all the study areas are located in low-lying areas, flooding during the rainy season is an annual occurrence. The need for storm drainage and internal paving of roads was stressed in all the communities I worked in. Women suffered greater losses and were more inconvenienced by flooding because they used the home more often as a

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locus for economic activities – for example, rolling incense sticks or preparing snacks for sale. The slums I worked in either have inadequate street lighting or none at all. Women are especially afraid of being outside their homes after dark, given the strong presence of illicit alcohol and bootlegging in most communities. Sexual assaults were reported in two of the study areas. Most families lived in fear for their female family members, and young women never dared to venture out of their homes alone at night. Social Dynamics and Major Sources of Conflict Ethnic or communal conflict was largely absent in the study areas at the time of my fieldwork.2 Water-related squabbles broke out almost on a daily basis, but residents stressed that they had their roots in the simple challenges people faced in procuring enough for their daily needs and did not include any communal or ethnic dimension. Gujarat is a “dry” state, but alcohol and bootlegging have a strong presence in all the slums where I conducted research. Because the police are frequently known to be in collusion with the bootleggers, illegal activity is rarely investigated. Perfunctory raids are conducted from time to time, and the odd bootlegger may occasionally be fined or imprisoned. After a raid, bootlegging activity always cools down for a few weeks, only to start up with renewed vigour once the threat of another raid has passed. Large numbers of men in slums partake liberally of hooch (illicit liquor). Often, fights break out between the men, and high levels of alcohol-related domestic violence were also reported to me. Several slum residents mentioned that they strongly disliked being a witness to domestic violence but were too scared to interfere. “You run the risk of being beaten up yourself or having your wife beaten up if you tell a man not to beat his wife,” said one man. He added that they just raised the volumes of their radios or television sets to drown out the noise whenever fights broke out in the neighbourhood. One young woman spoke of trying to stop a neighbour from beating his wife. He told her that what he did within his house was his business alone and that if she did not like watching women being beaten up she should move out of the slum into a bungalow or a housing society. “Men feel powerless because of the poverty and despair. They try to establish their masculinity by beating people who are even more vulnerable than they are. The women and children in the family are the easiest targets,” she concludes. Feelings of insecurity and vulnerability fuelled anxiety and stress for many research participants. Slum residents identify marriages, deaths, and illnesses as major expenses and major sources of stress. Unexpected expenses, water shortage, children’s education, and getting children or younger siblings married rank high on the list of general anxieties. I discuss how such factors influence ability to acquire landed assets in more detail in later chapters.

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60 Place Matters

Perceived Need for Social Development Services As mentioned, the physical infrastructure services of the Parivartan project are complemented by a community development component. During my group meetings and focus groups in the study areas, I asked slum dwellers to identify the social development services that they felt to be most beneficial and relevant for their circumstances. The idea of adult literacy classes received a lukewarm response in all but one of the slums I worked in. A few women mentioned that they would attend only if they were held in the slum and if they did not interfere with their economic activities or household chores. The idea of supplementing the education children received in municipal schools, which is known to be of notoriously low quality, by including them in literacy classes received a much more positive response than literacy classes for adult women. All parents wanted their children to be educated, but lack of money was not the only constraint they faced. Since most were uneducated themselves, they had neither the skills to inculcate discipline and good study habits nor the emotional ability to support and nurture children to develop their intellectual abilities. Many research participants mentioned that it would perhaps be a better idea for SEWA to focus its literacy efforts more directly toward children in slums. They explained that older people, both men and women, who have had no exposure to formal education are unlikely to be able to motivate themselves to learn, but if the children develop the learning habit early on, they may develop more enthusiasm and eventually attend of their own volition. Compared with literacy, women expressed much greater interest in learning new skills or upgrading existing skills that they could put to use to augment the family income. Many women are economically active outside the home, but they deemed their jobs to be so demeaning and of such low social status that being able to work at home for a good wage or, better yet, to be provided for by their husbands or sons was considered to be ideal. Since most research participants contributed upward of one-third of the family income through their economic activities, they did not hold out much hope of their husbands earning enough to support the entire family. They did seem to place a high value on being able to work out of their homes, though they knew that most women in the area who were home-based workers earned very low wages. The reason they offered for this was that they would at least be able to mind the children if they stayed home. I asked women if they had any ideas for economic activities they could perform at home. Several women who tailored clothes on rented sewing machines said that they would benefit from loans that would enable them to buy their own sewing machines, since they would be able to retain all the income from their labour instead of losing part of it to the rent of equipment. As quite a few women cooked for caterers, I asked if they could take small loans to pool together to form a catering service of their own. They seemed to like the

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idea very much and mentioned that they needed organizations like SEWA to give them good ideas, business plans, and financial counselling. Most slum dwellers visited private hospitals for treatment of minor ailments because the service was more efficient than state hospitals, and state hospitals for operations and major ailments because the service was subsidized. Women residents emphasized that backaches, eye and dental problems, urinary tract infections, respiratory and reproductive health problems usually went untreated. They simply tolerated these chronic conditions, as it was deemed a luxury to attend to them in the face of more urgent health needs of the family. There was a very high perceived need for a SEWA health camp to treat these conditions and for preventative and proactive health care education that would eliminate, or significantly reduce, emergency health problems for all men, women, and children. Research participants also requested information on how to cook different foods so as to retain maximum nutritional value and how to deal with different non-life-threatening illnesses at home. Women in many slums identified not having child care for children below the age of five as a major reason for being unable to participate in economic activities. There were no government- or NGO-run child-care centres in any of the pre-upgradation areas. This was perceived to be a pressing need and one for which slum residents were willing to pay fair prices provided children were fed and given adequate shelter and care. Conclusion The links between urban land tenure, housing, water, sanitation, microfinance, access to employment, education, health care, and social networks, as well as their implications for women’s access to and control over landed resources, comprise some of the most interesting and informative findings of my research. Women’s access to and control over property is best appreciated by considering various intersecting aspects of their lives cumulatively. In the study of women and property, the total – as the next four chapters demonstrate – adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

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4 Complicated Lives: Urban Women and Multiple Vulnerabilities

Like men, women acquire land and houses through inheritance, purchase in the market, and distribution by the state. However, unlike men, a wider range of factors influence women’s ability to access, own, and control land and housing. Along with the stumbling blocks faced because of more obvious reasons – male-biased inheritance practices and weaker access to financial markets, to name just two – there are other less explicit vulnerabilities women experience while performing their duties within the family, the market, and the community that influence their ability to create and control landed assets. The primary objective of this chapter is to deconstruct and examine perceived risks and vulnerabilities in light of their implications for access to and control over land and housing. The material, physical, economic, social, and psychological aspects of vulnerability feature prominently in this chapter, as I attempt to understand and elucidate not just the survival and coping strategies women employ to overcome their fears but also the ways in which the need to survive on a day-to-day basis erodes women’s abilities to plan for a more secure future. Although the focus groups, interviews, library, and archival research I conducted as part of fieldwork inform and influence the material I present, some of the key findings in this chapter are drawn from an exposure and dialogue program (EDP) that required a three-day and twonight stay with a host family in a slum awaiting upgradation through the Slum Networking Project (SNP). The idea of participating in an EDP was suggested to me after I had already completed fieldwork in thirteen slums in Ahmedabad. Despite being very pleased with the sheer volume of data I had generated on urban poverty, livelihoods in the informal sector, women and landed property rights, and related topics through primary and secondary research during the course of my stay in Ahmedabad, I craved a more layered understanding and deeper immersion into the day-to-day realities of my research participants. The information I had gathered from my focus groups, interviews, and archival research was in no way linear or superficial, but I still felt that it lacked a

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certain depth and complexity. That women’s experiences of poverty were different from men’s was supported by both my primary and secondary research, but even though the women who participated in my focus groups spoke eloquently about the vulnerabilities and deprivations they experienced in performing their duties in the context of the market, family, and community, the links between such vulnerabilities and their implications for access to and control over land, housing, and housing infrastructure were less clearly articulated. I tried to think of methods and tools that would enable me to gain a more layered and personal understanding of the factors that influence vulnerability, such as income, employment, health care, housing, standard of living, working conditions, and literacy, as well as their implications for asset ownership among women. I was discussing such issues with Bijal Bhatt, the coordinator of MHT, when she mentioned SEWA’s use of the EDP methodology to communicate the concerns, struggles, and experiences of poor self-employed women to researchers and policy makers. SEWA conducted its first EDP in 1991 under the guidance of Dr. Karl Osner from the Bonn-based Association for the Promotion of North-South Dialogue. SEWA Academy used the EDP methodology as a tool to sensitize its own staff, along with visitors and researchers from government, universities, donor agencies, NGOs, and women’s organizations, to the challenges and hardships faced by both urban and rural women in the informal sector in managing their lives and livelihoods. It exposes participants to a wide spectrum of personal, economic, social, and infrastructural living conditions as experienced by SEWA members, and the dialogue between participants and host families provides participants with an appreciation of the life history of the host and, further, an understanding of her strategies for increasing security and minimizing vulnerability. The EDP method is different from standard observational methods in that the participant is required not just to observe or accompany the host and her family as they go about their day but to actually perform the same activities, whether it be rolling incense sticks, selling vegetables, or digging for salt, to the extent that physical capacity permits, for the duration of the program. Living with the host family, sharing meals with family members, and participating in their daily routines provide the researcher with an additional layer of awareness and empathy about their realities and circumstances. Therefore, the major strength of an EDP lies in its potential for exploration of multiple aspects of vulnerability and risk management in one life or family. This includes information that the host is willing to share openly with the researcher, as well as other more muted responses and observations. Because I participated in the EDP toward the end of my research in Ahmedabad, I had already spent extended periods immersing myself in the life of slum communities through focus groups, interviews, meetings, meals, and other formal and informal interactions with slum-dwelling

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64 Complicated Lives

families. The EDP is not intended as a substitute for the type of extended immersion into host communities carried out by anthropologists such as Jellinek (1991), for example, yet it did provide a practical means to contextualize and understand some of the gaps that remained after seven months of extensive grounded research in slum communities in the city. I chose to undertake the EDP in a slum that had very limited water and sanitation services because I wanted to experience for myself the risks and hardships women faced in the absence of services such as water supply and toilets and the coping strategies they employed to overcome such difficulties. Because daily reality as experienced by low-income women living in slums may be quite different from the way in which that reality is interpreted by researchers, I hoped that first-hand exposure to the work and living conditions, and extended dialogue with the host family, would enable me to better communicate the concerns, struggles, and experiences of informal sector women not just to other researchers and policy makers but also to SEWA. As well, I hoped that the close interaction with the host and her family would enable me to capture quieter and more insidious forms of deprivation and disadvantage among informal sector workers, for instance, increased incidence of chronic illnesses, longer workdays, heavier workloads, and lack of leisure. Of course, the opportunity to immerse myself in the daily life and life history of one family did not in itself provide a representative picture of life in that community. However, it did provide me with a deeper awareness of and empathy for the host family’s realities, circumstances, and constraints. The EDP requirement that the participant perform the same activities as the host and her family enabled me to gain a deeper and broader understanding of the family’s strategies for increasing security and minimizing vulnerability. I identified a suitable host family and slum in consultation with MHT field staff. We discussed the possibility of conducting the EDP in each of the eight unserviced or underserviced slums I had conducted my fieldwork in. Several slums are hotbeds of gambling, bootlegging, and prostitution, and we eliminated them from the list because of safety concerns. The willingness of a family to serve as host was another factor to consider, though it was clear from the numerous invitations I had received to participants’ homes and the general frankness about their lives during the focus groups that most families would probably be quite happy to open their homes to me. We were not surprised when the first family we approached in a slum called Ramesh Dutt Colony, a community I had visited many times during the course of my fieldwork, agreed quite eagerly to participate in the EDP. Since I carried out the research in a very specific social and cultural context, I begin this chapter with a summary profile of Ramesh Dutt Colony, the community in which the EDP was conducted. This community profile is an abridged version of the one I wrote for MHT relying on information I

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collected through focus groups and demographic information collected by MHT and the AMC. I then draw upon a detailed documentation of the EDP experience with the host family to illuminate how inadequate access to income, dignified employment opportunities, health care, sanitation services, and a range of other tangible as well as less intangible factors – lack of physical security, social exclusion, and social respectability, for example – influence women’s ability to improve the material basis and overall quality of their lives. Profile of EDP Community Kamlaben lives in Ramesh Dutt Colony, which is located in the north zone of Ahmedabad.1 There are close to nine hundred families in Ramesh Dutt, but only four hundred qualified for upgradation through the SNP. Approximately five hundred families are on plots of land that are reserved by the municipal corporation for town planning. These households were not included in the upgradation effort. It is estimated that there are a minimum of five people in each household and a maximum of ten. There are approximately seven or eight people in each household, which takes the population of the community up to about three thousand. About half the households in Ramesh Dutt are joint multi-generational families; the other half are nuclear families. There is only one de jure female-headed household in the community, consisting of a widow living with her two minor daughters. A majority of households in Ramesh Dutt identify themselves as Hindu, though a small handful of residents are Christian. Most residents have their family roots in rural Gujarat – a large number migrated to Ahmedabad from neighbouring villages twenty-five to thirty years ago. There are also a smaller number of households from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan that migrated to this area ten to fifteen years ago. An even smaller number of new migrants continue to set up home in this slum. The range of trades and occupations practised is not as diverse in Ramesh Dutt Colony as in some of the other communities in which I conducted fieldwork. A large number of men and women in the community work as street cleaners for the AMC. At Rs.4,000 (US$100) per month, they earn significantly more than others in the community. Those who are not fortunate enough to hold stable government jobs work as domestic cleaners, cooks, and dishwashers in the more affluent housing societies and bungalows nearby and earn a maximum of Rs.1,500 (US$37.50) per month. A handful of women earn or supplement their living by wrapping candy for Rs.9 or 10 (US$0.23-0.25) per kilogram. They would like more work and higher incomes but are limited by the amount of unwrapped candy supplied to them. Many in the community are forced by the lack of employment opportunities to perform what is locally called chutak mazdoori (miscellaneous petty daily labour) throughout the year. There are no itinerant workers in

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this community, though a significant number of residents left the community for several months to do cleanup work in other communities after the major earthquake of 2001. A majority of residents of Ramesh Dutt built their own homes, and a few purchased homes from other people at prices ranging from Rs.8,000 (US$200) to 25,000 (US$625). There are no fully pukka (cemented or permanent) houses in the area. The types of homes range from shacks covered with gunny sacks and plastic sheets to earthen houses with tin sheets to those with cemented brick walls and asbestos roofs. About one-fourth of the residents live in rented houses, paying Rs.250 (US$6.25) to 400 (US$10) per month. Like the other communities scheduled for upgradation under the Parivartan project, Ramesh Dutt residents had access to illegal electricity supplies for Rs.300 (US$7.50) per month. However, unlike other communities, residents ranked access to legal low-cost electricity as being a bigger priority than water supply. Residents complained that the current service provider regularly cut off their electricity completely for four or five days a month, and sporadically at least once a day for several hours. In addition, the voltage fluctuated wildly during the day and was almost always very low at night. Despite the poor unreliable service, they were also cut off if they failed to pay their monthly dues on time. Unlike other areas, where most residents ranked electricity lower on their list of priorities and were hoping for large subsidies from the government or donor agencies toward meters in individual homes, there was a larger number of people in this community who had deposited Rs.5,000 (US$125) toward their own meters. So strong is the perceived need for legal electricity in this area that many, not yet eligible for SEWA loans, had borrowed all or most of this money from moneylenders at monthly interest rates of about 10 percent. The slightly more affluent nature of Ramesh Dutt may have made it a little easier for some people in the community to come up with relatively large sums of money. The Ahmedabad Electricity Company (AEC) had evidently promised residents and MHT fieldworkers that the work would be completed within a month of the money being deposited, but it had not delivered on its promise – more than two months had gone by at the time of the EDP. Both male and female residents were extremely vocal in their displeasure about this lapse, and many were demanding their money back. Several stressed that, given the number of times they had been cheated out of their money, it had taken a huge leap of faith to participate in this scheme. They had done so mainly because of the continued effort and sincerity of the MHT and SEWA Bank fieldworkers, but most residents were beginning to lose faith in the scheme and starting to wonder if they should have parted with the money at all. Most residents appreciated that the completion of the electricity work was not up to MHT or SEWA Bank and that AEC had to play the central role, but they still seemed disgruntled and wondered aloud whether they had gotten their hopes up for nothing.

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Residents shared many stories about the difficulties they faced because of the lack of regular access to electricity. Most revolved around difficulties in working at home after sunset, problems children faced with studying and doing their homework, and difficulties in performing household chores. Residents were especially unhappy during the EDP because even though AEC had not yet laid cables in the area, it had gone ahead and cut off the community’s illegal electricity supplies, leaving it literally in the dark. Residents were particularly upset because many children were preparing for their school exams and needed to study late into the night. Most households in Ramesh Dutt Colony had individual water connections through which they received water three times a day for about twenty minutes each time. The water problem in this community is acute but not as serious as in other areas. The presence of a river nearby lessened the dependence on the municipal water supply for bathing and laundry purposes. Most people rely on the water connections only for drinking water and either do their bathing and washing at the river or carry water back to their homes for those purposes. On average, residents informed me that it did not take them longer than thirty to forty-five minutes a day to meet their water needs. There were no public toilets in the community. Four or five households had built toilets within their homes at considerable cost, but most residents were forced to go to the riverside and its adjoining open areas to bathe and to defecate. This was embarrassing and humiliating at all times for both men and women but especially uncomfortable and unhygienic during the rainy season when the area was knee-deep in water and the riverbank threatened to overflow. Fearing harassment and violent attacks from men in neighbouring areas, the women generally went in groups of three or four. They were frequently pelted with stones and taunted or verbally abused by men from their own community and from adjoining middleclass housing societies. There used to be trees in the areas adjoining the river that offered women some protection, but the men in the more affluent neighbouring areas had recently cut them down to discourage people from the slums from using the area as an open toilet. Ramesh Dutt residents were of the opinion that in recent years, harassment against women had grown significantly. At the time of the EDP, AMC had already installed street lights in Ramesh Dutt, and residents mentioned that for the most part maintenance was quite decent. AMC employees did not make regular visits to the slums, but if they were asked to replace a bulb, they usually showed up within a day or two. There were no gutters installed in the community at the time of the EDP, though there were a few storm drains – enough to ensure that the area did not flood immediately after a few rain showers. More drains were needed to ensure that it did not flood, as it currently does every year, during the height of the monsoons. AMC did not do any garbage collection in this area, and

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residents were forced to shell out Rs.10 (US$0.25) per household to private garbage collectors to rid the area of its refuse once a month. Struggling for Security: A Day in the Life of Kamlaben Kamlaben is forty-three years old. She lived in the only completely kuccha (makeshift, impermanent) house in Ramesh Dutt Colony. She shared her home with her husband, Nayan, their twenty-two-year-old son, Anuj, and thirteen-year-old daughter, Shanti. Consisting of plastic sheets and gunny sacks strung on a square bamboo frame, the house resembled a tepee. It had a mud floor, and the tin door that led into it was flimsy and insecure. The family had illegal electricity, which cost Rs.300 (US$7.50) per month, but no water connection and no attached toilet or bath. Kamlaben and her husband had built a small brick bathing area outside their home, but other than the six-foot-high brick wall they had built between their house and their neighbour Babitaben’s house, there was no privacy whatsoever in the bathing area. Kamlaben worked as a cook for an employer who catered food for weddings, engagements, and other large events. She was not hired to work there on a formal or permanent basis but managed to find work for about twenty days a month for about eight months of the year. She earned between Rs.4,000 and Rs.5,000 (US$100 and US$125) per month and identified herself as the primary breadwinner of the household. Kamlaben supplemented her income by wrapping locally made hard candy. She earned Rs.8 (US$0.20) for every ten kilograms of candy wrapped. Shanti occasionally helped her out, but because they did not have enough time to devote to the activity, it frequently took them several days to wrap all ten kilograms. The employer was also unable to give Kamlaben supplies on a regular basis, so candy wrapping was never the mainstay of her economic activities. The candy had to be collected from and then deposited after wrapping to Sardar Nagar, a small township that was a Rs.4 (US$0.10) ride away in a shared auto rickshaw. Taking an auto rickshaw obviously made no sense, then, since it essentially consumed whatever they had earned from wrapping candy, so Shanti walked all the way there and back to collect and deposit the candy, since there was no other mode of transportation available to them. From the outset, Kamlaben seemed not entirely forthcoming about what her husband did for a living. She mentioned that he was a plumber but that he worked erratically, contributing approximately Rs.1,000-1,500 (US$25.0037.50) to the family’s monthly income. Like other children in the colony, her daughter apparently attended the local municipal school, though on the three weekdays that I spent there, I saw neither Shanti nor any of the other children in the community go to school. Kamlaben’s son, Anuj, had started working as an apprentice in an electronics shop a month earlier,

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and he was also working toward completing his higher secondary (standard twelve) exams. It took only some quick mental arithmetic to calculate that, based on Kamlaben’s account, her family income stood at about Rs.5,000-6,000 (US$125-150) per month. Since there were many other families in the community who earned much less but had managed to build more durable houses with brick walls and tin or cemented roofs, I was surprised that Kamlaben’s family had been unable to secure even a minimally adequate standard of housing at that income level. Wondering if they were perhaps new migrants who had been compelled to pay extortionate sums of money to previous land “owners” for the plot on which they had built their shack, I asked how long they had lived in the area. She told me that she had moved to the area as a young bride and had lived on the same piece of land they had squatted on twenty-five years ago. They had never paid for the plot of land but assumed that it was theirs, since they had lived on it for almost as long as the colony had been in existence. She explained that they had been unable to upgrade their house primarily because they had failed to acquire the large sum of money that was needed for such an effort. Since slum dwellers rarely, if ever, succeeded in getting their hands on large sums of money, and almost always upgraded their homes incrementally, I was not completely convinced by her explanation but decided to let the matter rest for the time being. The entrance to Kamlaben’s house was so low that I had to be very careful not to bump my head on the ceiling every time I entered it. Given the initial observations I made about Kamlaben’s income and the external appearance of her house vis-à-vis others in the colony, I was even more surprised by the interior of the house when I first saw it. Of course, by the time I visited Kamlaben’s house, I had spent time in many slum households and had observed that, for the most part, even people with fully cemented, permanent houses had very few possessions and homes were sparsely furnished and decorated. The external appearance of Kamlaben’s house belied the interior, which boasted everything from a television, a sound system with speakers that blared music all day, and dozens of audio cassettes to brass and stainless steel utensils hanging on one wall, a puja (place of worship) corner complete with brass and sandalwood idols of Hindu gods adorned with flashing multicolour lights, and a large wrought-iron cot. The wide range of consumer goods and appliances Kamlaben’s family owned contrasted sharply with the poor quality of housing and sanitation services they tolerated. The contradiction confused me about the family’s choices and priorities, but I hoped to understand them better during my stay in their home. I observed that Kamlaben faced many difficulties in coping with her domestic chores and economic activities. Theirs was one of the only households

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in the colony without an individual water connection. The water ran for about twenty minutes three times a day, so while other residents did not face any serious problems from water unavailability, Kamlaben had to rely on a relative, who lived in another section of the colony, for water. She and her daughter spent on average an hour a day collecting and carrying back water to their home. Kamlaben found the task of procuring water for the family on a daily basis especially difficult because of the chronic backache she has been suffering from for the past ten years. Like the rest of the community, Kamlaben and her family went to the riverside to relieve themselves. For both mother and daughter, not having an indoor toilet was especially uncomfortable and demeaning during menstruation. Kamlaben attributed the two miscarriages she had had to overwork and the lack of basic sanitation services. “It’s one thing for me to have had to suffer so much during my life, but it is even more painful to watch my daughter being subjected to the same indignities,” Kamlaben said with remorse. In the absence of sewers and storm drains, Kamlaben faced the additional challenge of collecting waste water from around her house and disposing it outside the colony. The entire area was low-lying and flooded easily, so water entered her house every year during the monsoon season. Her wages from working for the caterer were not affected by the floods, since she did not use her home to perform any activities related to that source of income, but the family suffered from the yearly inconvenience of having to move their belongings to higher ground to avoid damage. Kamlaben mentioned that, despite taking such precautions, it was unlikely that a year went by without some moisture-related damage to their house or belongings. As well, the hard candy Kamlaben and Shanti wrapped to supplement their income had gotten soggy during the rains on two occasions; the contractor had not only refused to pay for the wrapping of those consignments but also had extracted their cost from raw supplies he provided them with later. Kamlaben had to bear too the emotional and financial brunt of an ongoing feud with her neighbour, Babitaben. The two families had lived next door to each other for decades, and their children were of approximately the same age. Over the years, Babitaben had incrementally upgraded her house. At the time of the EDP, Babitaben’s house had brick walls, a cemented roof, an attached indoor toilet, and a closed bathing area. Kamlaben, on the other hand, had not upgraded her house at all. As the children approached adolescence, Kamlaben became extremely concerned about her daughter having to bathe in the open. She and her husband concurred that it would be best to build a brick wall between the two houses so that the bathing area would at least be semi-sheltered. Babitaben’s family was furious when the wall went up because they perceived it as an encroachment on their already cramped property. They pulled the wall down and Kamlaben was forced to seek police intervention. The wall went up again but it permanently soured relations

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between the two families. During the time of my stay in the colony, Babitaben tried hard to ingratiate herself with me and constantly badgered me with questions about what Kamlaben may have told me about her. Such problems are perhaps inevitable when people are forced to live in such close quarters with each other. But what disturbed me more is the culture of haves and have-nots; of inclusion and exclusion of people, even in areas that seem so homogenous in their poverty and deprivation to the casual observer. I discuss such conflicts and contradictions in greater detail later in the chapter. Kamlaben mentioned that she had in the past helped people in the colony in significant ways – cooking for them free of charge for large social occasions, helping deliver babies, and taking people to the hospital during emergencies – and so felt let down in her hour of need. She declined to elaborate on this issue, but I left the colony with a strong sense that this family felt very isolated from the other residents, who had secured houses and lives that were marginally better than theirs. Kamlaben had wanted to deposit Rs.5,000 (US$125) toward a legal electricity connection. The AEC turned her down because electric meters could be installed only on brick walls and her home was built of plastic sheets and gunny sacks. When I asked her about potential plans to upgrade her house, she explained that her husband’s brother, who had worked as a cleaner for the AMC and had died in a work-related accident a few years ago, had named her husband as primary recipient of his life insurance. The claim was tied up in bureaucratic red tape, but she and her husband were hoping, if and when it did come through, to use the money to upgrade their house. It became clear during my stay in the colony that Kamlaben’s husband did not contribute anything of significance for the maintenance of the household. Kamlaben’s desire to protect his failure to provide for his family is probably an outcome of her socialization. Over the years, she had on several occasions pawned her jewellery to secure loans for subsistence and emergency needs. While we were having breakfast on the second day, a man from a collection agency came to collect the daily instalment on a Rs.1,200 (US$30) loan Kamlaben had taken. She paid a daily instalment of Rs.30 (US$0.75) over fifty days. In other words, she paid compound interest at the rate of 25 percent. I asked Kamlaben if she would suffer any penalties if she defaulted on a payment. She replied that her fear of losing a reliable source of credit would keep her from missing a payment, but that she had observed the embarrassment other members of the community had suffered for defaulting on their loans. It was not an uncommon strategy for families that could not pay a loan instalment to bolt their homes from the outside, pretending to be out when the collection agency representative came around. The representative responded, in turn, by standing outside the defaulting family’s house and continuously ringing his bicycle bell or motorcycle horn. If nobody emerged from the house, the representative left and returned the

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next day, but by that time all the neighbours knew which family owed money, and the “loss of face” within the community was usually enough to motivate the family to come up with the instalment at any cost. Kamlaben mentioned other strategies moneylenders employed to ensure repayment. One tactic that several moneylenders used was to set up a stall in a public place within a slum from which to disburse and collect funds. If a family owed money, it was impossible for family members to walk past the stall without nagging, verbal harassment, or the threat of violence. “Most of us will do anything to avoid the dadagiri (bullying or coercion) of the moneylenders,” Kamlaben asserted. Kamlaben was a member of the local community-based organization and of SEWA Bank. As a fallback to her brother-in-law’s life insurance not coming through, she hoped to have enough savings in her SEWA Bank account to qualify for a housing loan to upgrade her house adequately within the next year. She also hoped to educate her daughter at least up to the twelfth standard. Kamlaben mentioned wanting to send her daughter to college in the neighbouring city of Baroda. Money was the major stumbling block, but she hoped that if her son earned on a regular basis after completing his higher secondary exams, they would be able to pool together the money to send Shanti to college, or at the very least to help her acquire some vocational training in tailoring or midwifery. “A woman’s life can be hard even when she has a supportive husband and nice in-laws. I hope Shanti will marry a nice boy someday, but I want her to be able to take care of herself, with or without a husband,” Kamlaben emphasized to me during one of our conversations. Understanding Poverty, Vulnerability, and Insecurity Kamlaben’s story provides useful insight into the nature and magnitude of vulnerability as experienced by urban women employed in the informal sector. In this context, the distinction Chambers (1989) makes between poverty and vulnerability is valuable because he emphasizes that those who are vulnerable in any society are exposed to particular risks, shocks, and stress, but they may not necessarily be poor. He contrasts vulnerability with security and links it with net assets or a wide range of tangible and intangible stores of value or claims to assistance that can be mobilized in a crisis. This inclusion of intangible assets, which by definition should include genderbased entitlements of kinship and society, makes the concept of vulnerability sensitive to women’s particular circumstances and constraints (Baruah 2009). It is important to understand vulnerability in existential terms because it provides some perspective on the requirements for a securer life. It is also crucial to make a distinction between poverty and vulnerability because, although households such as Kamlaben’s may not be defined as “poor” based on the extremely narrow and conservative criteria, primarily income and

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calorie intake, used as proxies to monitor and evaluate poverty, Kamlaben is constantly struggling for physical, economic, and social security. Writing about slums in Surat, a smaller city in Gujarat, Biswaroop Das (1994) similarly notes that even though some individuals were able to earn a higher income by exploiting certain situations that intermittently came their way, their probability of raising a secure and sustained income did not rise, their standards of living in real terms did not improve, their access to amenities did not increase, and their households did not get enough of a sustained boost to ensure that at least one or more of their family members would be able to acquire higher-level skills and incomes. Therefore, despite higher incomes, slum households in his study were found to be vulnerable on many counts. As well as drawing attention to the importance of making conceptual distinctions between poverty, insecurity, and vulnerability, Kamlaben’s story highlights the need to take an intersectional approach to engage with the lived realities of poor informal sector urban women. Intersectionality theorists hold that the classical models of inequality within society, such as those based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, class, or disability, do not act independently of one another; instead, these forms of oppression interrelate, creating a system of oppression that reflects the “intersection” of multiple forms of discrimination (Crenshaw 1991; Ritzer 2007). The use of intersectionality to understand how inequality and vulnerability is produced, experienced, reproduced, and resisted in everyday life is not new (see, for example, Fernandes 1997; Mohanty 1988, 2003). It has long been part of the dialogue of feminists, in both the global North and the South. The cross-cutting nature of race, class, and gender has been raised in examining the nature of the women’s movement, particularly by feminists of colour in the global North. Similar analyses have been applied by feminists in the global South in pressing for more gender-sensitive approaches to development policies within their national contexts. Intersectionality goes beyond just looking at gender as an analytical construct to engage with inequality and vulnerability. It seeks to provide a tool for analyzing the ways in which gender, race, class, and all other forms of identity and distinction, in different contexts, produce situations in which women and men may become vulnerable to discrimination and exploitation. Drawing upon the EDP, Kamlaben’s life story, and my other formal and informal interactions with research participants in the slums of Ahmedabad, I have identified the following related – frequently inseparable and intersecting – factors as most capable of rendering informal sector women workers economically and socially vulnerable. Aside from marriage, kinship systems, inheritance practices, and access to financial services, which are discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters, they are also the factors that most strongly influence women’s ability to create, own, and control independent landed assets.

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Inadequate Income and Insecure Employment In the absence of safety nets, a regular and adequate source of income is the most basic form of social security any informal sector worker could hope for. Kamlaben managed to find work as a cook for only about eight months of the year, and even though she considered her income adequate to meet the most basic needs of the family for those months, the erratic and informal nature of the employment exacerbated her economic vulnerability. Candy wrapping is the only economic activity available to Kamlaben for the rest of the year, and in this activity she is constrained not just by inadequate and irregular work supply but also by wages that are utterly incommensurate with the level of effort and time required. Her situation is not unlike millions of informal sector workers in India, especially women workers, who frequently work longer and harder hours than workers employed in the formal economy but fail to avail themselves of any legal entitlements for minimum wages or social security benefits, sometimes despite the existence of protective legislation. Osner (2002) corroborates this when he writes that hidden but effective structures of dependency make it difficult to supply the evidence needed to prove that the real nature of the relationship between many of the informal sector workers and those who pay for their work is one of employees and employers and not vendors and patrons. To complicate matters further, informal sector workers and firms that produce one type of good or provide one type of service may be complicit in exploiting other workers or businesses within the informal sector. As Rogerson (1997) reminds us, in South Africa, where the icons of the informal sector are women running spaza (convenience) shops or shebeens (informal bars) or hawking produce, most informal women are not actually self-employed or economically independent but work for someone else. Their economic security creates a parallel insecurity in the lives of other women and men. These ubiquitous and vicious networks of micro-exploitation, of the poor exploiting the very poor, are usually glossed over in accounts of the informal sector (Davis 2006). The chains of contracting and subcontracting labour can be long and convoluted. I interviewed a woman who made a living from sewing labels on garments. Her house was littered with labels from Gap and Eddie Bauer. A contractor from a neighbouring slum dropped off the shirts and labels three or four times a week and paid her approximately Rs.50 (US$1.25) per day for her effort; he then took the shirts to another contractor in the city for a different component of the production process. The woman was “thankful” for the work she was provided with and had no knowledge of the corporations beyond this subchain that marketed the clothes she helped produce or how much the shirts cost consumers in North America and Europe. Inadequate and irregular incomes force women to prioritize their most basic short-term needs such as food, shelter, clothing, and medicines over

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Scavenging for recyclables in garbage dumps and landfills is a common economic activity for poor urban women. (Ahmedabad; photograph by Sébastien Fernand)

longer-term needs and to reserve what little they can save for illness, unemployment, and other exigencies. Many women are forced to prioritize basic consumption needs over education for their children. Kamlaben is determined to provide her daughter with a post-secondary education instead of marrying her off early, but the inadequacy of their incomes frequently force many other women to make painful choices for their daughters. During the course of my fieldwork, several research participants emphasized that they recognized the injustice of sending their daughters to their marital homes to start conjugal lives when they were barely past menarche, yet their resource constraints made the difficult choice necessary. Early marriage, frequently to much older men, was often the only feasible option to ensure the survival of their daughters to adulthood. Many people were forced to

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take children out of school after they had secured a basic elementary education because they needed them to earn for the family. “I would have liked to educate my son beyond the sixth standard,” bemoaned one woman who rolled papads for a living, “but it was the choice between him going to school and starving or going to work and eating. No parent should have to make such a choice, but that is our reality.” Purchasing a plot of land or a house or even upgrading existing homes becomes challenging and frequently impossible when women find themselves faced with so many more urgent unmet family needs. Through its trade union activities, SEWA had succeeded in demanding and implementing minimum wage legislation for several categories of rural and urban informal sector workers. The unionization of paper pickers in Ahmedabad and of female tobacco workers in the Kheda district of Gujarat are good examples. In most such cases, it was not just women workers who benefited. The Equal Remuneration Act for tobacco workers, for example, not only abolished wage differences between men and women but succeeded in raising minimum wages for workers in the bidi (cigarette) industry in general (Bhowmik and Patel 1996). Such successes are commendable and well documented within SEWA and in the literature on women and economic empowerment, yet my research uncovered many other small unregulated and unorganized economic activities, for example, wrapping candy and making simple toys, that women perform in the urban context either as mainstays or for supplementary income. Despite SEWA’s leadership and reputation, it is difficult to imagine that the organization would be able to extend its trade union activities to the vast range of marginal enterprises, trades, and occupations through which urban informal sector workers make their livelihoods. Since most women who participated in my research expressed a greater interest in more lucrative and independent home-based entrepreneurial activities than in menial waged labour, organizing women around their common and usually urgent needs for adequate housing and sanitation services, especially in combination with credit and marketing support for entrepreneurship, provides the added advantage of offering women the opportunity to explore more autonomous but financially viable home-based economic activities that would enable them to receive fairer returns for their labour. Access to Markets and Wider Economy Gujarati women have always enjoyed greater mobility and visibility in public arenas compared with women in many other parts of India and South Asia. Empowerment research conducted with the members of the Grameen Bank in the early 1990s, for example, identified six specific indicators of women’s empowerment in Bangladesh: sense of self and vision of a future; mobility and visibility; economic security; status and decision-making power within

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the household; ability to interact effectively in the public sphere; and affiliation with collectives beyond those represented by the family (Schuler and Hashemi 1993). The same researchers conducted a subsequent study of empowerment as experienced by urban members of SEWA in India, which revealed that whereas all the other indicators had strong significance in their lives, mobility and visibility were deemed far less relevant and consequential than others. The priorities and aspirations of urban members of SEWA, who had always been relatively visible and independent workers in the informal economy, were significantly different from those of the rural members of Grameen, who were new entrants to the paid economy. Several of the slums in which I conducted my research were inhabited by people of Gujarati origin, whereas others were occupied by people who were originally from Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh. Despite having lived in Gujarat for decades and even centuries, in a few cases the latter groups held on to their traditions, which frequently included fairly stringent norms of female seclusion, including the ban on work outside the home. Rajasthani and Maharashtrian women were frequently actively engaged in home-based economic activities, but their access to markets and the wider economy was significantly weaker than their Gujarati counterparts. A good case in point is a community of Rajasthani artisans in West Ahmedabad. The men in the community made origami paper decorations that they exhibited and sold at schools and fairs across the state and country. A few of the men had even participated in exhibitions in Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, Malta, and the Philippines. The women in this community owned sewing machines and embroidered tablecloths, bedcovers, and pillow and cushion covers, interacting with other women only while conducting embroidery classes in their homes. Their wares were also sold at fairs and exhibitions, but all market transactions were conducted by their husbands, fathers, brothers, or sons because of the restrictions of purdah (norms of female seclusion). Women in this community contributed significantly in economic terms, but it was the men who controlled the finances in the household and in the community in general. Women from communities that practised purdah obviously faced additional challenges in accessing markets, yet I discovered that women qua women encountered other hurdles in optimizing their performance in the wider economy. Some of these are generic to the informal sector poor; others are specific to women. Besides limited employment opportunities and low wages, women face exploitation in the form of bribes, fines, high prices, and wage deductions from employers. Kamlaben’s feud with her neighbour over her right to put up a brick wall between their properties was resolved only when she bribed the police to intervene on her behalf. The man who hired her to wrap candy could deduct her wages at whim if he deemed the wrapping to be too loose or the candy to be wet. The net outcome of such attrition

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Rolling agarbatti (incense) sticks is a common but poorly paid and labour-intensive home-based economic activity for women in poor urban communities. (Ahmedabad; photograph by Sébastien Fernand)

is that women such as Kamlaben not only pay unusually high prices for raw materials, “overheads,” food, fuel, and electricity but they also remain indebted to moneylenders and pawnbrokers who are able to prey upon their vulnerability by charging higher rates of interest. Since women’s jewellery and utensils are usually the first assets a family pawns to secure loans, they are also the assets most frequently lost if the loan is not repaid – an additional source of vulnerability for informal sector women. Along with the reasons mentioned above, it is important for women to protect their independent incomes and assets from attrition because their priorities are frequently very different from the men in their families. Kamlaben considered herself fortunate because despite her husband being unable to contribute regularly to the family income, he did not have any vices or

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addictions that made him a burden on the family’s meagre earnings. Many women were frequently much worse off and perceived their husbands as liabilities rather than assets. Men in slum households were often reluctant to render a large part of their incomes for household sustenance and frequently spent all or most of their wages on alcohol (particularly the cheap illegally brewed hooch), bidis, tea, and clothes. In contrast, women spent their wages in most cases almost fully on their households. In such situations, carefully designed survival strategies by a woman might be shattered not just by her husband’s personal expenditure from his own income but also by his appropriation of her earnings or savings. SEWA has been very successful in adapting its products and services to the needs of informal sector women. In areas where women are in the paid workforce – for instance, construction workers and kerosene vendors in Ahmedabad or tobacco workers in Kheda – SEWA employed the twin strategy of unionizing workers and establishing cooperatives to negotiate secure higher wages or better working conditions. In contrast, while working in Banaskantha, Kutch, and other poorer rural areas with limited opportunities for waged employment, SEWA focused primarily on increasing the productivity and marketability of its economic activities, be it gum collecting or embroidering clothes, by linking them up to markets and services. My research confirms that whereas SEWA has worked consistently to provide urban informal sector women in Ahmedabad with credit on favourable terms and to organize women employed in larger, more visible sectors in the city into unions, less attention has been paid to helping existing or aspiring entrepreneurs in slums to access markets and raw materials for their more marginal enterprises. Although urban centres such as Ahmedabad appear to offer sufficient skilled or unskilled waged economic opportunities for anyone willing to work, I met many women who could not access such jobs for various reasons related to seclusion practices, poor health, and lack of child care. Providing such women with support to procure raw materials for their homebased economic ventures and to market the goods they produce through cooperatives or through the Internet would be significant in enabling them to secure greater control over their economic lives. The response to women’s literacy classes run by SEWA in several city slums has been lukewarm primarily because informal sector women are aware that education by itself does not translate into better employment opportunities for the poor. This is especially true in India, with its teeming millions of highly educated unemployed middle-class youth. Several women who participated in my research had struggled desperately to put their children, almost always sons, through high school, and in some cases through college, only to be disillusioned by their inability to secure well-paid jobs. My research also generally pointed to a lack of enthusiasm for formal education among slum-dwelling women, though it revealed high demand among the same

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women for non-formal education in entrepreneurship, establishment of cooperatives, and vocational training in more lucrative skills such as beautician training, tailoring, watch repair, television repair, radio mechanics, masonry, and carpentry that even non-literate women could aspire to learn. MHT (Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA Trust) is attempting to respond to such demands by affiliating with the Indira Gandhi National Open University to develop programs in masonry and carpentry for informal sector women. These initiatives are well intentioned and highly commendable, yet past experience with such training reveals that women are often unable to translate their training into well-paid employment because of pervasive gender discriminatory practices within the public and private sector construction industry. Of the one hundred women that MHT previously trained in carpentry, for example, less than ten were able to secure employment as carpenters (B. Bhatt 2003). I spoke with one of the women who had succeeded over the years in establishing herself as a carpenter and in earning wages at par with her male counterparts. Shantaben’s story may be inspiring to other informal sector women who want to acquire skills in traditionally maledominated occupations, but it also sheds light on some of the interlocking hurdles women must overcome: I used to be the first carpenter to show up on the construction site. In the beginning, the contractors simply refused to hire women. My husband and sons were not very supportive when I was doing the training, so in addition to not being able to bring home any money, I had to put up with their taunts. I went from construction site to construction site looking for work. Finally, I offered to work for free for one contractor. I told him that he didn’t have to pay me if he didn’t like my work. He made me work for weeks before offering to pay me half of what he paid the men, even though my work was cleaner and more efficient from the beginning. Also, I didn’t take frequent chai, bidi, and gup-shup [gossip or banter] breaks like the men. I worked for that contractor for almost a year at half of what he paid the men. It took many years of perseverance before I could get a higher wage. I still don’t earn as much as male carpenters but it is more than I earned from vending vegetables. My husband and sons have more respect for me. I like to joke to my friends that these days I am a mistry [carpenter] and my husband does the istry [clothes ironing].

Employment discrimination based on gender is pervasive and complex. Similar experiences narrated by women attempting to enter male-dominated occupations support the notion that the gender-based wage differential cannot be overcome by simply improving education and training for women. This is especially true since women frequently need to “prove” themselves to be as capable as men in trades such as carpentry and masonry and are

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The construction industry in India employs approximately 31 million people (Ahmedabad; photograph by Sébastien Fernand). Women make up 51 percent of the construction workforce (Baruah 2008a).

easily prevented from entering certain types of employment, usually on the grounds of physical weakness, inability to produce at the same rate as men, moral danger, or lack of facilities for women workers. To ensure that women are able to translate their training into equitable employment opportunities with men, it is imperative that MHT, SEWA, and similar organizations demand affirmative action policy responses from central and state governments that make it mandatory for public and private sector builders to give preference to trained women masons and carpenters if they are available. Writing about a community development project sponsored by Save the Children in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Fernando (1987) similarly notes that in training women in construction skills, which are traditionally regarded as “men’s work,” wider intervention at the national policy-making level is required to

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ensure that such efforts have replicable results. There are examples of such policies working quite well within India. The left-leaning state government in Kerala, for example, has an explicit commitment to gender equality. Public housing and infrastructure projects in Kerala are preferentially awarded to women’s organizations – provided they have the technical competence and administrative ability to implement them. Such policies can be tremendously empowering for women’s organizations seeking to enter non-traditional areas, but they are more the exception than the norm in India. Even policies that are not explicitly pro-women can be beneficial to skilled women if they enable trained workers to enter and be retained by the construction sector. The state government of Madhya Pradesh, for example, gives private builders a 5 percent tax exemption for employing certified workers on its construction sites. This policy has no gendered component and is motivated solely by a desire to raise the quality of construction to adhere to global construction standards enforced by the World Trade Organization (Baruah 2008a). However, if more states were to implement such policies, they would enable organizations such as MHT to make the case to introduce more trained women workers into construction sites. In general, economic liberalization in India has resulted in the retreat of state intervention, except for the facilitation of commerce. My findings, like those of Price (2008), reinforce that the retreat of the state from intervention in the workplace reduces workers’ power in general and gender equity in particular. The training and certification programs of SEWA and similar organizations can play a very important role in providing skilled women with quality employment opportunities, but they must also be reinforced by wider policy intervention at the state and national level to ensure sustainable and gender-equitable results. Several donor agencies have criticized MHT for not training and hiring more women in house repair, renovation, and construction both in urban slum upgradation projects and in rural disaster relief programs following the earthquake of 2001. This is an area MHT could definitely expand itself into, but it is vital that governments are pressured concurrently to implement affirmative action legislation that protects the interests of women and ensures sustainable gains from securing such training. Also, it is important to be aware that women in the informal sector are already actively engaged in economic activities, however small scale and marginal, and rely on their daily earnings to maintain their households. Most women cannot afford to take the time out from their current income-generating activities to learn new skills if they are not compensated financially during the training. Several feminist scholars have criticized efficiency-driven approaches to development for implicitly assuming that women’s time and energy are elastic (Beneria 2003; Moser 1993). Such criticisms are especially relevant in this

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context. Although women are eager to acquire specialized vocational training, it is imperative that financial compensation be made available to them during their training. Access to vocational training is important too because it seems to significantly influence the age of marriage for girls. It is more the norm for girls to be married off at a younger age in communities where fewer opportunities exist for them to earn independent incomes. General societal pressure to protect a girl’s chastity once she is past menarche, and the additional burden of doing so in congested slums with very little privacy, strongly influences decisions to arrange early marriages for daughters. However, if the daughters are able to contribute to the family income of their natal homes, parents are less likely to perceive them as economic burdens and more willing to wait until the daughters reached adulthood and sexual maturity to send them to their marital homes. Girls in the Rajasthani community described in a previous section were rarely educated beyond the fifth standard and were cloistered in their homes from the age of ten to learn embroidery from their mothers. Although they were sometimes betrothed while they were still in their midteenage years, they did not leave for their marital homes until the age of majority. This is in sharp contrast with other communities where it fairly common for girls to be sent to their in-laws’ homes when they were barely twelve or thirteen years old. The former case was hardly ideal given that young women in this community did not have a repertoire of choices in terms of careers or spouses, yet it did seem preferable to the scenarios in several of the other case study slums where girls were sent to their marital homes to assume their domestic responsibilities and start their sexual lives while they were still children. Physical Security and Health Ensuring her daughter’s physical safety was one of Kamlaben’s deepest persistent anxieties. She stressed that even though the entire family suffered the indignities of grossly inadequate housing and sanitation services, Shanti’s vulnerability to bodily harm, and especially to sexual assault, was compounded by her gender and her youth. Kamlaben accompanied her daughter during her ablutions at the riverbank whenever possible and worried constantly about her safety when Shanti went by herself. Kamlaben’s story is not unlike many others I heard from women who lived in slums without toilet facilities. Middle-aged women were as humiliated by having to relieve themselves along railway tracks or on riverbanks, but they considered themselves less vulnerable than younger women to the lewd advances of men or the attacks of sexual predators. Many slum communities in Ahmedabad are surrounded by housing complexes occupied by middle-class people who are heavily dependent on slum dwellers for cheap domestic labour but intolerant

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Procuring water is a predominantly female responsibility in urban poor communities. (Ahmedabad; photograph by Sébastien Fernand)

of their need to use public spaces as latrines. When more affluent people made attempts to sanitize their environments, whether by cutting down trees along riverbanks or hiring watch guards to prevent slum dwellers from defecating in public spaces, women and girls from slums frequently bore the brunt of the humiliation, since their needs, especially during menstruation, for some semblance of privacy far exceeded those of men and boys. Fear of harassment from neighbours or from railway officials who frequently sought bribes and threatened slum dwellers with penalties for defecating along railway tracks forced women to venture out under cover of darkness, which compromised their safety even further. Public toilets exist in some slum, but they do little to ameliorate the difficulties women face because of lack of toilets. Most charge a fee, which, however nominal, informal sector

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women find they can’t afford, and others are maintained so poorly and cleaned so infrequently as to be unusable. The construction of in-house toilet facilities, made possible by the slum upgradation initiative, had an especially dignifying effect on women. Almost all female research participants from upgraded slums spoke of how basic sanitation services, including toilets and running water, had not just made their domestic chores easier but also given them a new sense of dignity and security. Until recently, women’s needs for dignity, privacy, and security have received very little attention within sanitation programs. From a health perspective, women are endangered even more by the lack of community and household-level sanitation facilities because of the expectation that they should invariably deal with handling and disposing of excreta of young children, and of elderly, sick, and disabled people in the household for whom they have to care. Disregard for women’s needs, including the management of menstruation, has dogged many sanitation programs. Black and Fawcett (2008) write that “sanitation” is invariably a poor relation to “water” in the public health engineering portfolio and receives far fewer resources. They go on to say that the words “and sanitation” are frequently added to “water” in policy and program descriptors, without any indication of the need for radically different approaches, technologies, financing methods, or mobilization where sanitation is concerned. In recent years, sanitation advocates have emphasized that water supplies must be delinked from sanitation in the public official mind so that their respective roles in the causes and prevention of illness are more carefully defined and better understood. As things stand, 90 percent of most sanitation-related budgets, which are meagre to begin with, end up being spent on water supply, even though providing more or cleaner water reduces diarrhea – one of the most common outcomes of poor sanitation – by only 16 to 20 percent (R. George 2008). Although HIV/AIDS kills fewer children annually than sanitation-related disease, sanitation is tucked away under Goal 7 (environmental sustainability) of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, which seeks to halve by 2015 the proportion of the global population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. Yet again, sanitation finds itself overshadowed by its richer, more glamorous cousin. In the twenty-first century, celebrities such as the two Bills (Clinton and Gates), as well as a long list of singers, actors, and royalty, have happily attached their names to campaigns on water, but rare are those to have identified themselves unreservedly with the need for sanitary advance. There is an urgent need to build real political commitment behind sanitation in the local and national institutions of the developing world and in the international donor community. Over 1.2 billion people worldwide gained access to improved sanitation between 1990 and 2004. However, even with this

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progress, some 41 percent of the world’s population – an estimated 2.6 billion people, including 980 million children – lacks access to adequate sanitation facilities (R. George 2008). The United Nations’ declaration of 2008 as the International Year of Sanitation is the first time that sanitation has been decoupled from water and given recognition on its own. The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development was the first international development agency to issue a report criticizing the sanitation record of donors and emphasizing that, based on current trends, the Millennium Development Goals for sanitation would be met in 2076 and not 2015 as targeted. To achieve the sanitation goals by 2015, R. George (2008) calculates that 95,000 toilets must be installed every day – one toilet per second, every twenty-four hours, until 2015. This is highly unlikely given that few countries even have national sanitation policies. Since it does not feature in development plans, sanitation is also not considered for funding by many donors. In addition to focusing much more attention on sanitation goals, there is a need to make a distinction between sanitary needs for urban areas of the developing world and those for rural areas. The invisibility of many squatter and shanty-town residents in surveys and censuses means that their lack of facilities does not show up in the data collected at the international level. Consequently, the relatively rosier picture of sanitation access in urban areas as compared with rural areas – 80 percent compared with 39 percent, according to the latest computation – ignores those who need services most urgently (Black and Fawcett 2008). The growing numbers of people living in confined spaces in miserable and undignified conditions in the rapidly urbanizing developing world are a cause for major sanitary concern – cholera epidemics of the kind that ravaged nineteenth-century Europe are not unfathomable. Incidents such as the 1994 pneumonic plague outbreak in the city of Surat in Gujarat are wake-up calls that warrant urgent attention (G. Shah 1997). The long-standing rural bias in poverty alleviation programs in India has reinforced the neglect of poor urban populations with regard not only to sanitation but to water and other basic services as well. In 1998, a study entitled “Dwelling Environment and Housing Needs of the Rural Poor in Northern and Central Gujarat” was undertaken on behalf of MHT by Biswaroop Das of the Surat-based Centre for Social Studies in two districts – Banaskantha and Anand. The study identified a strong need in both regions for housing units that were more durable and stable. Since safe open spaces were available for defecation, indoor toilets were not considered essential in rural areas in Gujarat. Unlike slums in urban areas, where women are humiliated on a daily basis by their need to defecate outdoors, rural women did not consider toilets to be a top priority. Within the urban context, women’s need for toilet facilities require urgent attention. Poor urban communities

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are likely to prioritize water supply over toilets – as they have in this study – if neither is available in their communities. When there is food to buy and school fees to pay, a toilet may not be considered an urgent necessity even though its absence may contaminate food and make children too ill to go to school. Even when women value toilets very highly, they may be hesitant to talk about sanitation unless they are very specifically asked about their needs. Swallowing our squeamishness about sanitation is crucial because its absence has consequences that even lack of water supply does not. A family can be the only household to install a water pipe in a congested slum, and it can use clean water without harming anyone else or being harmed by anyone else. However, it takes only one family without a latrine to pollute all common areas and drinking water. R. George (2008, 179) emphasizes that “the irony of defecation is that it is a solitary business yet its repercussions are plural and public.” Lack of sanitation is only one serious threat to women’s physical security and health in slum communities. Violence against women – often as a result of lack of sanitation facilities – emerged as the other strongest cross-cutting theme in the survey of women in slums in six global cities – Mumbai, Colombo, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Accra, and Nairobi – undertaken by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE 2008). The patterns in the study resonate with my findings in Ahmedabad: in Accra, poor women who worked as porters reported incidents of rape and sexual abuse, with little or no response from the police; in Mumbai, women have expressed fear about going to the toilet at night for fear of being attacked, as it is not safe for them to venture outside their homes; in Nairobi, domestic violence in the slums emerged as a serious concern. Improvement in street lighting and enhanced personal safety were regarded as two of the most important changes needed to improve women’s living conditions in slum communities in cities in Argentina and Ghana (ibid.). Incidents of theft and mugging were reported in four of thirteen communities represented in my study. Several slums either had no street lights or had very inadequate street lighting. This exacerbated women’s perceptions of vulnerability. Most women tried to not venture out of their homes at all after dark and when compelled to, ensured that they did so in groups. Bootlegging and gambling activities flourished too in some areas, and at least two sexual attacks, including a gang rape of a teenager, were reported during the time of this research. The police sometimes perfunctorily raided slums and fined or imprisoned bootleggers. Bootlegging activity would then usually cool down for a few weeks, only to start up again with renewed vigour as long as there was no threat of another raid. Women feared physical and sexual violence not only at the hands of inebriated men from their own communities but also from men from neighbouring slums who frequently congregated to drink and gamble. As mentioned earlier, my choice of a slum

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for the EDP was strongly influenced by considerations for my personal safety. Even in slums where no such atrocities had been reported, the fear of such incidents loomed large in the minds of women. Their sense of abject vulnerability was compounded by the complete apathy of the police force toward slum residents. Since many local governments barely even acknowledge that slums exist in their cities, they are usually resistant to providing slum communities with public services such as police and fire protection. Although the gang rape had been reported, no charges had been laid. For the most part, the police do not consider crimes committed against slum dwellers to be worthy of investigation. In the face of such callousness and the social stigma attached to rape, most victims and their families are much more likely to try to hide such incidents in the interests of preserving the family’s honour. Slum communities have no option but to create a parallel universe with its own codes of conduct and its own – frequently deeply problematic – laws and regulations to deal with crime and punishment. Residents of several slums were open about their lack of confidence in law enforcement agencies. “The police have never been called to our slum,” declared one man proudly. “We solve our problems within the community.” Much of what I have discussed in this section points to a pervasive sense of powerlessness in the lives of slum dwellers. Men from low-income households and disadvantaged groups also experience powerlessness, but because of their gender, women experience it more intensely than the men of those same households or groups. My research was conducted less than a year after the communal violence that paralyzed the city in March 2002 and earned Ahmedabad the dubious distinction of being the most intolerant city in India. I discuss some of the social and economic impacts of such violence on slum dwellers in Chapter 3. Much print has also been devoted to documenting and analyzing how the poor, and especially women, bear a disproportionate burden of communal violence because of their positional vulnerability in society (S. Mehta 2004; K. Sharma 2002; Varshney 2002). For the urban poor in general, survival is a daily struggle, and much of the burden for fighting for basic services falls on the shoulders of women. The survival responses they develop during more tranquil times also influence their responses during times of conflict. Only two of the communities I conducted research in – a Hindu slum in East Ahmedabad and a Muslim slum in the old quarter of Ahmedabad – were directly targeted during the riots, but all communities were affected indirectly by the strife. Even though the residents of both slums were able to flee their homes before the arrival of the mobs and did not suffer any bodily harm, they suffered the consequences of the violence in very specific ways because of destruction of homes and loss of livelihoods. Damage to their homes severely undercut the ability of home-based workers to survive in the city. The curfew that was imposed on the city for days on end following the riots made it impossible

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for construction workers, domestic servants, paper pickers, vendors, and hawkers to earn daily wages, and many were reduced to begging from their neighbours to feed their families. The role durable housing can play in protecting slum residents not just from inclement weather and robbery during peaceful times but also from looting and vandalism during times of communal conflict becomes clear when one looks at the results of a housing needs survey I conducted on behalf of MHT in a Muslim slum in East Ahmedabad that was attacked during the riots. Twenty-eight of the hundred or so households suffered significant losses because of arson, vandalism, and theft. Houses with thatched roofs and walls sustained the most damage; four such houses had been burnt down completely. Eight houses had iron doors, and although most had been pried open or otherwise tampered with, they did not sustain enough damage to threaten the structural integrity of the houses. There were only two completely pukka houses in the community. Their owners spoke bitterly about the theft and poisoning of their livestock during the riots, but their homes had withstood the attack, the exterior walls suffering only hasty minor attempts at defacement. The owners of the pukka homes attested that putting their homes and lives back together had been less of an uphill task for them compared with other families in the community that had to start from scratch. Lack of Education and Functional Literacy Women in slum communities are acutely aware of their lack of formal education. Concerns about children’s education ranked high on parents’ list of collective general anxieties, and constraints to educating children existed at many levels. Like Shanti, many children were registered in schools, yet few attended classes. Less than half the children in the slums I researched actually attended school. Some children were pulled out of school to help earn income or maintain the household; others did not attend because of lack of discipline from their parents. A majority of children in slums attended government schools, but parents were concerned that the quality of education was extremely poor since teachers were absent most of the time. Children who were supposedly in standards six and seven could barely write their names. Parents were constantly worried too about not being able to provide their children with books, pencils, and other supplies. They were aware that private schools offered a better standard of education but at Rs.100-200 (US$2.50-5.00) per month, few could afford the luxury for their children. Even if they could afford to send them to private schools, the children were frequently mocked and made to feel humiliated by teachers and classmates from more elite backgrounds about their body odour, dishevelled personal appearance, and poor social status. In recent years, researchers working in many different geographical contexts of the developing

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world have demonstrated the links between availability of water and sanitation and school attendance, performance, and completion. Drawing on extensive research in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Zambia, Senegal, Mozambique, and Madagascar, among other countries, Black and Fawcett (2008) emphasize that children who were not clean or well turned-out frequently suffered abuse and humiliation from teachers and peers and left school. “How can we bathe two children and wash their clothes with one bucket of water?” asked one mother who participated in my research in a slum awaiting basic sanitation services. Many research participants were embarrassed that they were unable to help their children learn because they were not literate themselves. Several women indicated that their playing an active role in guiding children and instilling good study habits was more important in ensuring that children were well educated, or at the very least literate, than was the children attending private schools. I describe earlier how women perceived non-formal vocational training to be much more relevant to their economic aspirations than formal education. Most women appreciated the benefits of being functionally literate – of being able to do simple things such as signing their names and reading bus schedules – but most could not muster the enthusiasm to attend literacy classes in the slums and saw them as a drain on what little leisure time they had from their economic activities and household responsibilities. Consequently, the SEWA-run literacy classes in most areas last for only a couple of months and inevitably either close down completely or continue too erratically to serve their purpose. Although eagerness to participate in adult literacy classes was generally low among informal sector women, there was much higher enthusiasm, and even willingness to pay, for literacy classes that would supplement the notoriously poor education children received in government schools. Children’s literacy classes run in Ahmedabad slums by Saath, a local NGO, were popular among both school-going children and those who could not attend school because of economic constraints or household responsibilities. This is definitely an area SEWA could pay more attention to. So much has been written about education being the key to changing women’s status that a causal link between female schooling, female autonomy, and low fertility is almost universally assumed now. The assumption that education is a “silver bullet” policy instrument that can reduce women’s fertility, and therefore population growth, as well as enhance their economic aspirations and accomplishments is prominent in theoretical discourses on gender and development, as well as in national and international development policy formulation. In the 2001 World Development Report, for example, the World Bank lists the benefits of educating women as: reducing the need for community health programs; lowering infant mortality, thus compensating for the absence of medical facilities; and increasing the use

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of contraception. I am extremely uncomfortable with this instrumental approach of privileging economic and demographic objectives over women’s self-improvement and life chances; however, my research did not provide any clear causal connection between women’s access to formal education and fertility. A general awareness of family planning practices and the advantages of having smaller families has permeated the consciousness of most people in India, regardless of gender or socio-economic position, yet the majority of research participants who had fewer than three children offered reasons unrelated to their economic autonomy or education levels for limiting the size of their families. One SEWA organizer who had a secondary-level education ascribed having just one child, a daughter, to a simple inability to get pregnant a second time. Similarly, even though Kamlaben had no difficulty acknowledging primary breadwinner status within the family, she was eager to attribute their small family size to her husband’s awareness that since more children survived to adulthood today than they did decades ago, it made better economic sense to have fewer children. Decades of concerted effort by state and national governments to publicize the two-child Hum do hamare do (we two, our two) family as ideal, combined with steadily declining infant mortality rates all over the country, has most definitely created general awareness about the advantages of lower fertility. However, there was less evidence articulated in my research by women themselves to suggest that smaller families were an outcome of their increasing educational or economic accomplishment. Other authors have also raised questions about the purported causal link between female schooling, female autonomy, and low fertility: Jeffery and Jeffery (1998), for example, suggest that in many parts of South Asia, evidence of fertility decline should not be interpreted as a result of higher female autonomy, itself a supposed consequence of girls’ schooling, but as the outcome of the logics of male-dominated family systems in which low fertility has come to be seen as economically rational. Fertility decline may also speak less of female empowerment and more of the impact of the nuclear family ideology embodied in the content of much educational material (Jeffrey 1994). Anyone who grew up in India in the 1970s and 1980s almost certainly remembers the images of the ubiquitous happy and prosperous two-child (one boy and one girl, more specifically) family from school textbooks, as well as from popular films, television serials, and advertising campaigns of consumer goods. Since the primary objective of my research was to explore women’s ability to own and control landed property, I do not aim to provide any definitive arguments about the links between education, fertility, and economic empowerment. What I do consider extremely relevant to a woman’s ability to create independent assets, itself a function of her ability to access employment opportunities and financial services, is the double-edged sword that formal education presents where income and employment are concerned.

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Although the lack of formal education keeps informal sector women in lowpaying menial jobs, there is growing evidence to support the view that education by itself may not always translate into higher incomes or better employment opportunities (Jeffery and Jeffery 1998; Swaminathan 2002). Increasing numbers in slums of high school and university graduates who were either unemployed or unhappily employed in the same occupations as their less literate parents only added to the disillusionment with formal education. These observations mesh well with the widely articulated demand among informal sector women for vocational training that they can access despite their non-literate status. The bulk of employment that women in slums are able to access is informal, even if the units generating the jobs are legal and registered, and women are aware that they will continue to be able to access only insecure, ill-paid jobs with little scope for upward mobility if they remain unskilled. Whether they had primary or secondary schooling was deemed less important for their ability to acquire assets than having access to training in skills that could enable them to earn better wages. This is especially true in the context of the rapidly industrializing climate of urban India, with its significantly higher demand for specifically skilled labour than for generally educated labour. This phenomenon has been documented and analyzed among mill employees and construction workers, for example, by a significant amount of research conducted within and beyond the Indian context (see, for example, Chen 2006; International Labour Organization 2001; Jhabvala and Kanbur 2002; SEWA Academy 2000). Inadequate Access to Health Care and Insurance Services The lack of adequate health care influences a woman’s ability to create independent assets because it affects her ability to earn and save. In the absence of any health insurance, expensive medical treatments, either for herself or for family members, drain financial reserves that may otherwise have been put toward more durable gains such as purchasing land or upgrading homes. The links between poverty and urban environmental vulnerability are well established (see, for example, Satterthwaite 2003b). The lack of basic sanitation services in slums ensures that malaria, cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, jaundice, and pneumonia frequently afflict slum dwellers, and medical treatment for these illnesses is a regular drain on the meagre resources of slum households. The dramatic decline in such illnesses in upgraded slums documented by MHT in its evaluations of the Slum Networking Project indicates that along with improving the physical environments slum populations inhabit, upgradation initiatives ultimately reduce slum residents’ expenses on health-related treatments (MHT 2002b). Because the financial resources available to women are so limited, and because cultural stereotypes glorify self-sacrificing behaviour among women, women frequently consider their own health problems insignificant or

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unworthy of attention. None of her family members suffered from any health conditions, but Kamlaben was quick to mention that if problems did emerge, she would never compromise on her husband’s or her children’s health. Yet, she tolerated her chronic backache because she felt it was a luxury to seek treatment for it in the face of what she perceived as other, more pressing non-health-related family needs. I heard of similar experiences from other informal sector women, who suffered from a range of chronic health problems, including migraine headaches; arthritis; rheumatism; eye problems; and respiratory, reproductive, and urinary tract infections that went untreated until they required emergency attention. In most cases, living and working in unsanitary environments either caused or exacerbated such conditions. Kamlaben attributed her back problems to crouching for hours on end while cooking on open fires or wrapping candy, and the several miscarriages she had to malnourishment and the absence of basic sanitation services at home. Several other authors have documented how gender-specific work exposes men and women to different environmental risks and thus to different causes of morbidity and mortality (Glassman 2001; Momsen 2004; Ransome 2001). Employers rarely provide informal sector workers with health benefits or insurance. Other than subsidized but frequently subpar facilities and services at public hospitals, the state does not offer any health-related safety nets either. Private for-profit insurers, only recently allowed in India under the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority Act of 1999, mostly target better-off sections of society with expensive packages. Provided there is available information and education about the concept, there appears to be the need and willingness to pay, even among the poor, for insurance that will cover the costs of uncertain, frequently expensive medical treatments that might otherwise result in indebtedness. According to the World Bank Health Report of 2000, out-of-pocket medical expenses account for more than four-fifths of total health care spending in India. Members of lower socio-economic groups generally spend a higher proportion of their annual income on health than do more advantaged groups (Berman 1995). One admission to a hospital can consume a sizable share of a poor household’s resources and lead to financial crisis. Such findings may explain why nonprofit health insurance schemes run by NGOs have been able to attract the economically disadvantaged. Some of these schemes date back more than fifty years, and the total coverage under the schemes in 1990 was conservatively estimated at 30 million people (Dave 1991). The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority has indicated that insurance penetration and density in India has a long way to go to catch up with the rest of Asia. The penetration ratio for insurance in India was estimated at 4.80 in 2006, whereas it was 6.60 for the rest of Asia and 8.30 for Europe.2 Insurance in India is a function of education and affluence, and

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coverage is especially low among low-income populations. In India, only 19 percent of urban low-income workers and 12 percent of their rural counterparts have life insurance coverage (IIMS Dataworks 2007). SEWA has run an integrated social security scheme called Vimo-SEWA since 1992 that includes life, medical, and asset insurance. For a very low annual premium of around Rs.32 (US$0.80) for medical insurance, the scheme has covered a mean of 77 percent of the direct costs of hospital admission among claimants over the past nine years (Chatterjee 2003). Other than a small subsidy from the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GTZ) to help cover administrative costs, the insurance scheme is almost entirely self-sustaining. Coverage under the scheme, previously restricted to adult women working in the informal sector but recently extended to include husbands and minor children, is growing exponentially, having risen from 23,000 members in 1999-2000 to over 100,000 by 2003 (ibid.). The schemes were not popular in the initial years. Renewal rates were as low as 15 percent in 2002 but increased to 42 percent in 2005 (Srinivasan 2009). By 2006, the insurance cover extended to 140,000 SEWA members, though renewal rates remained higher in rural areas than in urban areas (ibid.). Despite these small successes, there are still many hurdles to overcome. Ranson (2001) reports that rates of claim submission among SEWA members remain low compared with rates of admission to hospital, partly because making insurance claims take up time and resources for members. VimoSEWA has responded to these problems by decentralizing the system for processing insurance claims to village and district levels. Ensuring that members have access to in-patient care that is of acceptable quality is another formidable task, since two-thirds of all SEWA-insured admissions are at small, private for-profit facilities spread over a wide geographical area within Gujarat. This has been addressed to some extent by providing members with education about quality of care and by informal communications with the most commonly used facilities. Gujarat has endured successive natural and human-made disasters in recent years in the form of floods, earthquakes, and riots. Protecting assets that informal sector workers are able to generate becomes especially important in the face of repeated calamities. Perhaps because slum households are more vulnerable to such disasters, insurance coverage of homes and work tools has grown dramatically among SEWA’s urban membership in the last few years (Chatterjee 2003). Alongside the damage done to homes during the riots, sewing machines were burnt and stocks of vegetables, incense, and bidis were either burnt or stolen. Families with insurance coverage were compensated for complete and partial damage of homes, work tools, and raw materials, and this had a demonstration effect on other families, which sought to protect themselves against future calamities by purchasing insurance policies. Vimo-SEWA is currently attempting to provide crop and cattle

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insurance to rural members, as such assets are crucial for the survival of many rural households. Despite the congestion and overcrowding in slums, I was surprised to discover that many households owned cattle and other livestock. An entire colony of small dairy farmers, for example, operated out of one of the communities in which I conducted research. Large numbers of livestock owned by slum households were poisoned and killed during the riots. To make insurance as comprehensive as possible of the resources the urban poor rely on for their livelihoods, it is important that Vimo-SEWA attempt to factor in such assets in their policies. Schemes such as Vimo-SEWA have played a very important role in addressing the weaknesses in insurance financing and provision, yet it is important to remember that they reach only a miniscule proportion of the populations that could benefit tremendously from such protection. This is as true for asset insurance as it is for life and health insurance. Scaling up its coverage to reach populations that have no knowledge of the concept and modus operandi of life, health, and asset insurance is the biggest challenge facing Vimo-SEWA today. Chatterjee (2003) emphasizes that steady expansion and retention are Vimo-SEWA’s biggest priorities. I document some of the inherent challenges with introducing informal sector workers to insurance services in Chapter 6. My research reveals that the longer SEWA fieldworkers work in a community, the more likely its residents are to establish bonds of trust and confidence in the organization and consequently to buy into its products and services. Not surprisingly, my research identified that purchase of comprehensive insurance policies was much more frequent in slums that have been upgraded through the Slum Networking Project than in those awaiting upgradation. In this matter, it is important to emphasize that regular human-resource intensive face-to-face interactions between SEWA fieldworkers and economically disadvantaged communities are not just desirable but crucial in helping informal sector workers understand the benefits of life, health, and asset insurance. Other training tools – videos, street plays, dramatization, and so on – may also pique slums residents’ interest in insurance services. Since the slum networking initiative seeks to physically upgrade slums and to introduce slum residents to a range of financial tools, including insurance services, it can increasingly serve as a vehicle for disaster and risk mitigation. Social Respectability and Upward Mobility My research in general, and the EDP in particular, not only provided valuable insight into the nature and dynamic processes of social exclusion, social respectability, and upward mobility, but also how they might serve as lenses through which to analyze previously somewhat neglected aspects of poverty and vulnerability. In its more classical usage, social exclusion was described in the work of Max Weber, for example, as the ways in which groups can,

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through a process of social closure, secure and maintain privilege at the expense of those different from their own members (Berting and VillainGandossi 2001). There is also a spatial dimension inherent in this definition of social exclusion that resonates well with the lives of slum dwellers who are stigmatized en bloc because of where they live, what they do to survive, and how they are perceived and “othered” by more affluent groups. Several authors have described how stigmatization of this nature burdens slum residents as a group with deeply internalized feelings of low self-esteem and low entitlement (De Wit 1997; Joshi 2002). What has been documented or analyzed less frequently in the literature on social exclusion is exclusion and inclusion within such groups of people, and the interaction of distributional and relational problems of human relations among such groups. Kamlaben’s inability to secure a tin roof and brick walls for her home and the attendant feelings of inadequacy this generated in her speak to a form of social exclusion that exists within groups already labelled as poor or disadvantaged. Her experiences convey the idea that some people experience material poverty and social exclusion simultaneously, whereas others can be in poverty without being socially excluded or can be socially excluded without being poor (Lister 2004). Her perceptions of exclusion and social shame are exacerbated by the awareness among other slum residents of her husband’s chronic underemployment. Kamlaben has been socialized to lie to outsiders about her husband’s economic non-performance in the household, but she is open to taunts and jibes from within the community about how she “keeps her man” or how her husband “wears the bangles in the family.” Momsen (2004) affirms that non-economic exclusionary measures are sometimes political and legal but most often are based on familial ideology and sanctioned by informal controls, for instance, gossip and ridicule. Kamlaben’s feelings of inferiority and isolation within the community may explain her attempts to earn a modicum of social respectability through the purchase of “prestige” items such as cable television and entertainment systems while not upgrading her home in even the most minimal way. Such choices may not seem illogical to her because social identities are increasingly being defined by conspicuous consumption and expenditure, and low-income households like hers experience social exclusion in simple and painful ways. A journal entry I made while conducting focus groups and interviews in a slum in East Ahmedabad documents how people in other communities made similar counterintuitive choices: The illegal electricity supplies were, of course, notoriously unreliable, frequently cutting off for hours in the middle of the day in the summer and also for entire nights. What I found surprising was the large number of families that shelled out Rs.150 (US$3.75) per month for access to cable

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television. Given the residents’ inability to afford basic amenities and basic needs items for themselves and their children, this seems ironic but is perhaps not entirely illogical, since having access to entertainment is a type of status symbol. My surmise about this is corroborated by the number of women who were eager to let me know that they were “forced” to meet their children’s demands for entertainment by getting cable television at home. Quite a few of the same people also had VCRs and VCD players. There appears to be no real correlation between income and possession of such items: the single mother, who worked as a daily labourer and could not “afford” a tin roof, had both cable TV and a VCD player in her house; the young couple that did not have the resources to send their son to school hosted a large birthday party for him every year, complete with cake, candy, and professional photographer. These cases seem to contradict the assumption that people attempt to take care of their basic needs before securing non-essential items. I have observed again and again that in many cases people are willing to cut back on their most basic necessities in order to own consumer goods that represent prosperity, perhaps to emulate more affluent middle-class people.

Rahnema (1993) attempts to address such contradictions when he writes that although the notion of “lack” or “deficiency” remains a common denominator of most perceptions of poverty, it captures only the basic relativity of the concept. He goes on: Besides, when poor is defined as lacking a number of things necessary to life, the question could be asked: what is necessary and for whom? And who is qualified to define all that? In smaller communities, where people are less strangers to one another and things are easier to compare, such questions are already difficult to answer. In a world of mass media, the old familiar horizons and communally defined bases of comparison are all destroyed. Everyone may think of themselves as poor when it is the TV set in the mud hut which defines the necessities of life, often in terms of the wildest and fanciest consumers appearing on the screen. (159)

Such contradictions reinforce the point that the dichotomy between survival and what is considered upward mobility may be more nebulous than is generally understood. What comprises a survival strategy in one household may be perceived as an attempt at upward mobility in another, and vice versa. They remind us too that there are considerable differences in economic position and power between individuals and neighbouring households even within low-income settlements such as slums. The differences arise not just from more tangible assets – for example, incomes earned and possessions owned – but also from less tangible assets – for example, knowledge, skills,

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and contacts. Families and individuals who feel isolated or excluded within these communities may be more likely to feel the pressure to demonstrate upward mobility to other, more privileged households. Karim (2008) writes eloquently about how rural women’s perceptions of honour and shame have been instrumentally appropriated by the expansion of globalization and liberalization in Bangladesh. A very similar economy of honour and shame influence people’s decisions in poor urban communities. Other markers of social disadvantage, such as India’s age-old kinship, caste, and power structures and their institutionalized inequalities, also influence people’s interest in securing social respectability.3 When I showed some interest in accepting a dinner invitation from a neighbour from a highercaste background than my host family, Kamlaben was quick to point out that I would not be able to get any news about the American invasion of Iraq if I spent the evening at her neighbour’s house, since she did not own a television. Although the untrammelled economic growth encouraged by the liberalization agenda in India ignores and even trivializes social and cultural costs, it is important to acknowledge that it has succeeded in providing more opportunities for upward class mobility than ever before. In part because of the political struggles of low-caste groups such as the Dalits and in part because of other factors such as the exposure to electronic media, global consumerism, and the spread of the market economy, caste by itself may be beginning to lose some of its social legitimacy, at least in the urban context. N. Banerjee (2002) writes that the increasing exposure to media and communications for all sections of the population has brought in a demonstration effect, and across the board there is an increase in people’s aspirations regarding their desired lifestyles and the goods and services they would like to enjoy. My experience in working with slum communities seems to suggest that people from lower castes are less likely today to try to emulate upper castes – a process that Srinivas (1962) describes as “Sanskritization” because it manifests itself in a desire to imitate Sanskritized Brahmin behaviours – and more likely to try to emulate “rich” or upper-class people and their lifestyles even if it means foregoing the more basic necessities of food and adequate shelter. Other authors have made note of such changes. Kapadia (2002b), for example, suggests that the caste system in India may gradually be metamorphosing into a class system. Attempts to move up the class ladder through conspicuous consumption undercuts women’s ability to purchase independent assets such as land and houses because it frequently motivates them to spend on less durable but more easily obtainable consumer goods. SEWA Bank’s recently launched financial counselling program attempts to address such conflicts by helping women understand the concept of financial planning and reinforcing the importance of acquiring assets that appreciate in value over time. As in skills

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training and insurance services, scaling up the programs to reach the millions of women who could benefit from such counselling stands out as a challenge. Like vocational training, it is important to support women’s participation in the training by compensating them financially for taking time out of other economic and household responsibilities. Lower-caste women in India typically enjoy greater visibility and mobility in the public sphere than do their upper-caste counterparts, who may be more circumscribed by social norms of seclusion. It has been observed in the rural context that the domination of women by men may intensify when lower-caste men attempt to scramble up the class ladder because they are eager and anxious to demonstrate to other men that “their” womenfolk are behaving in a high-status manner. Kapadia (2002b) documents how rural women are frequently withdrawn from agricultural work into semi-seclusion when their husbands perceived themselves to be financially secure enough to not “need” their wives’ economic contribution to the household. Although the women who participated in my research could scarcely imagine scenarios where their households could function without their financial contributions, it is possible that such situations may in the future present themselves in the urban context. Given the type of hard physical labour most informal sector women are forced to undertake, it is understandable that many expressed a desire to not work at all and described being supported fully by their husbands or sons as a state of bliss they could never hope to achieve. If women continue to trail behind men in being able to access training, skills, and higher incomes, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that women may no longer “need” to work, but they may find their independence and agency circumscribed in unexpected and unpredictable ways. I note in a previous section that although almost nine hundred families call Ramesh Dutt Colony home, only four hundred households were selected for upgradation through the Slum Networking Project, since the status of the land on which the other five hundred are located was deemed too insecure and controversial for provision of basic infrastructure. I observed on several occasions that providing valuable amenities such as toilets and water supply to one group of people while denying them to a second group that lived nearby for reasons that were usually beyond their control created a culture within slums of haves and have-nots that polarized people and occasionally eroded pre-existing systems of support and solidarity. People living on the boundaries of slums and on pavements adjoining slums areas were frequently not selected for upgradation services. Although they struggled as much as other, more centrally located families in non-upgraded slums to procure water, for example, there were clearer hierarchies of entitlement to such resources in upgraded slums because people who received the services had paid for them and people who did not were perceived to be free riders.

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Karim (2004) describes how well-intentioned but unreflective NGOs in rural Bangladesh can enmesh people in multiple levels of dependency that weaken existing forms of social solidarity and community building. My research reveals similar cause for concern in the urban context. In one upgraded slum, many families had taken to physically locking their water taps and toilets to prevent other families that did not receive the services from “stealing” their water or using their toilets. A vegetable vendor whose house did not qualify for upgradation because of its location mentioned that whereas in the past she had been able to collect the water she needed from the public taps located in the centre of the slum, she had since been reduced to begging for water from neighbouring housing societies, as the public taps no longer worked following the delivery of household-level infrastructure. She described with sorrow that neighbours who had previously stood in line with her at the public taps chatting about their husbands and children were less than polite in their unwillingness to let her fill her bucket in their homes on a daily basis. Similar findings are reported by Asthana (1994, 68) in the context of a slum improvement scheme in Visakhapatnam, where residents mention losing their “togetherness” and becoming a “community of strange faces” a few years after the construction of pukka homes in the community. In their eagerness to extend the benefits of the Parivartan project to as many slums in Ahmedabad as possible, neither SEWA nor the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has paid much attention to such critical issues. Yet, these issues need to be addressed to ensure that well-intentioned interventions for certain groups of people do not create or exacerbate feelings of vulnerability and powerlessness for others. There are good reasons, including extreme pressure on water taps, toilets, and other public utilities and appallingly poor maintenance, to support the delivery of basic water and sanitation services at the household level in low-income settlements such as slums. However, because current slum upgradation initiatives seem to exclude large numbers of families that live in extremely close quarters to those households selected for upgradation, it is important, at the very least, that the maintenance of public services be continued even after the delivery of household-level infrastructure. The privatization and pricing of basic services such as water and electricity are hotly debated topics in India. The AMC still retains control over water distribution and pricing, but electricity has recently been commercialized or privatized in parts of Gujarat state, including Ahmedabad. In the future, this may present other social, political, and economic challenges for slum populations (Baruah 2008b). Conclusion This chapter draws on the findings of an exposure and dialogue program conducted in a slum without basic sanitation services, as well as on numerous formal and informal interactions with informal sector women in the

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slums of Ahmedabad, to identify factors most capable of influencing a slum household’s ability to plan secure futures, including the purchase of assets such as land and houses. Inadequate income resulting from insecure employment was identified as the factor most capable of rendering a slum household economically and socially vulnerable. SEWA’s efforts to unionize workers in different trades and to implement occupation-specific minimum wage legislation in some sectors were noteworthy accomplishments in raising incomes and protecting livelihoods, yet their benefits rarely accrued to large numbers of urban low-income women engaged in small marginalized and frequently subcontracted economic activities, for instance, candy wrapping and embroidery. The preference for more autonomous and entrepreneurial homebased economic activities articulated by many slum-dwelling women serves to highlight the need for credit and marketing opportunities and to reinforce the significance of adequate housing in the lives of self-employed women. Concerns about physical security resulting from lack of basic amenities such as toilets, enclosed bathing spaces, and street lights provide further evidence of the role basic housing and community infrastructure can play in influencing women’s perceptions of their lives. Lack of formal education was mentioned as one of the reasons women were frequently unable to access better-paid employment, though research participants expressed greater enthusiasm for vocational training in higher-income skills such as tailoring, television repair, and carpentry that they could aspire to despite their nonliterate status. These findings may explain the half-hearted enthusiasm for, and poor attendance in, the literacy classes organized by SEWA in slum communities. Although it makes a strong case for MHT’s continued efforts to provide women with training in carpentry, masonry, and house construction, it also highlights the importance of demanding affirmative action employment legislation from the state so that women do not find themselves unable to translate their training into lucrative employment because of gender discrimination. Death of a breadwinner, frequent illness, calamities (earthquakes, floods, riots), and other crises also dramatically influence the economic vulnerability of slum households. Vimo-SEWA’s efforts to persuade urban and rural low-income populations to purchase life, health, and asset insurance may be steps in the right direction, but challenges in expansion and retention need to be addressed for insurance services to make a difference in the lives of millions of informal sector households. With social identities becoming increasingly defined by conspicuous expenditure and consumption, low-income households feel more and more burdened to demonstrate upward mobility by purchasing consumer goods and services such as entertainment systems and cable television. This significantly erodes their ability to make longer-term investments in landed assets. Financial counselling provided by SEWA Bank may help slum households make better financial plans for their futures, but “prestige” spending

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is likely to continue, at least to some extent, in the face of unprecedented access to electronic media and the uninhibited economic growth encouraged by liberalizing economies. At a broader level, this chapter highlights the importance of the concept of intersectionality in engaging with the lives of urban informal sector women. Interest in intersectionality arose out of a critique of gender-based and race-based research for failing to account for lived experience at neglected points of the intersection – ones that tended to reflect multiple subordinate locations as opposed to dominant or mixed locations (McCall 2005). In addition to providing a nuanced understanding of the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations, an intersectional approach to the challenges faced by different groups of urban informal sector women may enable us to understand the multiplier effects of the vulnerabilities they experience in their day-to-day lives. Kamlaben’s story – and those of others who fall between the cracks even of well-intentioned interventions – highlight that ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups. What is it like for a woman to be a primary breadwinner in a community where only men are used to playing that role? What are the challenges of being the only household without a water connection within a slum community? Looking at the ways in which different forms of discrimination interact and impact people and communities in various contexts would in turn enable us to create mechanisms that protect different groups of women and their unique vulnerabilities. My research corroborates the work of Susanna George (2001) and others, who emphasize that intersectionality has not gained much support from governmental organizations or NGOs largely because they have not had much exposure to it. Intersectionality remains an abstract concept for them. There may also be resistance to it because drawing easy conclusions about victims and oppressors would no longer be possible when an intersectional analysis is applied, since things will not simply fall into neat formal-informal, menwomen categories. By pioneering and disseminating research methodologies such as EDP that enable researchers, activists, and policy makers to immerse themselves in the lives of self-employed women, SEWA and its sister organizations have provided a tremendous service to other organizations working with women. Since different methodologies produce different kinds of substantive knowledge (Baruah 2009), a much wider range of methodologies may be needed to fully engage with the lived realities of diverse urban informal sector women and to reveal the complexity of lived experience within such groups. SEWA’s resistance to methodological complacency and its corresponding willingness to experiment and innovate with new methodologies and tools to better understand the lives of its members is a tremendous strength. Broad class, caste, and gender structures of inequality are important

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and must not be underestimated; however, they do not determine the complex terrain of everyday life for individual members of a social or occupational group, no matter how detailed the level of disaggregation. Attempting to deconstruct the normative assumptions about such groups in a nuanced manner may contribute to the possibility of positive social change.

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5 Gendered Realities: Property Ownership and Tenancy Relationships

I employed gender intersectionality in the previous chapter to provide complex insights into the lives of urban women, though gender by itself has emerged as a critical analytical construct in exploring land ownership and tenancy relationships in South Asia. This is primarily because women own a negligible proportion – less than 1 percent – of the region’s landed property and are found instead in very large numbers in the lowest ranks of the residential hierarchy represented by vulnerable living arrangements, including informal renting, subletting, sharing, and lodging with a family. The increasing awareness that women’s inferior property and tenancy status is an outcome of their lower social and economic position has translated into policy recommendations that women must acquire greater representation in decision-making structures, from local to national, and that women must be recognized and “empowered” at the community level in order for their entitlements to landed property to be addressed. However, legal and policy reforms do little or nothing to challenge the underlying social norms and customs that inhibit women’s access to and control over property. Education and consciousness-raising initiatives that raise awareness among women as well as men about women’s equal entitlements to landed property are just as crucial as policy reforms and state actions that protect women’s interests and facilitate their agency. Although I was aware of some of the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of women’s inferior position in land relations and in society at large in South Asia, this research grew out of a desire to gain a more nuanced understanding of issues relating to Indian women’s access to and authority over urban land and landed property. I conducted extensive fieldwork in thirteen slums in the city of Ahmedabad in order to explore the nature, magnitude, and complexity of challenges and opportunities facing lowincome slum-dwelling women in securing ownership of land and landed property, represented primarily by houses. In this chapter, I explore the nature of landed property rights and tenure in these slums from a gender

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Gendered Realities 105

perspective. I begin with a brief description of some of the cultural, political, and psychological stumbling blocks Indian women encounter in seeking ownership of landed property, especially in the context of a rapidly globalizing market economy. I follow this by presenting the range of formal and informal tenure arrangements that were in place in the slums represented in my case study and their implications for women. I proceed to raise key issues that need consideration in developing a gendered vision of urban land rights, tenure, and reform by documenting the central findings of my field research. These include more widely established issues, such as tenuous inheritance rights of daughters and challenges in securing property titles for women, as well as less documented emerging issues, such as unique impediments faced by renters in slums, largely unsubstantiated fears about gentrification and market evictions associated with tenure security, and the legal and practical challenges of translating the “right of residence” into the “right of ownership.” In each case, I attempt to draw out policy recommendations for redressing discrepancies in women’s ownership of urban land and landed property. My research was conducted in slums that had been settled for several decades. The residents of only one slum had access to formal land titles through a Government of Gujarat land distribution program; others considered quasi-legal and informal factors – the length of occupation, the size of a settlement, political patronage, the level and cohesion of community organization, support from civil society organizations, or possession of documents such as ration cards and election cards – to be proxies for tenure security or protection from eviction. None of these is legally acceptable proof of ownership, yet they provide populations residing in settled slums with a sense of security and entitlement to which people inhabiting more precarious environments – the areas along riverbanks, railway tracks, and pavements, for example – could only aspire. Occupants of the latter types of irregular and illegal settlements have absolutely no legal rights over land or its development and are far less economically secure than the residents of settled slums. Although settlements in such environmentally hazardous locations are not always occupied exclusively by the urban poor, since the social structure of squatter settlements is not homogeneous within a single city or even within one settlement, in general terms, a map of the poorest populations in the city can be superimposed on them with a fair degree of accuracy. Illegal occupation and the associated environmental hazards of location exclude residents in such areas from getting building permits or access to regular city services. Because the Parivartan project aims to deliver infrastructure and services to settled slums that are not located in hazardous environments, and since my research was conducted within its parameters, this study does not address the access and ownership issues faced by transient populations residing in locations like the ones described above.

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106 Gendered Realities

When studying politically charged issues such as land tenure and land reform in slums, it is important to be cognizant of the diversity of people involved, despite outward appearances of homogeneity, not just in matters of ethnic background, occupations, place of origin, and historical experience but also in types of access and control over resources different groups may enjoy. I describe in Chapter 3 how internally complex the groups of people represented in my study are in terms of class and caste structures. It is equally important to be cognizant that “women in slums” or, for that matter, “lowincome self-employed women in slums” cannot be discussed en bloc and do not represent homogeneous entities. As the previous chapter demonstrates, class, age, marital status, kinship role, and status – as wife, daughter, sister, mother – all intervene to create differences in power, authority, and access to resources. In approaching issues of urban land tenure from a gender perspective, I hope to uncover nuanced experiences among different categories of women and to make policy recommendations that do not reinforce existing inequalities but instead seek to improve rights of access, control, and authority for marginalized groups. In general, women in South Asia are insecure in their rights of access to, as well as control over, land and property, since their rights are usually mediated through men – be it a husband, son, brother, slum lord, chief, or headman. In India, separate personal laws apply to different religious groups. In most cases, women enjoy fairly extensive legal rights to inherit and own land. This is especially true for Hindu women after the introduction of the gender-progressive Hindu Succession Act of 1956, which provides for the daughters, widow, and mother of a Hindu man dying intestate to inherit property equally with sons. In practice, however, significant and persistent gaps exist between women’s legal rights and their actual ownership of landed property, and between the limited ownership rights women do enjoy and their effective control over landed assets. Women’s legal rights in land conflict with deeply embedded social norms and customs and are rarely recognized to be socially legitimate. There are strong pressures on rural and urban women alike to forfeit their legal rights in favour of their brothers, reinforced by social stigmas, seclusion practices, and other sanctions. The lack of alternatives compels women to be dependent on brothers for socio-economic support in the event of widowhood or divorce. Consequently, women frequently tend to internalize social norms to the extent that they forfeit their legal entitlements to property even without overt pressure from their families. Women themselves are sometimes not aware of the implications of vesting sole authority in the male head of the household, since early socialization may motivate them to “walk behind” their husbands and to be “seen but not heard.” Not only are women inhibited from claiming their entitlements

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to property by such traditions but in some communities even talking about family property is considered disrespectful of their husbands, a sentiment that frequently obstructs division of property and assets in a divorce. Therefore, in looking at strategies for achieving the goals of gender equity, empowerment, and a redressing of the imbalance in property ownership, it is important to bear in mind that the most vital issues are not just legal and cultural but also political and psychological. Such complexities serve to reinforce the position that land tenure in South Asia is best understood as a multi-faceted social and political process rather than as a system of laws and rules, since it more closely resembles a continuum with many intermediate positions than a dichotomy of what is legal or illegal, formal or informal. The criteria that determine the kinds of people and households that should qualify socially and politically for land ownership are influenced dramatically by the values of the community, by prevailing power relations, and often by unspoken assumptions and ingrained attitudes of custom and tradition about how people should act and what they are “allowed” to expect. Although changes in statutory law may enable women to inherit parental property at par with brothers, custom will continue to decree that a “good” woman should relinquish such claims to land. Because a large part of the content of tenure systems is based on such unspoken social assumptions rather than in law or in official rules, it is frequently not enough to address gender disadvantage in access to land through legal processes. Rapid economic change and privatization measures have begun to impact family cohesiveness and have frequently led to disputes over access to and use of land and house, even in previously agricultural or subsistence-based communities (Tinker and Summerfield 1999). Globalization, with its predominant focus on urban populations and mass production, places a new emphasis on individual self-sufficiency, eroding community and kinship support and producing a new set of challenges for women. The transition to a market economy, with its valuation of productive but not reproductive labour, has affected women of all socio-economic strata but has especially disadvantaged the poor. With women participating in increasingly large numbers in both formal and informal sector employment, it has become more acceptable for men to withdraw completely or to reduce their commitment to household support. Older patriarchal land and property systems were often very unjust in their allocation of resources, but they did have the value of entitling women to support from their husbands, sons, brothers, and other male relatives. Many women now bear a disproportionate share of the burden for supporting their families through their own efforts, without the corresponding increase in social authority and control of land and other resources shifting to them. Consequently, instead of finding themselves

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with more and better opportunities, many women are faced with shrinking options and less reliable support. To survive in this rapidly changing socioeconomic milieu, urban women need not just the security of landed property to provide income and shelter for themselves and their dependants but also the education, intra-household power, and social standing to control the use of these resources. In the next few pages, I outline the formal and informal strategies and interventions slum populations rely on to secure control over their landed assets, as well as the ways in which these mechanisms may facilitate or impede the ability of women to secure access to and control over landed property. Urban Tenure Security – Strategies and Interventions As in other states in India, it appears that land tenure issues wended their way into development policy and practice in Gujarat through the language of “means,” in which secure tenure is perceived as instrumental to achieving other objectives, such as poverty alleviation, women’s empowerment, credit worthiness for housing loans, and compensation for relocation of squatters and pavement dwellers, as well as being an incentive for poor families to invest in shelter improvement. Civil society organizations, activist groups, and political manifestos have also employed the language of “rights” to assert every citizen’s entitlement to a place to live. The Ahmedabad Study Action Group and the Mumbai-based Indian People’s Tribunal on Environment and Human Rights, for example, use rights-based campaigns to convince municipalities to rethink mass evictions and slum relocations (Indian People’s Tribunal 1999; K. Shah 2000). De Soto (2000) estimates the total value of real estate held but not legally owned by the poor of developing countries at US$9.3 trillion, more than all the foreign direct investment in these countries in the last decade, and fortysix times all World Bank loans of the past three decades. Such statistics make a compelling argument in favour of the extension of full legal tenure as a means to alleviate poverty and to enhance the creditworthiness of the poor. On the other hand, legality by itself may not be particularly useful for slumdwelling populations. For example, despite the significant land titling program in Peru, which issued 4 million deeds in four years, banks use mortgages only for loans higher than US$5,000 because of the high cost of the paperwork and challenges of carrying out foreclosure. Poor clients are also understandably reluctant to use land titles as collateral for loans that average less than US$1,000. Studies have even found that a lack of finance was twice as significant for house improvement as security of tenure and as the most important constraint identified by poor households wishing to improve their housing (Biswas 2003). Such findings may lead us to believe that secure de facto tenure, with or without land titles, is what matters most to slum

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dwellers, since it is the protection from eviction that gives the land its major source of value. Many of the outcomes of legality are desirable but can be achieved in different ways. The differences between legality and legitimacy ensure that even though a number of tenure arrangements stop well short of formal titling, they still provide valuable benefits to slum-dwelling populations at a much lower cost. Moves to more formal tenure systems are undoubtedly advisable, but they should be made at a rate consistent with social and cultural norms as well as institutional capacity. As Payne (2002, 305) emphasizes, “Legality is important but legitimacy is all.” Legitimacy is especially important because there is increasing recognition that a secure urban address provides a basis for asset formation for lowincome households (Patel 1999). A variety of tools, strategies, and techniques for securing land tenure and protection from eviction has come into existence in various cities in India, parallel to domestic and international policy responses. They are devised and applied in different situations depending largely on the nature and scale of informality or irregularity of the settlement and the existing regulatory framework. The following strategies and interventions featured prominently in slums in the city of Ahmedabad. Legal Tenure The extension of land tenure rights over government land, locally known as patta, to squatters is undertaken on rare occasions as a welfare measure by state governments. Only one slum in my study had received formal individual land titles from the Government of Gujarat. Residents of Keshav Nagar were squatting illegally on pavements in East Ahmedabad in the early 1990s when they were offered land at a highly subsidized rate through a government land redistribution program. Although current development approaches endorsed by state and central governments give preference to in situ regularization over relocation, none of the other slums in the study had been granted tenure rights either in situ or in alternative locations. Numerous states, including Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra, had opted for tenure regularization as a statewide policy across urban areas, whereas other states, including West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, had evolved city-specific or program-specific approaches (B. Banerjee 2002). Gujarat is in the process of adopting the Gujarat State Urban Slum Policy (GSUSP), now in the final draft stage. SEWA and MHT had been invited to serve on the steering committee for its formulation, along with other stakeholders such as slum dwellers, community-based organizations and other NGOs, civil servants, and elected representatives. All representatives on the steering committee had made strong recommendations supporting the granting of in situ tenure rights to settled slums and forceful arguments about the legal superiority of full tenure over other options. Other significant land- and gender-related policy recommendations

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in the draft include extension of eligibility for upgradation to all slums other than those situated on public streets, riverbanks, disaster-prone or hazardous areas, environmentally sensitive areas, and on plots critically required by municipalities for providing essential services; regularization of sales transactions made without a valid sale deed, for example, those made on plain paper or on stamp paper of low monetary denomination; transfer of formal sale titles and deeds to slum dwellers at 33 percent of the market value of the land; implementation of joint land titles in the names of women and men; provisions for more affordable group tenure, collective tenure, and cooperative tenure for slum residents; and 33 percent representation from women on cooperative societies and residents’ associations. These recommendations are timely and relevant for women. Before the formulation of the GSUSP, rural as well as urban land reform policies in Gujarat were based on the principles of redistributive justice and efficiency. These reforms supported practices such as land to the tiller, fixation of ceilings, and prevention of fragmentation, but gender inequalities were never taken into account.1 The recommendations the GSUSP suggests are definitely steps in the right direction because they provide a strong legal basis to rectify women’s inability to own and control landed property. However, such legal and policy reforms do little or nothing to challenge the underlying social norms and customs that inhibit women’s access to land. Conscientization to improve awareness among women and men about women’s needs and entitlements for landed resources is just as crucial as policy reform. Other authors have argued that legislation cannot be the sole focus for social change, as the advantage of favourable laws and policies can be appreciated only in the context of other means of socio-economic empowerment (Parasher 1992; Rosen 1978). Writing about the property rights of low- and middleincome women in New Delhi, S. Basu (1999) further emphasizes that the mere encoding of laws cannot effect changes in cultural practice substantially unless there is a concerted state effort to also achieve widespread legal literacy to explain the benefits of greater equity and to address the fears of undoing customary privileges. Guarantee of Non-Eviction A verbal guarantee of non-eviction issued by the municipal corporation for a period of ten years comprised the most common form of tenure security granted to settled slums. Once the ownership status of the land was clarified and it was established that it was not earmarked for other projects or in an environmentally sensitive location, the area was deemed suitable for upgradation and continued occupation without displacement for a period of ten years. All the slums in the study had either received guarantees of noneviction or were in the process of receiving them at the time of the research. Notification of an area as a “slum” under the Slum Act also provides a certain

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degree of protection from eviction in Gujarat. It entitles slums to basic subsidized services under the Environmental Improvement of Urban Slums Scheme of 1972 and to resettlement if displacement is unavoidable. Since any party can file public interest litigation under Indian law, court rulings and stay orders prohibiting displacement without alternative accommodation often have similar effects as guarantees of non-eviction or continued occupation, since they are difficult to implement in land-scarce urban areas. Two of the slums in the study that were located on municipal land and had secured ten-year guarantees of non-eviction had in the past received notices of eviction. Residents were surprisingly nonchalant about the notices, and their perceptions of security of tenure seemed unaffected by them. They mentioned the ability of political leaders to secure multiple stay orders on eviction notices, and the eventual willingness of the municipal corporation to include the slums in the upgradation project as evidence of their security of tenure. I asked several officers in the Town Development Department of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) about the motivation behind issuing guarantees of non-eviction for only ten years. They explained that it largely had to do with “trying to keep all parties happy.” The AMC relied on soft loans from the World Bank and USAID, among other organizations, to undertake upgradation activities. Most funders were unwilling to extend loans for provision of water and sanitation services without demonstration of some form of de facto or de jure tenure security. Since a majority of slums in Ahmedabad were on privately owned land, and since most private owners were loathe to completely give up their claim to the land without adequate financial compensation, the AMC saw it as strategic and cost-effective to negotiate limited-term guarantees for non-eviction as a proxy for tenure security while pro-poor urban land policy instruments, such as the state urban slum policy, were still being formulated. The same logic applied to land owned by state and central governments, though slum upgradation was justified in public health terms much more frequently in these cases. At the persuasion of the NGOs involved in the Slum Networking Project, AMC has agreed to issue documents resulting from the verbal guarantee of non-eviction granted to slum dwellers, for example, water and land tax bills, in the names of women heads of household, even when a man is present. Because it is unprecedented for slum-dwelling women to have any form of official recognition or documentation in their names, most women perceive them as empowering and as symbolic representations of their right to residence in their homes and their communities. Since women perform a disproportionate share of family and household maintenance activities, they benefit tremendously from the services and infrastructure received as a result of upgradation of their home environments, even without legal tenure. However, because a guarantee of non-eviction stops well short of formal

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titling of the land, it is best viewed as a point on the continuum to full legal tenure instead of a long-term solution. In addition to legal land rights and guarantees of non-eviction, there are other factors contributing to perceptions of security or insecurity of land tenure among slum residents. Availability of Documents Related to Land and Housing The informal nature of transactions of sale, transfer, rent, and subletting of property is described in Chapter 3. Legal documents attested by a public notary are rarely available, and most transactions take place through promissory notes or on 10 to 20 rupees stamp paper in the presence of four witnesses in the slum. Because legal notarized documents were considered expensive and inaccessible to slum dwellers, the presence of any kind of quasi-legal documentation that asserted a claim to legitimate residence instilled a sense of security in people. Despite a widespread assumption that slum dwellers are encroachers on the land they occupy, my findings indicate that almost all residents had paid significant sums of money for the plots either to legal owners or to those who had initially squatted on the land. The original encroachers had in many cases become de facto slum lords and had “sold” municipal or government land to many current residents, who were completely unaware that they had “bought” land from people who were not rightful legal owners. “We did not know while purchasing the property that the land belonged to the government. Transactions were conducted and we believed that the land and house were legally ours,” said one research participant. Durand-Lasserve and Royston (2002) report similar findings. They emphasize that, contrary to popular belief, access to slums is rarely free. An entry fee generally must be paid to an intermediary or to the person or group exerting control over the settlement. I was not surprised that the vast majority of women in slums did not have their names on promissory notes attesting ownership, but I was astounded that almost 40 percent of men did not have any form of title to the land and house they occupied either. It was commonplace for property to remain in the name of the dead or living grandfather or father of the male head of household. High property transaction costs were cited as the primary reason property had not been transferred to the current owners. This may explain why large numbers of male household heads in slums do not have any ownership documents in their names, yet it draws attention to the observations B. Cooper (1997) and Jackson (2003) make that many men may also have precarious, contingent, and anxious relations with land than may appear if we lump all men together as the inevitable beneficiaries of patrilineal inheritance. It can also mean that the weak position of women in landed property ownership may not necessarily be an outcome of the desire to subjugate women but may well be a consequence of competition between

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different groups of men or of the inability of certain groups of men to acquire control over landed property. Availability of Legal Documents I requested information about availability of legal documents from residents of all case study slums. Ration cards and election cards were available to residents in all locations.2 Municipal water and land tax receipts were available in upgraded slums, as were electricity bills issued by the Ahmedabad Electric Company. There was a general assumption among male and female slum residents alike that the possession of such legal and quasi-legal documents was tantamount to approval of their occupancy from the government and protection from eviction. “We have ration cards and election cards. Why should we be scared?” was a common response to queries about tenure security. The awareness that these documents represent only user charges and at best strengthen their right to residence yet in no way indicate proof of ownership status was low in general but surprisingly much higher among men and women in the five upgraded slums that had received guarantees of non-eviction than among the eight slums that were yet to be upgraded. This is discussed in greater detail below, in the section comparing findings between upgraded and non-upgraded slums. I was surprised by how much women valued their voter registration and ration cards, along with the water and land tax bills in their names. Because women typically saw very few opportunities to acquire resources or to express opinions unmediated by the men in their lives, many recognized that having documents in their own names gave them the chance to negotiate some space and independence for themselves. Voting for a different candidate than did their husbands during election time and buying rice or flour at the government-approved subsidized rate with their own incomes are two examples women offered of expressing agency without the explicit approval or support of their partners. Such findings do not directly assert women’s claims to property, but they are not inconsequential in that they demonstrate women’s ability to protect their own interests and to exercise their rights even when cultural stereotypes frequently glorify them for being incapable of thought or action independent from their husbands, fathers, or sons. Listing of Slums A city-wide listing of slums was undertaken in 1976 under the aegis of the nationwide survey of slums initiated by the Indira Gandhi government. Slums that were identified and listed under the survey were provided with basic public services and guaranteed relocation if unavoidable circumstances necessitated eviction. Photo identification cards, known as “photo-passes,” were issued to the heads of families residing in slums during that time.

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Residents of all case study slums were aware of the value of the passes, yet less than 50 percent of families had retained this identification. Many families had lost the documents during fires, earthquakes, or the floods that ravage low-lying areas on an annual basis. Other families had been away from their homes during the survey and had not succeeded in securing their photo-passes. Many of the slums had grown significantly in size since the 1970s, and most newcomers did not have any photo identification asserting their right of residence or to relocation in the event of eviction. However, the level of insecurity about tenure among new migrants in settled slums was surprisingly low, since most considered the inclusion of the slum as a whole in the 1976 survey as adequate proxy for individual security of tenure. The listing of slums was also conducted long before issues of gender disadvantage and inequality acquired any real currency beyond tokenism in the discourses and practice of development and poverty alleviation. Women were counted in the survey as heads of households only when there were no adult males in the households. Widowed women frequently found their names subsumed under those of adult sons, even when the sons lived separately with their own families and did not support their mothers in any way. Married women living with their husbands were, of course, subsumed under the husband’s name. Many women who were divorced, separated, or abandoned by their husbands since the listing was conducted but who continued to live in the same slums also did not possess photo-passes. Since the survey was conducted three decades ago, and since it reinforced the dominant patriarchal mindset that women should be dependent on men for negotiating access to and control over landed resources, it is safe to conclude that although it may not have intended to disadvantage women in securing landed assets or livelihoods, it did not empower women in any significant way either. Political Patronage Patronage from local leaders frequently led to assurances of non-eviction and occasionally to provision of basic public services. In addition to support from local politicians, there is a growing and influential lobby against eviction, as well as media and judiciary support for the rights of squatters as citizens. In Ahmedabad, Saath, Ahmedabad Study Action Group, Disha, and other NGOs and action groups have repeatedly confronted the municipal corporation and the state government on evictions and tenure. In several cases, this prevented planned evictions or demolitions and coerced the government into considering less disruptive ways of addressing conflicts over land. A new trend of dialogue and intervention has emerged as a result of such confrontations, and there is greater willingness among various stakeholders to work together to find solutions to land-related conflicts than there was during the 1970s or 1980s. On a grassroots level, slum dwellers

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have devised their own mechanisms to ensure security of tenure. Information networks with officials lower down in the municipal bureaucracy enable slum populations to receive early warnings of impending notices of eviction or demolition. This gives them enough time to seek out the support of local political leaders who can act on their behalf to secure stay orders from courts and to organize protests, demonstrations, and other visible newsworthy events to derail any plans for displacement. Slum residents are politically savvy enough to recognize the importance of inviting local politicians and the press to cultural and sports events in slums. For example, Barotvas, one of the slums in my study, has a tradition of celebrating Navratri (a Hindu festival) in a grand way. The field in front of the settlement is cleared and set up with a stage on which many dance performances are held. People from all over Ahmedabad and other parts of Gujarat attend the festivities. “Even Mallika Sarabhai [a renowned classical dancer] and Narendra Modi [the chief minister of Gujarat] have come to celebrate Navratri with us,” gushed one proud resident. As well as being major cultural events within slums, these celebrations are excellent vehicles to publicize de facto regularization and entitlement to public services. The presence of local political leaders and their interventions on behalf of slum residents frequently strengthen tenure security, yet I observed that many participants in my study deferred constantly to their leaders and agreed with their opinions and ideas when they were present in group meetings but opened up more and often presented contradictory ideas in their absence. In one instance, a local leader spent a considerable amount of time informing me about how he had served the slum dwellers over the years amid what I thought was agreement from the male and female participants. During a subsequent meeting with mostly female residents, I was told that the local leader was “more talk than anything” and that his level of commitment to the slum and the well-being of its residents was usually a function of how close it was to election time. They explained that they continued to vote for him because, in the absence of other leadership in the slum, even his halfhearted attempts at pressuring the government for land documents or for infrastructure such as water stands and street lights was more than they had been able to secure on their own. Similar findings have been reported by authors writing about other cities. K. Sharma (2002), for example, notes that Muslim women in Dharavi, a large slum in Mumbai, which was the scene of direct clashes between Hindus and Muslims in 1992, said that they would vote for the rabidly right-wing Hindu legislator in the next election because he was the only elected official who had taken the trouble to build toilets in their neighbourhood. Such findings support the view that although political patronage can frequently serve as a means to strengthen tenure security and to secure basic services, it can also impose other, less obvious restrictions and prices upon slum residents.

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Relying on political patronage to ensure security of tenure has strong gendered implications. In many situations, power relations in slums are seriously corrupt, and men’s greater access to power and to power brokers give them a significant advantage over women in delivering bribes and mobilizing unfair advantage – be it in acquiring an illegal electricity connection, receiving a ration card out of turn, or seeking physical protection from politicians in pursuing economic illegal activities such as bootlegging and drug dealing. This dependence on informal processes further undermines women’s access to authority, since it increases women’s dependence on men and their links to informal or illegal power structures. Construction of Religious Structures Building a concrete religious structure, be it a temple or a mosque, in a prominent location is a fairly common practice even in slums where the quality of housing is extremely poor. Slum residents reasoned that as well as being places of worship, these buildings served as community halls and also provided shelter from inclement weather for slum residents who could not afford to secure their homes adequately from the elements. Many research participants spoke of taking shelter in temples or mosques after the earthquake of 2001 and during the annual floods that wreak havoc on their homes. These are highly plausible reasons for pooling together scarce resources to build such structures in highly impoverished communities, yet the structures also very strategically enhance security of tenure. The recent rise of Hindu fundamentalism across India, and in Gujarat in particular, has occurred amid widespread but frequently denied allegations of pro-Hindu bias among municipal, state, and central governments. With the threat of communal violence perennially looming large in Ahmedabad and other cities, having a religious structure in their midst equips slum populations with an informal but potent defence mechanism. Since municipal authorities would want to avoid the negative publicity of tearing down a temple or a mosque during politically turbulent times, areas surrounding these structures also secure a form of de facto immunity from displacement. Women benefited as much as men from the informal tenure security of having a religious structure in the middle of their communities, though my research suggests that they were less likely than men to avail themselves of its use as a gathering place because of social restrictions on mobility and public interaction. The ideology of female seclusion in many parts of India restricts women’s contact with men through the territorial gendering of public and private space. Indeed, in many of the case study slums, women were expected to avoid spaces where men congregate. Consequently, women frequently preferred to meet as a group in each other’s homes or courtyards even when there was a supposedly public space such as a temple available. Men, on the other hand, seemed to feel more entitled and comfortable in

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Having a temple, mosque, or church in its midst can provide de facto tenure security to an urban informal settlement. (Ahmedabad; photograph by Sébastien Fernand)

these community spaces. I noticed that a large group of young men was always playing cards, drinking tea, and socializing in the temple courtyard of one of the case study communities. The slum headman informed me that as an educated “Westernized” woman, it would be appropriate for me to hold a focus group of men in that space, but that the women of the community would probably prefer to meet with me in a more private place where they could speak openly without violating the norms of female seclusion. Similar encounters in other communities motivate me to emphasize that mechanisms that strengthen tenure security and right to residence by informal means frequently marginalize women by adding more hurdles – conveniently reasoned through the logic of culture and tradition – for them to overcome en route to any real access to resources or to power.

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Affiliation with NGOs and Other Groups Residents of all slums in the case study indicated high levels of confidence, regardless of the ownership status of the land, that the municipal authorities would not evict them except under unavoidable circumstances and only after alternate arrangements had been made. Slum communities indicated that, along with other factors, the alliances with civil society organizations that had helped them acquire knowledge about the law and negotiated on their behalf for appropriate responses from municipal and state governments had enhanced their perceptions of security of tenure. As in many other states in India, civil society mobilization in Gujarat was instrumental in creating a political lobby for inclusive policy-making processes. NGOs, communitybased organizations (CBOs), trade unions, grassroots movements, lawyers, planners, and other professionals in the housing and urban development sector participated in consultations and contributed actively to the drafting of the state urban slum policy. Although the policy is yet to be implemented, the mobilization involved in its formulation has already created a space for debate, dialogue, negotiation, and improved flow of information. Municipal staff indicated during interviews that, along with securing essential services at the household level, slum communities were primarily interested in participating in upgradation activities because of the continued occupation of the site that the ten-year guarantee of non-eviction promised. Despite agreeing that these were indeed major motivators, women who participated in focus groups also believed there were opportunities for securing their landed assets by affiliating with an organization such as SEWA that had an established reputation in the city for advocating for women’s property rights. Since most of SEWA’s urban membership lived in slums, successes enjoyed by the organization in applying on women’s behalf for public land redistributed by the Government of Gujarat, securing access to workspace for vendors, and facilitating women’s access to microfinance for housing and entrepreneurship were well known, and women who were not currently members of the organization wanted to avail themselves of the benefits of membership. Women who participated in my study indicated that affiliating with NGOs and being active in CBOs presented them with opportunities to limit the effects of exclusion in decision making within the community. Several participants indicated that whereas in the past they had felt compelled to accept whatever services or infrastructure were given to them, they now felt significantly empowered by participating actively in bringing services as useful as water and electricity to their communities. Because women are active primarily in the domestic sphere, or perceive themselves to be active only in the domestic arena even when contributing significantly to the community, their access to the public sphere and the resources associated

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with it are usually mediated by men. Mearns (1999) suggests that participatory schemes can improve women’s access and entitlement to land and housing, which legal and administrative measures alone, usually few in number and difficult to enforce to begin with, are unable to do. Agarwal (1997) demonstrates in her work how the assistance of “gender-sensitive” NGOs can be helpful in facilitating women’s ability to gain rights in land, to access goods and services that are often denied propertyless women, and to provide a forum through which women can share ideas and become more assertive in making claims. Support from civil society groups has been crucial in helping slum dwellers struggle for their rights in other parts of South Asia. Proshika, a Bangladeshi NGO, for example, played a lead role in organizing women and men’s groups in Dhaka to struggle collectively against exploitation and harassment from menacing mastans (thugs or racketeers controlled by powerful patrons), who prey on the vulnerability of slum populations (Rashid and Shahabuddin 1996). Developing a Gendered Vision of Land Tenure: Key Issues Ownership of landed property is clearly a critical entry point to challenge unequal gender relations and power. The findings documented in the previous section demonstrate that land relations are largely – although not exclusively – an outcome of gender relations, and women’s economic, social, and political position are the outcome of processes of bargaining and contestation. These processes are not always discernible or explicit. They involve both cooperation and conflict and take place in different arenas, from the household to the community, the market, and the state. These areas are interlinked in such a way that change in one area impinges on others. For example, strengthening women’s bargaining power within the community gives them greater bargaining power within the household. But women’s ability to improve their position in the intra-household arena has been impeded by a history of entrenched inequality in the construction of gender, in the entitlement to property, and in public decision making. Urban researchers in the developing world are increasingly asserting that women’s access to “house and land” is a key determinant of women’s empowerment in urban areas (Tinker and Summerfield 1999). Mearns (1999) describes how women are excluded from holding title to land through either legal or cultural means, emphasizing that this lack of access and control is a key determinant of women’s economic status and poverty. Although women enjoy nearly the same legal rights as men to own property in India, many cultural traditions deny them inheritance or management rights. Since the struggle for women’s property rights requires legal, institutional, and cultural transformation, tenure reform without explicit concern for women

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can disadvantage them even further. In the next section, I outline key issues that must be addressed in attempting to develop a gendered vision on land rights, reform, and tenure. I also make policy recommendations for redressing gender inequality in ownership of landed property. Knowledge of Land Issues and Perceptions of Security In Chapter 2 I mention that the literature suggests that the negotiation of de jure as well as de facto land rights and tenure remain a primarily male enterprise in both the urban and the rural context in India. Similar findings are reported by authors working in the African and Latin American context. For example, Whitehead and Tsikata (2003) write that women in sub-Saharan Africa have too little political voice at all the decision-making levels implied by the land question – not only within formal law and government but also within local level management systems and civil society. To the extent that men in slums are generally better informed about land tenure and much more immersed in the politics and politicking of negotiating informal tenure security, my research findings support this thesis. However, I observed noteworthy differences in levels of awareness about land tenure and relevant issues among women in slums depending on their participation in CBOs and other collectives as well as their exposure to the organizing and mobilizing efforts of MHT, SEWA, Saath, and other civil society organizations. Focus groups conducted with women in non-upgraded and upgraded slums revealed very interesting differences in knowledge of ownership rights and responsibilities, and in perceptions of security of tenure. Less than 5 percent of the female participants from non-upgraded slums could provide accurate information about the ownership of the land they occupied, and an equally low number were aware of the 1976 slum listing or past attempts at eviction or relocation. By contrast, almost 50 percent of the female participants from upgraded slums could correctly indicate whether their slums were located on private, municipal, or government land. Although knowledge of the 1976 slum survey and its implications for land tenure remained quite low even among older female residents, women from upgraded slums were better informed about recent land-related negotiations between slum communities, NGOs, politicians, and the municipal corporation. Perceptions of security about land tenure were counter-intuitively much higher among women in non-upgraded slums, many of which had not received either the slum networking infrastructure or the ten-year verbal guarantees of non-eviction from the municipality, than in upgraded slums, where the municipality had invested significant amounts of money in upgradation and guaranteed non-eviction for a decade. Because all slums in the study had been settled for at least a decade, levels of insecurity about land tenure and fear of eviction were generally low. However, women in upgraded slums were much more concerned about their future claims to the

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land than their counterparts in non-upgraded slums. This is counterintuitive because the provision of basic facilities by a public body generally creates the impression that people will not be removed (Smets 2006). Investment in upgrading housing and housing infrastructure exacerbated these anxieties among residents of upgraded slums. In the absence of standardized legal documents to demonstrate ownership, residents of all slums were extremely conscientious about preserving any form of quasi-legal documentation that asserted their entitlement to land and landed assets. However, participants from upgraded slums demonstrated much clearer understanding that even though ration cards, electricity bills, and other such documents may enhance their right of residence, they were not acceptable as legal proofs of ownership of landed property. Similarly, although residents of all case study slums felt positively about AMC guarantees of continued occupation, research participants from upgraded slums revealed higher levels of anxiety about what would happen at the end of the ten-year period. Several participants wanted to know if the government would grant them full tenure rights in the form of pattas once the ten-year guarantee of non-eviction had expired. Since present policy interventions appear to support a guarantee of noneviction in combination with investment in water and sanitation infrastructure as a point on the continuum toward the granting of full tenure rights, such expectations among women in upgraded slums represent high levels of awareness about current practices of governments and attitudes toward slums. These findings speak to the value of consciousness-raising and functional literacy initiatives of organizations such as MHT not only in increasing women’s awareness of their rights and entitlements to landed property and infrastructural services but also in impressing upon them how significant and strategic organizing for tenure security can be in improving the overall quality of their lives. Educating women about their rights and entitlements is a crucial issue, since a huge stumbling block for even the most enlightened pro-women land reform policy – for example, the recommendations intended for the Gujarat State Urban Slum Policy – is the lack of appropriate dissemination at a grassroots level. Policy in the books and policy on the ground are two entirely different things. Women cannot exercise their rights if they are unaware of them. Gentrification and Market Evictions One of the recurring themes in the literature on urban land tenure suggests that granting full legal rights to slum dwellers and providing essential services at the household level sometimes contribute to gentrification through the sale of plots and houses to higher-income groups, though the populations that the interventions were intended for eventually find themselves no better off than they were before. This may have happened in other contexts, but my findings in Ahmedabad provided very little indication of such a

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phenomenon. In the first year after upgradation, only three families had moved out of the five upgraded slums in which fieldwork was conducted. One family moved to another upgraded slum, and the other two had been able to purchase property in low-income housing societies. In the face of skyrocketing land values, of course there is no guarantee that slum dwellers cannot be forced off their plots by powerful corporate interests with keen interests in serviced urban land. This has certainly happened in the past in Ahmedabad and elsewhere. I spoke with legal residents of a listed slum in Ankleshwar, a small city on the Ahmedabad-Mumbai highway, who were under tremendous pressure to sell the land they were occupying to the oil conglomerate Mobil. Because of its attractive location, the corporation wanted to build a fuel station and convenience store on the site and was offering residents large sums of money to leave. The residents, armed with both photo-passes and below-poverty-line certificates issued by the Government of Gujarat, were determined to stay not just because they knew how expensive and scarce serviced urban land was but also because they were uncertain that the government would feel any pressure to provide them with alternatives if they accepted large sums of money from Mobil.3 “The money will run out one day, and if we can’t find another location in the town, we may not be any better off than we are today if we leave our homes now,” confided the slum headman. He was quick to point out that the community was divided on the issue and that many in the community were trying to mobilize majority opinion in favour of selling and moving off the land. Although many poor communities may find it difficult to resist corporate financial carrots and arm-twisting, my findings dispel, at least to some extent, the widespread middle-class assumptions expressed by several bureaucrats during interviews that the poor are accustomed to living, working, and raising their families in squalid environments and do not fully appreciate the benefits of tenure security or of availability of essential services. Women in both pre- and post-Parivartan slums were consistently more interested in secure tenure of landed assets and the opportunity to raise their children in hygienic environments than in financial gains from selling property. Participants in my research were unequivocal about their desire to hang on to their homes in upgraded settlements. Other researchers have suggested, however, that people may be compelled to sell landed property for reasons other than profit. In their research in Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam, Baken and Smets (1999) discovered that housing programs may exacerbate financial hardship by forcing low-income households to take on extra levels of household debt. The researchers emphasize that 52 percent of the original beneficiaries of the Weaker Section Housing Programme sold their dwellings within nine years after the start of the housing program not as a means to get rich quickly but to escape from the debt trap they found themselves in. Housing officials were aware of the shortcomings of the program in this

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case, but they still blamed the beneficiaries for selling their houses. Excessive borrowing – made possible by the widespread availability of formal and informal credit – may create such a scenario in upgraded slums in Ahmedabad in the future. The primary intention of this research was not to explore whether participation and leadership of women in CBOs and other collectives deliver more sustainable gains in landed property for the poor, though evidence from partnership programs in other cities in India suggests that it does. In Visakhapatnam, for example, there has been substantial gentrification and downward raiding through the sale of plots to higher-income families in the well-located areas along the national highways. The initial enthusiasm of building a nice home on land with secure tenure caused many land owners to incur large debts at high interest rates, presumably mostly from informal lenders, resulting consequently in large numbers of distress sales. However, B. Banerjee (2002) notes that in well-organized neighbourhoods with women dominating local committees, the turnover of plots is significantly lower. Women who participated in my research indicated that owning wellserviced homes on secure land had significantly influenced their self-image and attitude toward the future. Several participants stressed that the prestige, security, stability, and convenience of owning one’s home made it almost ludicrous to think about selling it for profit if the alternative meant going back to paying rent or living in an under-serviced home. Focus group participants who had previously lived in rented homes for extended periods listed not having to pay rent and not having to deal with the anxiety of eviction threats from landlords as the biggest benefits of owning a home. The practicality and pride of home ownership is evident in the words of one elderly divorced participant who had just succeeded in buying her own home in an upgraded slum with the help of a SEWA Bank loan: I can manage to feed my family without a man’s help. I always have. I still struggle a lot with money, but even if I have to occasionally go to bed hungry, I am unafraid about the future because I own a house. I invested in the upkeep of the house even when we lived in a rented home. We fixed the roof when it leaked but we received no appreciation from the owner when he came around to collect the rent – not one rupee discount did he give us. He wouldn’t tolerate the rent being even a day late and constantly threatened to throw us out. Now when I invest in the home, it is an investment into our own future.

The status and self-esteem associated with home ownership, availability of water and sanitation services, and tenure security is also evidenced by the widespread desire expressed by study participants to rename their communities once upgradation services were delivered and guarantees of non-eviction

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were secured. In India, slums and other informal settlements are often referred to in derogatory terms such as chali (shack) and zhopadpatti (hovel). Several of the slums had been renamed formally following upgradation in response to popular demand from residents. Study participants emphasized on several occasions that living in Indira Nagar (the city of Indira) or Nehru Nagar (the city of Nehru) instead of Talavadi na chhapra (the slum on the lake) or City Mill ni chali (the city mill’s shack) enhanced the image of the community they were part of and also their perceptions of their place in society. Despite their significant contributions to the urban economy, slum communities exist on the fringes of society and occupy the lowest rungs of social and economic hierarchies. The physical, mental, and spiritual transition from eking out an existence in areas that are perceived as eyesores and hotbeds of urban crime, disease, and disrepair to living in low-income housing societies complete with basic amenities has a strong dignifying effect on slum residents in general and on women in particular, since they perform the bulk of family and household maintenance activities. Both male and female residents of upgraded slums were understandably happy about the rise in market value of their properties following the delivery of services, yet neither expressed any interest in selling unless they could afford to buy land and a home in another location with comparable or better facilities. The marked shift in slum residents’ perception of the places they call home is illustrated poignantly by a wedding invitation MHT staff received from Ghanshyam Nagar, a slum upgraded under the Parivartan project. The address of the resident is indicated on the card as “12 Ghanshyam Nagar Housing Society.” Wedding invitations were rarely printed in the past, and when they were, they merely mentioned the name of the household and the slum in which the festivities were to take place. Individualized numbered addresses became a reality only after upgradation activities were undertaken. Contrary to the negative constructions prevalent among the middle classes of being just a number to the powers that be, they represent a form of official recognition of personhood and a source of pride to slum residents. These and other income-, health-, and education-related outcomes of securing tenure, adequate housing, and sanitation services reported by study participants suggest that the fear of gentrification of upgraded slums and the eventual displacement of populations for whom the services were intended may be based less on empirical evidence and more on biased assumptions and generalizations about the urban poor and their lives. Other researchers have arrived at similar conclusions about poor urban communities in different geographical contexts. Writing about Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, R. George (2008), for example, notes that city planners routinely play up the generalization that slums are havens of sloth and criminality in order to bulldoze them or to deprive them of services, though slum dwellers are actually much more likely to be victims rather than perpetrators of crime.

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Renters and Informal Renting in Slums Improved security of tenure and the provision of basic services sometimes impacts negatively on the rental sector in slums. This is a major problem, evoked by several authors, for which no satisfactory answers have yet been provided (Moser and Peake 1987; UN-Habitat 2003). Housing produced informally or illegally is often used for rental purposes, where a combination of the insecurity of the settlement and non-compliance with basic health and safety standards makes it possible to provide shelter to low-income households at affordable rates. Improving security of tenure and providing basic services in a given settlement inevitably raises two questions for renters. The first relates to identifying the beneficiary households: Is it the owner of the land or the occupant of the dwelling who should be regularized? The second relates to whether the owner or the occupant, or both, should have to pay for the upgradation services and how much. The response is usually political and context-specific. Tenure security raises concerns too about the link between tenure upgrading and market eviction. Tenants are almost always in the line of fire in these situations. Administrative measures, including rent control acts aimed at improving or controlling the low-income rental sector, have been tried without much success in Mumbai and New Delhi. In several instances, they have produced undesirable adverse effects of generating housing shortages, discouraging private investment in improving or maintaining the quality of housing, and restricting the rental option for the very populations they were enacted to serve (S. Mehta 2004). Informal rental arrangements comprise a significant form of shelter for slum dwellers in this study. They represent approximately 25 percent of all families in the slums included in the research. Of the families that rent, approximately 30 percent are households where women are the primary or sole breadwinners. It is estimated that less than 16 percent of urban households in richer countries live in poverty. In sharp contrast, 36 percent of all households and 41 percent of women-headed households in urban areas of developing countries live with incomes below locally defined poverty lines (UN-Habitat 2001). Chant (1997), who has written extensively about the diversity of female-headed households in the developing world, and Lloyd and Gage-Brandon (1993), who conducted comparative research on maleand female-headed households in Ghana, very astutely emphasize that female headship is not always a proxy for poverty. Even in India, where female-headed households are more uniformly elderly widows, the link with poverty is not always strong (Agarwal 1986). Much depends upon the reason for female headedness. For example, women who are de facto heads of rural households that receive remittances from migrant males may often be less poor than male-headed households (Kennedy and Peters 1992), while widows and divorced, separated, or abandoned women are indeed often among the

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poorest of rural people, with very limited access to male income transfers and property rights. Women-headed households in the urban context also typically belong to the latter category. Such households have fewer incomeearning opportunities than male-headed households and are generally poorer. Because of their low incomes, they have a more restricted range of housing choices. The literature on slums and other informal or irregular settlements suggests that arrangements such as informal renting, subletting, sharing, group-renting, and lodging with a family rank lowest in the residential hierarchy and are largely occupied by women and women-headed households (Volbeda 1989; Yapi-Diahou 1995). In Ghana, women living in slum communities reported resorting to group-renting a room in a shack in order to share living expenses – it is quite common for ten to thirty young women to collectively rent a single, tiny room in a dilapidated shack on either a weekly or monthly basis (COHRE 2008). Such findings are corroborated in my study in both upgraded and non-upgraded slums, where women, especially those with young children and without a male breadwinner, repeatedly indicated greater difficulty in securing rental accommodation. Several landlords and landladies openly mentioned their reservations about renting to women, based on speculations about the economic security of households headed by women. My findings indicate that infrastructure provision, shelter improvement, and tenure security definitely increase land and housing values and rents of slum properties. Renters informed me that landlords increased rents by a few hundred rupees for even one-room houses in three of the five upgraded slums almost immediately after infrastructure upgradation was announced. One of the larger slums in the study had been threatened with litigations and eviction notices in the past. These were eventually dropped, and when the AMC announced its intention to upgrade the slum, rents went up within a month by approximately one hundred rupees in anticipation of the infrastructure and the implicit guarantee of continued occupation. Although women benefit tremendously from the availability of basic services in the home, it is also possible that titled tenure and provision of infrastructure will make renting prohibitively expensive for them, thereby sharpening the status distinctions between owners and renters and ironically reproducing the very dependency relationships that such interventions were designed to erase. Knowledge about informal landlords or landladies and tenants and the kinds of programs that might benefit them are rare, and aid programs for rental tenure remain a neglected element of development assistance. The limited research on “landlordism” that does exist includes no analysis of gender (see, for example, Kumar 1996). My research indicates that informal renting in slums presents a double-edged sword for women. Women and women-headed households are adversely and disproportionately affected

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by rises in rents because of their positional vulnerability in society; however, my findings and those of others, including De Soto (2000) and Gilbert (1999), that describe the considerable enterprise of slum dwellers, support the view that providing rental housing is a major livelihood and sometimes the only form of social security available to women in slums. Over 50 percent of the female-headed households interviewed by K. Datta (1999) in low-income communities in Gaborone as part of her research on gender and housing finance in Botswana identified subletting as a strategy for economic survival. Rental income emerged as one of the most important sources of income for low-income households in Gaborone and is often invested in housing consolidation. In some cases, women heads sublet the temporary dwellings they had constructed when they first moved onto the plot, or the better rooms that fetched higher rents were rented, while they stayed on in the mud huts. My findings in Ahmedabad suggest that a landlady in a slum is little better off and often does not have better tenure security than the tenant. Most live close by or in part of the house and may be engaged in the same or similar economic activities as the renter. It would be unwise to generalize, but it appears that the caricature of the exploitative landlord or landlady may be as much a part of middle-class mythology as the assumption that slums are home to indolent criminals who make no positive contribution toward the functioning of the city. Women and Kinship Entitlements One disturbing finding of my study is the high level of male violence reported by single women lodging with relatives in slums. Securing formal rental accommodation is a challenge for young single urban women in India regardless of income, education, or privilege. I lived in the very cosmopolitan city of Pune in western India during my early twenties while completing a master’s degree in mass communication and working in an executive position in one of India’s biggest advertising agencies. Some landlords were candid about turning down my application because of my age, gender, and marital status, but others doubted my ability to pay rent despite being provided with proofs of income. Several insisted that my “mummy and daddy” co-sign the application. Paternalistic attitudes and biases against young women are more the norm than the exception even in major urban centres in India. Indo-American journalist Anita Jain devotes several chapters of her 2008 memoir Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India to the amusing yet excruciating challenges of finding rental accommodation in New Delhi as a young unmarried professional woman. Whereas women from higher socioeconomic backgrounds may have the educational and financial resources to manipulate the system to meet their needs, women from less advantaged backgrounds rarely do.

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A large number of new migrants to cities and internal migrants within cities find shelter in slums through networks of kinship. A few months of rent-free or highly subsidized accommodation with a friend or a relative can make a significant difference to a new migrant’s ability to establish a foothold in the city. Such networks of support exist for both men and women, though cultural norms ensure that men feel more entitled to them than women do. During the course of my research, I became acquainted with several families comprising a man, his wife and children, and one or more of his brothers or other male relatives. The male relatives were considered part of the family and were even accorded higher status than the wife and children because of their gender, age, perceived ability to contribute toward the household income, and entitlement to their brother’s home and resources. Sisters also occasionally resided with their brothers’ families, yet their stay was deemed temporary and expected to last only until they left for their marital homes. The kinship entitlements of single, divorced, or widowed women who were residing with their sisters’ families were even more tenuous. One young woman went to live with her sister’s family after leaving an abusive alcoholic husband. Although she worked in a factory and contributed her entire wages to the household, she was frequently physically abused and humiliated by her brother-in-law and reminded of her “place” in the family. Since it was extremely unusual for young women to live alone in slums, she perceived remarriage as her only option to secure alternate shelter. Narrations of similar accounts in several slums reinforce the finding that, among other factors, women’s ability to access adequate shelter is frequently eroded by weaker claims to kinship entitlements. A woman’s lower sense of entitlement to land, property, work tools, and other resources is an outcome of her socialization. Therefore, a combination of strengthening her access to these resources through legal means and raising her consciousness through formal or informal educational initiatives that assert why she is justified in having independent claims to landed property promise to be the most appropriate strategies for building her confidence and rectifying injustices in kinship entitlements. Inheritance Rights of Daughters Urban women acquire land and property through the same mechanisms as their rural counterparts, namely, inheritance, purchase in the market, and distribution by the state. Although statutory law entitles a woman to a share in the property of her parents along with her brothers, the widespread practice of customary law in both Hindu and Muslim communities ensure that in practice only a small minority of women actually acquire property through inheritance. Only seven of the more than one hundred women who participated in my study had inherited parental property, and in each case only because there were no male siblings to stake a claim.

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Data on land ownership are rarely disaggregated by gender. Fragmentation of agricultural land holdings is frequently used as a reason to justify excluding daughters from inheriting property in rural settings, though parallel arguments about the cultural practice of patrilocality and operational problems associated with managing the property once a woman moves to her marital home were frequently employed by parents and in many cases daughters themselves to explain women’s exclusion from inheriting property in the urban context. Several research participants mentioned that giving up their claims to parental property made it mandatory for their brothers to support them in times of crisis. Most participants in my study did not passively internalize the gender ideologies on which their disentitlement to property was based, but they tended to respond with much quieter negotiations of the current order and with much fear about losing the benefits of kinship, affection, and filial love implied by claiming a stake to natal property. S. Basu (1999) reports similar findings when she writes that despite being able to visualize the benefits for themselves and their families, the social stigma of being grasping and greedy, and worst of all, the apprehension of losing the symbolic space of love represented by the natal family often made women decline natal property. There was a lack of unanimity among women who participated in my research on the issue of equal inheritance rights for sons and daughters. Several female participants pointed out that giving land or property to daughters instead of jewellery or cash would have a positive impact on the dowry problem. Parents were often forced to sell a piece of land or a house to arrange a dowry for a daughter, but even when the dowry demands were met, there was no guarantee that the daughter would be able to retain control over what her parents had given her or that she would be treated well in her marital home. If the marriage were to be dissolved, it was more the norm than the exception that items given as dowry by the bride’s family remained in the possession of the groom and his family. One woman recounted the story of a father who had sold his auto rickshaw to arrange for his daughter’s dowry. When the daughter was sent back to her parents after six months of marriage, all the gold jewellery, cash, and household items that had been given to her as dowry remained with the in-laws. She emphasized that if the parents had given their daughter a piece of land or a title to their house, the daughter would have retained control over it. Other women were less receptive to the idea of leaving property to their daughters because it was not customary. Even women who had independently purchased property were hesitant to assert the inheritance rights of their daughters. Most expressed a clear preference for sons, employing the entrenched logic that a son would support them in their old age whereas a daughter would leave the family after marrying. Persistence of social taboos against parents seeking any help from married daughters during economic

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crises further erodes parental desire to endow daughters with property. One research participant who had built her own house after being abandoned by her husband insisted that only her sons inherit her property. She based her decision on the logic that leaving property to a daughter was like “watering a tree in someone else’s garden.” Manimala (1983) and Rao (2002) have expressed dismay over how embedded and widespread such attitudes are. In her landmark account of the Bodhgaya movement in Bihar, Manimala (1983) documents how land rights for women emerged out of mobilization around a number of other issues, for example, such domestic violence, alcohol abuse, education, and land distribution to landless men from a large land holding. Bodhgaya involved a prolonged struggle, initiated and intensively nurtured by resident youth activists, of landless men and women against a monastery controlling thousands of acres of land, exploiting labourers, and sexually abusing women labourers. Manimala writes that the demand for separate titles for women emerged when landless men given title to land became drunken and violent, provoking their wives to demand titles in their own names. However, women who received land said that they would leave it to their sons, thus confirming that land ownership would eventually revert to male control. Researchers working in the African context have also pointed out that the simple targeting of resources to women does not always ensure equitable outcomes, since resources may then be allocated in biased ways to children under conditions of strong son preference (Haddad and Hoddinott 1995; Wanyeki 2003). Jackson (2003) emphasizes that the motivation to make emotional as well as social and economic investments in sons is a powerful force in many women’s subjectivities that needs to be acknowledged, as it is an important factor in the exercise of agency. The persistence of such preferences despite women’s growing economic independence reinforces how entrenched social norms and cultural traditions can be. Such preferences also speak to the importance of consciousness-raising in order to end prejudices and stereotypes that maintain that women do not need economic resources such as land because men support them. It is now widely accepted that policy, programs, and legislation can influence gender relations by enhancing women’s entitlement and agency. A large body of literature on entitlement by notable scholars such as Bina Agarwal (2002a), Naila Kabeer (1996), and Amartya Sen (1990) emphasize both the formal laws and the informal rules, norms, and practices from which entitlements are derived, and their inherent gender biases. Recognizing gender as a dimension of entitlement structures is especially important, since economic reform may be modifying entitlements and resource transfers and in doing so producing different impacts on men and women. As an example, Agarwal (1992) has shown the disastrous consequences for women when their entitlements to common property resources are eroded because

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of the private titling of communal land required under structural adjustment programs. Landed Property Titles for Urban Women Regardless of their social class and economic status, very few women in India own landed property. I discovered during a focus group that only one MHT staff member had a joint title to the home she owned with her husband. Most staff members come from middle-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds, and although all of them contributed all or part of their incomes to the household kitty, none had ever questioned why she did not have joint titles to the house she lived in. A large number of women in my study had moved to Gujarat after marriage from Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh. Very few could afford to visit their families, and any claims they may have been able to stake to parental or ancestral property were dissolved by the physical distance from their natal families. My findings also reveal a clear male bias in land distribution through government schemes. Both male and female residents of Keshav Nagar, the only slum in my study with full legal tenure, made monetary and labour contributions toward acquiring their plots, but at the time of issuing property titles, land revenue officials gave clear preference to male household heads. Joint titles were not issued for married couples, and the only two women in the community who received independent titles did so because of the absence of male household heads in their families. Given low availability of land for distribution and limited female inheritance, securing joint titles to land and landed assets appears to present a practical solution, even though demanding them may frequently be countered with the argument that the wife already has a legal, albeit rarely exercised, right to parental property. The majority of women who participated in the research were married, yet an exceedingly small number had joint titles to land and landed assets. In many cases, the property remained in the names of fathers-in-law or brothers-in-law – and even their husbands did not have titles. Women have the option of independently purchasing land in the market; however, the scarcity of the resource and their poor access to credit and other financial services ensure that they are rarely able to do so. Under such circumstances, the conferral of joint titles to land may be seen not as an alternative to inheritance but as an adjustment to the reality that women in general are propertyless in India. Most of the women who participated in my study appreciated the value of joint titles, though a small handful indicated that they trusted their husbands or sons to take care of them and did not see the need to have their names on ownership documents. The prominent advantage cited by those who did perceive the need for joint titles was that of security. Several participants stressed that their claim to land and other productive assets would make it difficult for family members to expel them

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from their homes. The sale of land would also not be possible without their consent. As in the case of agricultural land, SEWA Bank has advocated for inclusion of women’s names in titles to urban land and housing. SEWA Bank provides loans to women for outright purchases of land and homes, but women much more frequently borrow money for purposes of repair, upgrading, and deliverance from mortgages. Although it is relatively simple to provide women with independent or joint titles to newly purchased property, there are several legal and financial challenges to doing so for already-owned land and houses. Joint titles are problematic in the urban context even outside slums, where land ownership in its standard form of sale deeds rarely exists. In the rural context, all that is required for joint titles is that the person whose name appears on the title has no objection to another name being added to it. Given the stronghold of patriarchy in much of India and the widespread resistance to girl children inheriting property, acquiring joint titles for women on a large scale is a significant challenge even in the rural context, despite the existence of legal mechanisms to effect such changes. In contrast, in the urban setting there is no provision for the inclusion of a woman’s name in the title of property belonging to her husband, and the inclusion of a new name in the title document is treated as a sale or transfer of property for which a new sale deed would have to be drawn up. Under the Bombay Stamp Act of 1958, any transfer of property attracts a significant stamp duty at the rate of 10 percent of the value of the property (Unni 1999). The levy of stamp duty for property transactions is justified on the grounds that in their absence, there would be large-scale illegal or benami (nameless) transfer of property among the middle and upper income groups to evade wealth, property, and gift taxes. In addition to formal transaction costs – registration fees, stamp duties, and surcharges – it is commonplace for people to incur under-the-table costs, for example, bribes to expedite transactions and baksheesh or gratuities to informal land evaluators. I did not attempt to collect quantitative data on formal and informal transaction costs in this study, but Mearns (1999) estimates that transaction costs in land sale-purchase markets, including both the formal and the informal costs, may amount to one-third of the total value of the land transacted. These high costs are onerous for all but especially exorbitant and prohibitive for the urban poor. It may explain why even educated middle-class women do not attempt to secure joint titles despite contributing money and labour toward the upkeep of family property. It is certainly too large an amount for low-income women in the informal sector to afford, and none of the women who participated in my study thought it worthwhile to spend such a large sum of money, even if she had access to it, when there were so many more pressing family needs competing

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for attention. The risk of losing land and property through encroachment by others and through lack of transparency in record keeping is considerably higher when landholders lack clear title to their land. The logistics of dealing with the bureaucratic details of property acquisition and transfer are especially formidable for women who are already burdened with illiteracy, overwork, seclusion, lack of political voice, and sexist cultural norms. For women to gain access to property within existing patriarchal structures there is a need for SEWA, MHT, and other women’s organizations to make a strong case for joint titles for women at the national and state level. Agricultural land is now widely understood to be a productive asset for rural women as a result of academic scholarship and the advocacy activities of women’s groups. A similar and equally convincing argument can be made for self-employed urban women. As well, women’s organizations may wish to forward a petition to land revenue departments to request exemption from stamp duty for low-income women seeking joint titles to their husbands’ properties. The petition might also demand policy change to waive or greatly reduce stamp duty on property transfer for low-income women in order to facilitate their ability to secure joint titles. Efforts to optimize women’s access to joint titles through a reduction in formal transaction costs must be complemented by pressure on land administration and revenue agencies to improve transparency in record keeping and land management operations so that corruption is reduced and informal costs of land transaction are minimized. The multiplicity of land management institutions and departments in the city – the municipal corporation, the revenue department, the town development department, the estate department – and the frequent nebulousness of roles and responsibilities significantly contributes to confusion and delays in property acquisition and transfer. The Seventy-fourth Amendment Act of the Constitution of India facilitated a transfer of power from state legislatures to municipalities in functional areas such as urban planning, regulation of land use, economic and social development planning, provision of civic infrastructure, slum improvement, and urban poverty alleviation, yet such well-intentioned decentralization was not matched with the resources required to operationalize it. Consequently, the lack of skilled human resource capacity in municipal governments and revenue departments is a serious obstacle to the realization of decentralization and gender equity objectives. Interviewees within government agencies emphasized that a culture of bribery is widespread in the municipal corporation and revenue agencies, where incentives and promotion opportunities for revenue inspectors and other lower-level functionaries are not performance related. If corruption within its ranks is to be reduced, reform in management and incentive structures of such bodies in combination with the countervailing influence of a strong watchful civil society is crucial.

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Right of Residence and Right of Ownership I describe earlier in this chapter how the concept of land tenure more closely resembles a continuum with many intermediary positions than a dichotomy of what is legal and what is not. A similar analogy can be made for women’s property rights in urban areas, where concretizing a woman’s right of residence in her home may similarly serve as an intermediary position en route to the final destination of the right of independent or joint ownership. Whereas the right of ownership can be established only through the execution of a sale deed on secure land, the right of residence can be strengthened through a variety of mechanisms. Since land ownership in its standard form is still not available to an overwhelming majority of slum populations, and the concept of joint titles to urban land and housing is only just beginning to gain currency, SEWA and MHT have been motivated to develop alternative mechanisms that strengthen women’s right to residence and to a stake in landed property in the case of disputes and separation, legal or otherwise. Renana Jhabvala (2003), the former general secretary of SEWA, summed up the organization’s strategy: Since there is no concept of standard ownership for poor women living in slums, we attempt to empower them with whatever means available to us. It’s usually more of a matter of putting women’s names on different documents such as promissory notes, electricity bills, and house and land tax. In the slums, the best we are assured of by way of tenure security at the moment is a ten-year guarantee of non-eviction. We have to work within this framework while advocating for the appropriate policy instruments and legislation.

I found widespread support and very little resistance from male residents in case study slums to SEWA Bank’s and MHT’s advocacy for land tax documents and electricity bills being issued in the names of women. This prematurely led me to believe that gender relations are more egalitarian among lowerincome groups or that such ego issues are more the domain of middle-class households; however, I was sobered by the realization that the lack of objection was more a function of how spectacularly deprived both men and women were of basic necessities in such communities than it was of gender equality. One male resident responded to my request for his opinion about the electricity bills being in his wife’s name by stressing that since he had never experienced the luxury of having electricity in the home, it would not bother him at all if the bills were to be issued in the name of a stray cat on the street as long as the promised service was delivered. Similar findings are reported by other authors. Agarwal (2003), for example, reports very little male resistance to women farming land collectively leased or purchased by women’s groups in Andhra Pradesh, since it was considered a win-win situation for

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everyone. Gains from securing services such as electricity and profits from women’s farming efforts may not be challenged at all by the men in their families, but it is not unlikely that the redistribution of land within households and families will be contested, as men stand to lose their traditional control over the resource. These and other findings suggest that for empowerment gains for women in landed property to be transformative of gender relations, it is as important to work with men as it is to work with women. Documents representing user charges were almost universally perceived as empowering by women who participated in my study and can be used in a court of law to demand the right of residence for a woman in the case of divorce or separation, but they cannot be used to establish right to ownership. Seeking joint titles to urban land and housing is a practical approach to increasing the entitlements of women. They have the potential to be especially empowering if acquired in conjunction with credit and other financial services as well as appropriate social security interventions that allow women to concurrently create independent landed assets. The challenges and opportunities women in slums face in securing access to adequate and appropriate savings and credit instruments are discussed in the next chapter. The Lack of a Uniform Civil Code In India, the laws governing family are described as personal laws because they relate to personal relationships within a family. Consequently, family law is treated as somewhat unique and separate from civil law and so codified separately for major religious communities, including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis, based on each of their religious doctrines. Because these codes are a combination of the dictates of scripture, heterogeneous customary practices, and the ideologies advanced by dominant groups, usually composed of men, they tend to perpetuate hierarchies based on class, caste, and gender. S. Sen (2002, 486, my emphasis) emphasizes this when she writes: Personal law defines the relationship between men and women within the family; it controls and directs marriage, divorce, maintenance, guardianship of children, adoption, succession and inheritance; it concerns women intimately and yet treats women as subordinate to and dependent on male kin. Man is constructed as the head of the family and women do not have equivalent rights, especially to property.

Because personal laws are codified separately for different religious communities, they are in practice not just customary or common laws but also statutory laws based on religion. As a secular nation, India maintains these religious laws concurrently with civil and criminal secular laws and administers them through the same judicial and legal apparatus.

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The demand from the All India Women’s Conference and other organizations for a uniform civil code (UCC) based on secular and egalitarian principles as a replacement for personal laws emerged even before independence in 1947 and received support from national leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, and law minister B.R. Ambedkar. However, there has been considerable public opinion, even within the women’s movement, in favour of preserving personal laws and against state interference in the affairs of religious communities. The resistance to the UCC from certain women’s groups arose because it was perceived more as an instrument through which to establish singular and homogeneous national identity than one intended to promote gender equality (Agnes 1995; Kishwar 1986). In recent years, the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party’s support for the UCC has been perceived quite astutely by many within women’s organizations and civil society groups as a covert attempt to appropriate women’s rights in order to suppress the rights of religious minorities. Mukhopadhyay (1998) writes that whereas some feminists have stuck to the UCC as an issue of women’s rights, others believe that the argument has been dissipated in a vortex of patriarchal and communal formulations of the issue. The debate over the UCC remains unresolved, though it continues to fuel communal politics and evoke bitter contestation within the women’s movement. In the absence of a UCC, women, regardless of religious affiliation, are unable to secure an alternative to customary or religious law as a vehicle for asserting their claims to property. Landed property demonstrates the connection between tradition and modernity at a level more complex than other areas of women’s disadvantage. The absence of a UCC that would apply consistently to all religious groups and communities ensures that in India statutory law as well as customary or religious law and practice exist side by side in both rural and urban areas. Policy, even when explicitly pro-women, does not take this sufficiently into account with regard to women’s access to and control over landed property. In general, women have always experienced a blurred line between the public and private worlds, negotiating with landlords and employers, fighting for health care and their children’s education, even as they have led supposedly private domestic lives. It is fairly obvious that conceptualizing these areas as separate, either spatially or functionally, is an artifact that serves to isolate women, keeping their concerns off the table and discounting their perceptions, yet policy formulation typically maintains the public-private dichotomy and views family as a private realm that is beyond the law. In implementing policy, this translates into the state delegating power and authority to the male head of the family to deal with his dependants as he wishes. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979

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and ratified by India in 1993, can be used as an advocacy tool by women’s organizations to promote Indian women’s land ownership. CEDAW requires its signatories to eradicate all practices that violate women’s equality rights, no matter how rooted in culture or in tradition they may be. The convention calls on governments to work on the transformation not only of statutory law but also of customary and religious law to achieve equality between men and women. As a signatory of CEDAW, the Government of India can and should be held accountable for taking appropriate measures to neutralize customary law and to develop a UCC that would offer a woman an alternative to customary or religious law as a vehicle for asserting her claims to landed property. I mention above that only seven of the more than one hundred participants in my research inherited parental property. They did so only because there were no male siblings to stake a claim. Women’s economic interests in inheriting family property are complicated by deep emotional and cultural disentitlements to landed resources. Poor urban families may have very few landed assets to bequeath to their children regardless of gender; however, not having a UCC on which to even stake a claim further marginalizes female children. It also restricts daughters’ ability to ask for a share of rural landed property, which many migrants retain control over even decades after moving to urban areas. Women’s organizations have employed CEDAW very successfully to mobilize campaigns and demand policy responses from governments to fight dowry, female infanticide, and other social evils, but the convention has never been evoked to address the challenges women face in accessing and controlling landed property. Jackson (2003) writes that women’s movements in India have rarely demanded land. Those that have been movements of women mobilizing as women rather than as landless labourers, Dalits, or Adivasis (indigenous peoples), have arisen around issues such as dowry murder, custodial and landlord rape, sati, alcohol, and domestic violence. The androcentric biases of legal logic and rationality are amply demonstrated by the tendency for policy makers to welcome women’s claims involving vulnerability and the need for protection and to respond to them with appropriate legislation over those demanding equal treatment before the law in the ownership of highly politicized resources such as land. Although it is unlikely for these reasons that women’s claims to landed property will evoke clear-cut non-negotiable responses from policy makers and politicians as will more emotionally charged issues, the very act of framing a UCC will provide women and women’s organizations with a new bargaining tool with which to assert entitlement to landed property. Conclusion This chapter establishes the critical importance of women asserting their rights to landed property in the face of the twin stumbling blocks of

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economic transformations that erode customary rights and entitlements and the persistence of cultural traditions of patriarchy that deny them any real control over landed resources and power. Enhancing women’s ability to secure independent titles to urban land and housing is a long-term goal for both MHT and SEWA. Joint titles are a step in the right direction toward establishing women’s right to property, though the obstacles to achieving even this small step, as detailed in this chapter, are quite significant. Overall, policy initiatives that strengthen the ability of urban women to make land claims – for example, legal education, reform of the judiciary and governance, public awareness campaigns, equality of treatment in resettlement schemes and land allocation processes, and equal access to credit and technological inputs – will be extremely valuable in ensuring that land rights have the potential to transform gender relations. In addition to property, urban self-employed women prioritize access to jobs, water, and basic services such as clinics, schools, and child care as the means to secure livelihoods and to improve the conditions of their reproductive labour. Without livelihoods, incomes, and access to basic services, access to land and property will not take women very far. Therefore, pro-women land policy must be located within a broader urban development framework aimed at raising incomes, optimizing livelihood opportunities, educating both women and men about the rights and privileges of property ownership, and providing housing and infrastructure. My findings in Ahmedabad echo those of Jackson (2003) by emphasizing that it is necessary to pose questions about women and landed property in the broader context, since the structures of power confronting women operate at local, national, and global levels and within diverse institutional arenas represented by communities, social movements, markets, states, kin groups, and households. The next chapter builds on the findings related to women’s control over land rights and tenure in urban slums. It identifies opportunities and constraints women in the informal sector encounter in accessing appropriate financial services to support purchasing new housing and upgrading existing housing infrastructure.

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6 Women and Housing Microfinance

Like land, houses are considered key assets in rural and urban India. For low-income households, housing functions as a shelter, a commodity, and an investment. Home ownership also confers collateral in credit markets, social status, and security in the event of natural or human-made disasters. At the macro level, a growing literature attests that asset equality is positively correlated with economic growth. Asset inequality, combined with market failures, leads to differential productivity between the asset poor and the asset rich, which creates poverty and inequality traps (see, for example, Banerjee and Duflo 2003; Barrett and Carter 2005; Carter and Zimmerman 2000). Productive assets play a very important role in reducing poverty. Researchers Volbeda (1989) and De Soto (2000) emphasize that people who own homes tend to exert disproportionate influence over urban and rural institutions, including labour and credit markets. A home, however small, offers opportunities to increase incomes through small-scale home-based economic activities. Other researchers emphasize that inadequate incomes may be a major cause of poverty within urban centres, but it is the lack of landed and other assets that exacerbates the vulnerability of low-income women and men to economic shocks (Chambers 1995; Pryer 1993). The possession of assets helps households and individuals to cope with vulnerability and to avoid the impoverishment that may be brought on by aggregate shocks such as droughts or floods, as well as idiosyncratic shocks such as illness or divorce (Doss, Grown, and Deere 2008; Hulme and McKay 2005). The absence of effective public social protection programs that is characteristic of low and even middle-income countries puts a premium on assets that can be converted to cash (Hulme and Shepherd 2003). When people have more assets, they experience less vulnerability and insecurity in the face of risks; conversely, the more assets are eroded, the greater is people’s vulnerability (Moser 2007). This chapter explores two major issues. First, it focuses on the importance of housing for low-income households in general and for women in particular. Second, it highlights the unique housing finance needs and limitations of

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low-income groups. I begin by providing a brief description of the limited shelter finance sources in India and emphasizing the growing need for innovative tools such as housing microfinance to meet the needs of low-income households. One of the primary goals of this research is to bolster the capacity of microfinance organizations to understand the housing microfinance needs of its urban membership.1 Therefore, I document and analyze in detail the challenges and opportunities low-income women face in securing access to microfinance for acquiring adequate housing and housing infrastructure. I also make policy recommendations to improve the accessibility and affordability of housing-related services and financial products for women in the informal sector. The effectiveness of microfinance – for housing or other purposes – in empowering women remains deeply contested, as does the rather fuzzy concept of “empowerment” itself. I do not attempt to measure or evaluate whether housing microfinance can “empower” women, though I do emphasize conflicts and complications that may arise from unquestioningly accepting, as much of the development practitioner community does, that providing women with microfinance can promote gender equality within and outside the household. Housing and Low-Income Urban Women In an influential article entitled “Housing as a verb,” John Turner (1972) writes that housing is not so important for what it is, as for what it does for people. Turner did not engage with gender at all in his work, but organizations such as SEWA and MHT corroborate that in addition to being a place to live in, a home is indeed a productive and wealth-generating asset for millions of low-income women who work out of their homes, rent rooms in it, or use their homes as warehouses or as collateral for securing loans and other services. Secure and adequate shelter helps women increase the productivity and volume of business, and consequently their incomes. Access to adequate housing also enhances storage capacity, reduces wastage, makes it possible for women to buy wares in bulk instead of daily, and enables women to improve the quality of their products to attract more customers. Several women who participated in my research were able to make the leap from retail to wholesale businesses based on the space and security afforded by adequate shelter. Access to adequate housing and amenities such as water and sanitation also greatly reduces recurring expenses for repairs and reduces time poverty by eliminating the necessity to procure water for maintaining the household. Writing about slum dwellers in Mumbai, Patel (1999) emphasizes that the constant maintenance required because of the monsoon season means that over a twenty-year period the very poorest of households spend the equivalent of the deposit on a loan and interest repayments sufficient to buy a sixty-square-metre house. Jones and Mitlin (1999) concur when they write that the greatest benefit of adequate and secure housing

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Women and Housing Microfinance 141

may be understood in terms of savings in the cost of repairs and renovations as housing consolidation takes place. There is a strong correlation between perceived tenure security and investment on housing. Despite years – sometimes decades – of residence, over 85 percent of households in non-SNP communities have not built pukka (cemented or permanent) structures. Conversely, within three years of the launch of the SNP, around 80 percent of houses have been upgraded (Kundu 2002). Only a small percentage of people have not upgraded their homes. About 5 percent of households have added a room to their homes and a similar number have converted their homes into shops and other commercial establishments. Households have spent anywhere between Rs.20,000 (US$500) and Rs.120,000 (US$3,000) on home improvements (ibid.). A study conducted by SEWA to assess the impact of the Parivartan slum upgradation project showed a 35 percent average increase in small-enterprise weekly earnings (MHT 2002b). Internal evaluations of SEWA’s membership suggest that women with assets are less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life than those without because they have greater bargaining power not just with employers and contractors but also with their spouses and families (SEWA Bank 2001). Similar findings are reported by other housing programs in South Asia. In Sri Lanka, for example, the Women’s Bank has found that loans for housing and neighbourhood improvement increased the number of small businesses – small shops, tailors – even in areas where they seemed previously to have barely existed. The women reported that the upgraded homes help make their business more successful by attracting more customers. Food producers had increased space for food preparation, improved ventilation, and enlarged counter space. Garment producers could create space for private fittings, storage, production, and design, and shop owners had enlarged windows for trading and wider footpaths (Albee and Gamage 1996). Besides productivity and income, owning a home strengthens women’s sense of security and self-worth within the family and society at large. Other assets – savings, work equipment, gold and silver jewellery, copper and bronze utensils – may also strengthen women’s position within the family and community, but homes enjoy a privileged position because they bestow higher social status upon the owner than do other assets. Acute financial problems frequently lead women to sell their gold jewellery, which is not only a source of pride and dignity but also a form of personal insurance against unforeseen events, such as divorce or the death of the husband (Doss, Grown, and Deere 2008). Indeed, household dissolution – whether because of divorce, separation, abandonment, or death – is increasingly common in many countries and frequently associated with female poverty (Dreze and Srinivasan 1997; D’Souza 2000; Fuwa 2000). The rise of HIV/AIDS, coupled with limited economic opportunities, also puts many widows and their

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children at the risk of destitution (Alibur and Walker 2006; Drimie 2002; Muchunguzi 2002). Homes are less easily alienable from women than other assets. Asset ownership in general, and home ownership in particular, influences the fallback position of each spouse in negotiations over key household and family decisions and hence the exit options available to each (Doss 1996; Quisumbing and Hallman 2006) Several surveys from South Asia found that women who owned property had greater say in household decision making than women without property (Agarwal 1998b, 2002b; Allendorf 2007; Mason 1998). In Colombia, Friedemann-Sanchez (2006) found that women use property and social assets to negotiate the right to work, control their own income, move freely, and live without spousal violence. As well as these benefits, women’s asset ownership has been demonstrated to increase the anthropometric status of children (Duflo 2000), the incidence of prenatal care (Beegle, Frankenberg, and Thomas 2001), and children’s schooling (Katz and Chamorro 2003); it may also reduce domestic violence (ICRW 2006; Panda and Agarwal 2005). Because there are tremendous individual and social welfare benefits associated with women’s ownership of property, it is crucial that we find ways to assist women in the acquisition of and control over key assets such as homes. Toward this end, the collective experiences of SEWA Bank and MHT seem to suggest that making adequate and appropriate housing financial services as well as housing technical assistance available to women are viable enabling interventions that have tremendous potential not just to alleviate poverty and improve quality of life but also to promote more egalitarian gender relations within and outside the household. Low-Income Urban Households and Housing Finance A combination of tenure insecurity and income volatility ensures that the urban poor build their homes tentatively, sporadically, and incrementally. The bulk of households in most developing countries build their homes incrementally over a period of five to fifteen years (Ferguson 2001). This process typically starts with getting access to land either through invasion or purchase and continues with the building of a small makeshift unit and its improvement and expansion. Despite the recent liberalization of the economy in India as well as policy and regulatory reform, very few financial institutions cater to the housing needs of low-income households. Even fewer have developed products that fall under the rubric of housing microfinance and are tailored to the informal and progressive ways in which the poor build their homes. Housing loans for people in the informal sector are distinct from mortgages in that they are typically not for the purchase or construction of new units but, rather, for the progressive enhancement of existing housing, however inadequate. Building codes and financial laws in many countries are often based on the assumption that people acquire homes

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through the purchase of a fully constructed unit. In Kenya, for example, building codes were designed for the construction of complete homes, thus making progressive building illegal despite it being the most common form of home construction for the poor (Malhotra 2003). Housing microfinance is offered as a new product line largely by a generation of financial institutions that built their success on providing working capital loans to the urban poor and who are now looking to expand and diversify their portfolios and products (Malhotra 2003). For example, in mid-2000, Mibanco, a Peruvian microfinance institution (MFI), launched its housing product – MiCasa (“My home”) – and achieved impressive results within a year, with 3,000 active clients and a US$2.6 million portfolio. This helped Mibanco’s overall profitability, while reaching its poor client base. MiCasa achieved rapid and profitable growth because the product was developed and launched within Mibanco’s existing branch and lending infrastructure – there was no need to create new offices or to hire new loan officers (Brown and Garcia 2001). Housing microfinance promises to suit the progressive housing process used by a majority of households in developing countries because it better suits their realities of informal, frequently erratic incomes and quasi-legal tenure. The underwriting conditions of full legal title and formal employment required by formal financial institutions conflict with the reality of poor people’s lives and are almost impossible for the majority of the working poor to fulfill. Because low-income households are typically also averse to long-term debts such as those represented by mortgages, one or more shortterm loans can better fund steps in acquiring adequate shelter, whether it is land acquisition, room addition, or sanitary facilities, at affordable terms (Daphnis and Ferguson 2004). In their review of formal and informal housing markets in two Indian cities, Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam, Baken and Smets (1999) conclude that the form of housing construction and the financial arrangements that are part of public housing programs do not match household survival strategies and that the terms and conditions of informal housing finance are generally more adequate. Much data corroborate that formal sector lending institutions overwhelmingly favour households with above-average incomes, where the household “head” is male and employed in the formal sector (Klak and Smith 1999; Struyk and Turner 1986). Despite some degree of liberalization in India, eligibility for a housing loan through a finance corporation remains restricted to salaried employees in the formal public or private sector and to selfemployed people who are able to provide tax records. Housing finance delivery is particularly discriminatory against women, since they are underrepresented in the formal sector, which is mainly the preserve of men. Consequently, women are able to gain access to housing finance only through a husband or other male who can provide proof of income. This has the

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effect of excluding most female-headed households. Baken and Smets (1999) emphasize that marginal and vulnerable households, a disproportionate number of which are headed by women, face greater difficulties in accessing loans even from informal lenders compared with the somewhat better off among the low-income households. In addition to the assets and savings of potential borrowers, informal lenders often require evidence of level and security of income, repayment records covering the recent past, or ownership of a house or a plot of land as a precondition to granting a loan. Sources of Shelter Finance in India India faces a housing shortage that is particularly severe among low-income populations. The Asian Development Bank estimates that India’s housing shortage is as high as 40 million units, suggesting that more than 200 million people are living in chronically poor housing conditions or on the streets (Asian Development Bank 2007). The bank argues that a primary cause for the housing crisis is a lack of housing finance options for the lowincome households that account for over 90 percent of the housing need. The unsatisfied demand for low-income housing finance is significant too in other parts of the developing world. For example, one market study concludes that 14 percent of all households in three Mexican cities along the United States border, representing a market of about US$300 million, are interested in housing loans (Ferguson 2001). Two surveys in Morocco found that 83 percent of low-income households are willing to take a loan to finance their home improvement projects (Davis and Mahoney 2001). Similarly, in Indonesia, the annual projection for housing needs for the next ten years is approximately 735,000 new units, with another 420,000 in need of improvement. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of all housing in Indonesia is constructed informally and incrementally, with minimal access to formal financial markets (Malhotra 2004). In Peru, 82 percent of the 8 million people living in greater Lima are classified as poor. At least 50 percent of poor households and 60 percent of the poorest households expressed a strong desire to expand or improve their home within the next year. Only 10 to 15 percent are borrowing from formal and informal sources (Brown and Garcia 2001). Sixty-eight percent of low-income households in South Africa are unable to access formal financial services, and the majority of them rely on informal financial mechanisms (Mills 2007). Such findings emphasize that developing appropriate financial instruments to meet the shelter needs of the urban poor, including squatters on remote or unutilized land and those living in rental arrangements in overcrowded inner-city slum tenements, is the greatest challenge facing the housing finance industry today (Daphnis and Ferguson 2004; USAID/DAI 2000). Although much has been done in recent decades to improve low-income households’ access to finance for income-generation, the same can certainly

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not be said of housing finance. In India, an increasing number of incomegenerating finance schemes have been initiated by NGOs and cooperative banks, as well as by private sector banks and state and central governments. These schemes have made microfinance for income-generation available to urban and rural low-income households. Of course, this does not mean that all households have equal access to microcredit. Indeed, several researchers have demonstrated an upward creep and increasingly an urban bias in microcredit delivery (Baruah 2007; Robinson 1991). Consequently, despite estimates that the number of grassroots levels organizations involved in mobilizing savings and providing microloan services to the poor is four to five hundred nationally, the cumulative outreach of financial services from MFIs to families below the poverty line is no more than 1.5 million households or 2.5 percent (Biswas 2003). It is clear that there is a huge gap between demand and supply. In spite of such deficiencies, NGOs and low-income communities that want finance for income-generation purposes now know where to go, what bureaucratic rules to expect, and how to reproduce the organizational systems through which access to finance is made possible. There is also enough documentation and institutional knowledge so that new organizations can learn from the experiences of more-established organizations while innovating, experimenting, and learning. The same progress has not been made in housing finance. In 1992, India’s Planning Commission found that whereas national housing finance requirements were close to US$1.4 billion, the budgetary provision was a mere US$500 million (Patel 1999). The same report noted that only one-third of finance is provided by formal financial institutions; this falls to 24 percent in the case of low-income households. The development of housing finance in India was delayed for several reasons. The Government of India began to consider issues of finance much later than other developing countries and initiated housing policies and reforms only in the late 1980s (Patel and Burra 1994). Nor has housing finance been a priority for NGO intervention even among NGOs devoted to shelter activities. M. Mehta (1994) and Mitlin (1997) estimate that only four of the eighteen NGOs in Mumbai that are involved in housing activities provide housing finance. This is partly because many NGOs do not want to engage with complicated land tenure issues, preferring the safer, more traditional role of service delivery. It is common for NGOs to “adopt” specific slum settlements in order to provide primary health care, education, welfare, and recreation schemes but to steer clear of difficult issues of land security and urban basic services. To further complicate the situation, there is a labyrinth of legislation in India that protects certain categories of slums from demolition while forbidding residents from constructing permanent dwellings. Urban NGOs and community organizations working with lowincome communities have also found urban basic service and housing

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upgradation schemes difficult to implement because of the volatility of household incomes. Finally, housing finance for all social groups in India remains somewhat underdeveloped. A 1992 study revealed that 92 percent of homeowners across all income groups did not use mortgages to construct or purchase their homes (Patel 1999). There has been dramatic activity in the housing finance sector in the last decade with the remarkable growth of the economy and the unprecedented increase in the size of the middle class. Nevertheless, a flawed logic persists that if housing finance for the rich remains still somewhat undeveloped, low-income households should not expect to have access to those privileges. Consequently, for millions of poor workers, especially those in India’s self-employed or informal sector, the predominant delivery mechanism for housing has been people’s own efforts. Housing finance sources in developing countries typically fall into three categories or tiers (Renaud 1984). The first tier comprises private commercial institutions providing credit for higher-income groups at market interest rates upon the certification of income and provision of collateral. This category has mostly avoided involvement in provision of housing finance for low-income groups because of their lack of collateral or regular income, the perceived high default risk, and high transaction costs (USAID/DAI 2000). The second source is the public sector, which usually provides subsidized funds for middle-income groups and civil servants. Public programs frequently fail to reach the poor for several reasons. Their eligible beneficiaries typically operate within the formal economy, possess basic home ownership capacity, and have at least some access to capital, however modest. Public programs attempting to target lower-income groups have been hampered by lack of political will, leakage of funds to non-eligible groups because of corruption, or a failure to take into account the socio-economic and political realities with which lower-income groups operate. For example, many public sector housing programs in India advertise eligibility criteria for subsidized housing schemes in local and national newspapers. Since a large majority of India’s working poor are non-literate, they are seldom able to avail themselves of such schemes, if they are even aware of their existence. Consequently, not only have public programs been unable to deliver sufficient and affordable housing but they have absorbed and exhausted all resources allocated to house low-income groups. Mostly employed in the informal economy, low-income groups have with very few exceptions been excluded from accessing capital from formal public or private financial institutions. This group has consistently relied on informal sources – savings, loans from friends and family, remittances from family working elsewhere in India or abroad, and the sale of assets such as land, jewellery, and dowry (Baken and Smets 1999; Patel and Burra 1994). According to the Indian National Statistical Survey’s forty-fourth round, more than 80 percent of housing finance

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comes from private savings, sale of assets, and non-formal sources of credit (Biswas 2003). Housing microfinance programs administered by MFIs and shelter advocacy groups have emerged in recent years to address the shelter needs of such groups and to fill the financing gaps not covered by traditional, more formal institutions. Most MFIs that attempt to provide for a range of financial needs of lowincome groups perceive housing finance as a logical next step toward asset building. Offering housing finance also serves as a powerful tool for client retention, since a client’s history of credibility with an MFI, whether through savings or loans, can serve as a good proxy for his or her credibility as a borrower. Most MFIs offer housing loans as part of a “graduation” process after the borrower has established a record with the institution. M. Mehta (2008) emphasizes that MFIs can increase their outreach and customer base, improve their financial viability, and better meet their social performance targets by providing housing microfinance services. The next few pages describe the housing financial products, services, lending philosophy, and clientele of SEWA Bank. An Overview of Housing Finance at SEWA Bank SEWA Bank was registered as a bank under the dual control of the Reserve Bank of India and the Government of Gujarat in May 1974. The bank’s initial capital came from the contributions of approximately 4,000 SEWA members. SEWA Bank is a cooperative bank, with the bulk of its loan capital continuing to come from its members. Over the past few years, SEWA Bank has also received financing from the Housing and Urban Development Corporation, a federal public sector housing finance provider, and the Housing Development Finance Corporation, a commercial housing finance company. As of 2007, SEWA Bank had deposits worth approximately US$16.5 million, working capital of US$23.65 million, and 91,096 active loan accounts (SEWA Bank 2007). In 2003, the US-based Cooperative Housing Foundation (CHF International) conducted an assessment of SEWA Bank’s housing finance program. It was estimated that of the total outstanding loan portfolio of US$2.275 million on 31 January 2002, 40 percent was accounted for by lending for housing. This includes loans for purchases of new homes as well as for repair and upgradation purposes. As part of a city-wide slum upgradation project, loans were also provided to low-income women for infrastructural facilities such as acquiring water and electricity connections, building toilets, and securing sewer connections to city mains, but these represented only a little over 4 percent of the total housing portfolio (USAID/DAI 2000). Repayment rates of approximately 96 percent on housing loans, as opposed to 94 percent on microenterprise loans, have ensured that SEWA Bank can continue to lend for housing purposes, and develop and customize its financial services to meet the needs of its membership (SEWA Bank 2001;

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USAID/DAI 2000). SEWA Bank has been profitable every year since 1978. These profits are disbursed by way of dividends to its clients, the majority of whom are shareholders. Because SEWA Bank is a cooperative bank, all loan applicants must purchase one-time shares in the bank totalling 5 percent of the loan amount applied for (Biswas 2003). Characteristics of Bank Clientele SEWA Bank’s clientele, both borrowers and depositors, are low-income women engaged primarily in the informal sector. Urban members comprise 70 percent and rural members 30 percent of SEWA’s membership. Urban members are predominantly micro-entrepreneurs, dependent subcontractors, or casual labourers. A survey of a sample of SEWA’s borrowers in 1998 revealed that 76 percent had annual household incomes below Rs.18,000 (US$450) and half of these had annual household incomes below Rs.12,000 (US$300) (Ghatate 1998). Chen and Snodgrass (2001) further identified that 87 percent of SEWA members lived on less than $2 per day. The same study identified that, like most low-income urban women in Ahmedabad, bank clients maintain high levels of debt, averaging at about 27 percent of annual household income. The study found too that borrowers frequently used SEWA Bank loans to pay off loans from other sources. Although ability to save is quite low among poor households, Chen and Snodgrass (2001) identified that SEWA Bank clients had two or three times as much savings as non-clients and hold most of these funds in SEWA Bank. The same authors note that “no one in the sample seems to have much to do with banks other than SEWA Bank, either as a source of credit or as a savings vehicle” (ibid., 5). SEWA Bank clients, as well as other economically active poor families, are susceptible to various financial shocks that interrupt normal income flows or necessitate extraordinarily large expenditures. In the Chen and Snodgrass study, 71 percent of women questioned experienced at least one significant financial shock over a two-year period. The home was identified as the primary physical asset for women interviewed and was also a workspace for more than 75 percent of the sample. Product Description SEWA Bank has been a pioneer in the field of housing microfinance in India. It was one of the first microfinance institutions in the world to acknowledge that microfinance clients use loans for a variety of purposes, including housing. SEWA Bank developed dedicated housing loans and products when it was discovered that all or part of 50 percent of total loans disbursed were being used for housing purposes (SEWA Bank 2001; Vyas 2003). The bank started disbursing housing loans in acknowledgment that its clients wanted to improve their living conditions and were using business loans for housing purposes. The bank decided that a lower reducing balance interest rate of

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approximately 14.5 percent for housing loans, as opposed to 17 percent for business loans, would enable its clients to report honestly on the intended purpose of a loan.2 SEWA Bank’s main housing microfinance products do not diverge significantly from its microenterprise loans in any other way. The only other main differences are in the repayment terms and the guarantee requirements. A client has sixty months to repay a housing loan but only thirty-five months to repay a microenterprise loan. The longer repayment period reflects the higher cost of lending for housing and, according to SEWA Bank, the less productive nature of housing as compared with microenterprise (USAID/DAI 2000). The maximum loan amount for housing is Rs.25,000 (US$625), and a client may not have more than one outstanding loan at a time.3 The amount lent is based solely on the client’s repayment capacity. The bank does not require that the loan amount cover the cost of a completed improvement. The types of upgradation financed range from major construction (for example, room addition) to minor enhancements (for example, plastering and tiling). In terms of guarantee requirements, SEWA Bank offers secured and unsecured loans. Secured loans are backed by assets such as jewellery or a lien on the client’s fixed deposits held at SEWA Bank. Unsecured loans are typically backed by salaried guarantors. The client’s savings deposit must be at least 35 percent of the loan amount. The exact amount, however, depends on the economic situation of the client and the availability of guarantors, since the loan review committee determines the required amount of the lien on a case-by-case basis. The number of guarantors required depends on the loan amount. For loans of up to Rs.10,000 (US$250), one guarantor is required and that individual may be a family member. For loans of more than Rs.10,000 (US$250), two guarantors are required and one of them must be formally employed at a salary of at least Rs.4,000 (US$100). Non-professional and non-technical junior or entry-level government and private sector employees can generally expect to earn such a monthly salary. Once a loan is approved, the client must provide a guarantee. The guarantor typically comes to the bank to sign the loan documents. The guarantor must provide a copy of his or her identification card and a proof of income. The loan officer reviews the guarantor and may seek additional approval from the accountant or managing director. SEWA Bank encourages women to have their name added to the property title or stamp paper. However, this is not a requirement for women to be able to access housing loans. Delivery and Follow-Up Methodology Once the application is received, the bank usually disperses the loan within five days. Unless a client’s previous loan was for business or consumer purposes, in which case the bank would undertake a more formal evaluation, it is as little as one or two days for repeat clients. Typically, unless a loan is

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secured, a client must establish a savings record with SEWA Bank before taking a loan. In rare cases, a client can obtain a loan without prior participation in a savings program if she is a member of the bank and can produce adequate collateral. A client can make savings deposits through various methods. She may go directly to SEWA Bank; pay at the mobile collection unit, which travels to the communities SEWA serves once a week; or pay at one of seven satellite offices. Most clients save for at least four to six months to become eligible for a loan. Jayshree Vyas, the managing director of SEWA Bank, informed me that a bank client typically uses a first loan to pay off outstanding debts to moneylenders, a second loan as working capital to expand her business, and a third or fourth loan to upgrade her home. In many cases, loans for home improvement purposes typically also serve a business purpose. For example, a carpenter who works manually would naturally want to buy a drilling machine, but if she does not have access to electricity at home, she may want to borrow to secure an electricity connection before she purchases a drill. Biswas (2003) emphasizes that the dividing line between incomegeneration loans and housing loans is often very blurred at the grassroots because inputs into a business such as water or electricity or paved flooring may be viewed as either a housing improvement or a business improvement in order to increase productivity. In a similar vein, Malhotra (2003) stresses that the poor are able to service their loan repayments precisely because housing is a productive asset for them, with 30 to 60 percent of housing finance clients engaged in a home-based income-generating activity. A loan officer conducts a site visit to verify loan use approximately a month after loan disbursement. If a client is found to be using a housing loan for business purposes, the interest is raised to 17 percent. However, if a client chooses to use a business loan for housing purposes, the rate of interest is not reduced to 14.5 percent. Payments are considered late only if the full monthly instalment is not made. The bank accepts partial payments, though a partial payment is considered a late payment and monitored as such. Bank officials visit the client after one missed payment. A late notice listing the amount due is sent to the client and her guarantors after two missed payments. A second notice is sent after three missed payments. Once the loan period exceeds the sixty-month repayment term, a third notice is sent by registered mail to the client and the guarantor informing them that if the loan is not paid, legal action will be pursued. In the first thirty years of its existence, SEWA Bank has taken only two hundred clients to court (Vyas 2003). In 2007, there were 282 active legal cases based on non-payment, out of a total of 103,679 outstanding loans (Vyas 2007). Challenges and Opportunities in Providing Housing Microfinance With a population approaching 6 million, Ahmedabad is the seventh largest city in India. It has experienced fast-paced growth during the last few

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decades, with its population increasing by about 22 percent between 1991 and 2001 (Kundu and Mahadevia 2002). The city’s economy has received severe setbacks in the past few years from droughts, earthquakes, and social unrest and as a result its poverty rate is above the national average, with 34 percent of the population living below the poverty line as compared with 21 percent for India as a whole (CHF International 2003). Given the rapid population growth, collapse of the textile industry, and paucity of affordable housing and basic services, the city has experienced a swift proliferation of slums and squatter settlements. Two-fifths of the city’s population lives in such settlements. The aggregate demand for shelter financing from slum residents far outstrips the available supply of loans. Although a varied range of public and private sector institutions in Ahmedabad provide housing finance, they have not made a major impact on low-income households employed in the informal sector (CHF International 2003). Most institutions primarily offer long-term mortgage loans for home purchases and construction. The repayment periods are generally up to twenty years, with interest rates typically ranging between 3 and 9 percent. Borrowers are required to pay 10 to 30 percent of the appraised value and must have legal title to the property. Millions of economically active poor in the city cannot access these lenders and rely on savings and informal moneylenders to finance their housing needs. Consequently, in some markets in South Asia, microfinance organizations have found that introducing housing finance to members who previously had no access to such services has been both a positive financial initiative and a powerful instrument for consolidating member loyalty and commitment. However, in other contexts, notably in Latin America, entering into the housing finance sector has prompted an aggressive response from competing financial institutions that had previously ignored the clientele of microfinance organizations. In some cases, this competition can undermine member patronage of even conventional savings and loan services and has caused considerable difficulty for the microfinance organizations in question (Scoggins 1995). In recent years, private sector housing finance companies, commercial banks, and commercial insurance companies have responded to the economies of scale and shown tremendous interest in catering to SEWA’s 1 million strong, ready-made national membership. Although recognizing the potential to scale up outreach through such collaborations, SEWA’s leadership has struggled to negotiate terms with commercial organizations that ensure that the best interests of its membership are served. Insurance services are a good example. In response to tremendous interest from ICICI Prudential and other commercial banks to provide asset, health, and accident insurance services to SEWA’s membership, SEWA was able to negotiate terms that made monitoring, evaluation, and certification of claims the sole responsibility of its

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internal evaluators. Because SEWA evaluators are authorized to settle claims, papers do not have to be sent to insurance companies for authorization. The collaborating insurance companies merely reimburse SEWA once claims have been settled (Chatterjee 2003). As with insurance services, it is predictable that the success of housing microfinance will pave the path for a whole new set of players – commercial banks, mortgage finance corporations, private builders, and others – that are typically very hesitant to cater to lowincome groups to compete for their attention and purchasing power. The experience that SEWA has gained in protecting and optimizing the interests of its membership within collaborations promises to be extremely valuable and relevant in the future. SEWA Bank is the largest microfinance provider in Gujarat and one of only two NGOs offering housing finance to economically active low-income populations. Saath, a local grassroots NGO, provides housing microfinance but has a strong presence in only a handful of city slums. Since its scope is so limited, SEWA Bank is the only institution that provides housing finance in a broad-based manner in Ahmedabad. However, with a loan portfolio under US$3 million, even SEWA Bank’s impact has been limited, and the unmet demand for housing finance remains quite large. Given reliable estimates that more than 90 percent of Indian women are engaged in the informal sector and 41 percent reside in communities classified as slums, the potential female housing microfinance market can be conservatively estimated at 1 million women in Ahmedabad alone (CHF International 2003). Only a miniscule fraction of this market is being served. Scaling up housing microfinance services and products to reach more low-income urban families while ensuring financial sustainability constitutes the most significant challenges for housing microfinance institutions in the city. The complex land and housing market dynamics, particularly the political and legal ramifications of land tenure, make housing microfinance more challenging to deliver in urban areas. Because many housing microfinance programs operate on a relatively small scale and lack the necessary political clout, they focus solely on housing improvement loans. SEWA, on the other hand, is candid about building on its institutional status and political connections to address land, housing, and infrastructure problems facing its membership. Through initiatives such as the Parivartan project, MHT, for example, uses its visibility and clout as a SEWA sister organization to lobby municipal and national authorities to gain some form of tenure security for its members. SEWA Bank’s increased recognition as a successful MFI has enabled it to tap into large pools of financial resources to finance housing services, but such access is not without its limitations. For example, SEWA Bank is able to secure capital from the Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO), the Indian public housing finance agency, at a belowmarket rate of 9 percent to on-lend to eligible borrowers at 13.5 percent.

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However, since HUDCO requires its borrowers to have legal title to the land they wish to build upon, SEWA is unable to use HUDCO funds to lend to a large majority of its urban slum-dwelling membership, even though SEWA Bank itself accepts promissory notes and other quasi-legal documents, as well as municipal guarantees of non-eviction (described in detail in the previous chapter), as proof of tenure security. Similar constraints limit the use of funds from the Housing Development Finance Corporation to serve slumdwelling populations. Persuading such organizations to accept proxies for de facto land security in situations where formal land title cannot be procured is an ongoing challenge for SEWA Bank. The artificial distinction between business loans, which are deemed productive, and housing and infrastructure loans, especially for the self-employed – many of whom are home-based workers – is another obstacle for MFIs when accessing wholesale loans from mainstream financial that earmark specific usage. Innovative solutions to housing problems devised by MFIs are often rendered difficult in practice because of such limitations. Connecting with government initiatives aimed at serving low-income populations so as to avoid duplication of schemes and services poses further challenges for MFIs. There are significant differences in opinion even among SEWA Bank and MHT staff about how to collaborate, and whether to collaborate at all, with municipal and state governments. The Urban Community Development Program, a government-subsidized scheme that aims to provide basic services to the poor is a good case in point. MHT attempted to collaborate with this program on an initiative called the Hundred Rupee Scheme, which required low-income families in possession of below-povertyline (BPL) certificates to pay a nominal fee of Rs.100 (US$2.50) toward subsidized legal electricity connections. MHT succeeded in collaborating with the government to deliver services in one Ahmedabad slum before withdrawing from the scheme. The Indian government’s definition of BPL, based solely on family income of Rs.1,100 (US$27.50) per month and the consumption of a minimum amount of calories on a daily basis, while obviously gender-insensitive and politically motivated to demonstrate declining poverty rates in the country, is so narrow and unrealistic that it qualifies practically no one, not even beggars, as poor. To participate in such initiatives, MHT was faced with the responsibility of haggling with the government to allow slum dwellers, who did not qualify as poor based strictly on the definition of BPL, to participate in the scheme. The high levels of corruption and low accountability hindered the accomplishment of targets, as did the inevitable delays in infrastructure delivery that occurred as a result of the sheer number of actors involved in the scheme. “Like us, poor people want efficient services. They would rather pay more for high-quality services that are delivered in an efficient manner than wait years for nothing,” remarked one MHT fieldworker. Other staff members commented that even after all

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the established criteria are fulfilled, the government may be strapped for resources and unable to release funds to complete promised upgradation. Consequently, what starts out as a Rs.100 scheme, frequently ends up as a Rs.1,000 or Rs.2,000 scheme for the poor. Similarly, Patel (1999) writes about a government scheme in Mumbai in which slum dwellers ended up paying Rs.35,000 (US$875) for the “free” houses they were promised. In addition to such limitations, there are fundamental deficiencies and contradictions in the conception of these government-subsidized schemes. Providing a family that earns less than Rs.1,100 (US$27.50) per month with a legal electricity connection over other basic services seems like an inappropriate intervention, since the family would in all likelihood not be able to pay its electricity bill over a longer period and literally end up in the dark again. MHT staff members emphasize that interventions designed to improve access to food, health services, clothing, and tin roofs, as well as release from bonded labour and repayment of previous debts with moneylenders, would be far more appropriate for extremely poor families. On the other hand, they stress that charging slum households that already have access to other basic services the market rate of Rs.5,200 (US$130), which they can acquire as a loan from SEWA Bank, for a legal electricity connection yields more sustainable results than more welfare-oriented approaches, as it obviates the need to depend on government subsidization, speeds up the delivery process, and raises the recipient’s entitlement to high-quality services. Organizations such as SEWA Bank and MHT are cognizant of the value of government recognition and support, yet such core conflicts in development philosophy make collaborations with state agencies cumbersome and frustrating. Despite these conflicts, NGOs and donor agencies increasingly recognize that working with governments might permit them to scale up dramatically, lock in achievements, and improve project or program implementation (Edwards and Hulme 1992; UN Centre for Human Settlements 1993). NGOs in the Philippines, Thailand, and Brazil, for example, have sought to develop strategies to secure wholesale adoption of their innovative housing finance strategies, including low-income mortgage options, through government programs (Datta and Jones 1999). The Kuyasa Fund, a housing MFI, builds on the opportunity presented by the South African government’s housing scheme. Available to South African citizens who do not already own a home and earn less than ZAR 3,500 (US$380) a month, the subsidy is intended to provide a twenty-six- to thirty-six-square-metre starter home. Kuyasa provides small loans to people who have accessed the state housing subsidy in order to improve or extend their starter homes (Mills 2007). Challenges and Opportunities in Accessing Housing Microfinance While organizations such as SEWA Bank and MHT struggle to find ways to provide their clientele with timely and easy access to shelter-related credit

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and infrastructural support, SEWA members face their own stumbling blocks in securing access to microfinance. Focus groups conducted with women in five slums that have been upgraded with basic amenities through the Parivartan initiative and eight slums that are awaiting upgradation revealed the following factors as the most prominent challenges women face in securing housing microfinance: fulfilling a guarantor requirement, unsuitability of loan amounts, high dependence on informal credit, availability of multiple sources of credit, and pressure to borrow for social mobility and prestige. Guarantor Requirement Of the several hurdles, including developing a savings habit, that a potential SEWA Bank borrower must get over to secure a housing loan, informal sector women workers who participated in my study stressed finding a guarantor government employee who earned at least Rs.4,000 (US$100) per month as the most difficult. The requirement was not as burdensome for borrowers who had friends, neighbours, or relatives who worked for the government, but since an overwhelming majority of slum residents worked in the informal sector, they either did not know anyone who worked for the government or did not know anyone who earned enough to serve as a guarantor. Consequently, they were compelled to approach people who were not friends or acquaintances to serve as guarantors and frequently forced to pay bribes ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand rupees for the “service.” Many women described having to beg people to serve as guarantors as humiliating and discouraging. Reshmaben, a study participant who sold panipuris (savoury Indian snacks) from a pushcart described her ordeal trying to find a guarantor: Government people always treat us badly. When they think we need something from them, it gives them more power and they treat us even worse. I had been saving with SEWA for over three years and I had taken two loans for business purposes in the past. The only thing that stopped me from getting a housing loan was the guarantor requirement. When I requested a government employee to be a guarantor, he gave me the runaround. He called me back to his office three times, and although I went to see him at the times he had specified, he was absent on each occasion. Then he demanded Rs.1,000. I did not have the money to offer as a bribe and felt very discouraged. I needed to raise the plinth of my house. The floods damaged my wares every year. I decided to borrow the money from a moneylender at this point although the interest rate was much higher. I got the loan on the same day.

Many similar stories attesting to the difficulties women faced in finding guarantors for their loans were related to me during the course of the research.

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SEWA Bank came into existence in response to the challenges self-employed women faced in securing access to credit from public and private sector banks that did not consider them creditworthy. In light of this, many study participants found it ironic that SEWA Bank would need potential borrowers to fulfill a salaried guarantor requirement that subjected them to the same humiliations and indignities that formal sector financial institutions did. The slums I conducted research in are home to a significant number of class IV government employees, which consists of drivers and cleaners, among others. Several study participants mentioned that often the difficulty was not so much in finding a government employee to guarantee a loan but in finding one who earned enough to be able to serve as a guarantor. Most class IV employees did not. Several women who had tried to secure loans through SEWA Bank mentioned that the bank sometimes arbitrarily turned down potential guarantors even when they earned enough to qualify as guarantors if their positions in government were not deemed high enough or “respectable” enough. One slum that was awaiting upgradation at the time of the research was home to a large number of men and women who worked as salaried cleaners for the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation. At Rs.4,000 (US$100) per month, they were significantly better paid than the other residents of the slum, who worked as domestic cleaners, cooks, and dishwashers in the more affluent housing societies and bungalows nearby, earning a maximum of Rs.1,500 (US$37.50) per month. Several slum residents mentioned that they had tried but failed to persuade SEWA Bank to accept municipal cleaners as loan guarantors. The exact reasons why specific individuals were declined as guarantors were difficult to gauge from the focus groups with SEWA members and from interviews with SEWA Bank staff, but it is of great concern that research participants have accused bank employees of elitist and intolerant attitudes toward them. Such revelations are especially disappointing in light of the bank’s genesis as a cooperative funded by the savings of informal sector women workers and designed exclusively to serve their financial needs. Upgraded slums enjoyed greater security of tenure, albeit usually in the form of verbal guarantees of non-eviction from the municipal corporation, than did non-upgraded slums. Consequently, residents in upgraded slums invest more money into improving their homes. Several women who had participated actively in community-based organizations during and after the upgradation of their slums expressed disappointment that SEWA Bank did not permit them to serve as guarantors to other women in the slums because they were not salaried government employees. One community organizer expressed her frustration with SEWA Bank’s contradictory attitudes toward them in these words:

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On one hand, the SEWA behans [sisters] tell us that their organization wants to empower informal sector women like us. On the other hand, they inform us that we cannot serve as guarantors to our sisters in the slums because we are not formal sector employees. So, what are they trying to tell us? That we’re good enough to serve as SEWA organizers and mobilizers, but not good enough to serve as guarantors? We live together, we work together, we help each other out during trouble, what more proof do they need that we’ll take care of each other?

Many other study participants expressed their disappointment about such double standards and the mixed messages they convey to self-employed women. They indicated that SEWA Bank could support their aspirations to improve their homes by devising alternate forms of collateral that were easier for informal sector workers to fulfill and by relaxing the rules to allow nongovernment employees and informal sector workers to serve as guarantors. Other organizations that provide women with credit also face challenges related to collateral and lending structures. The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh pioneered the substitution of physical collateral with social collateral, in the form of peer pressure exerted on clients by other members of the credit circles who risk losing their lending privileges as a result of the default by any one of its members. The bank has declared the peer-pressure model extremely successful, based solely on extremely high take-up and repayment rates, but it is not without its critics. Goetz and Sengupta (1996) warn that women’s high repayment rates may have less to do with profitable loan use than with a desire to maintain membership of one of the few social and public institutions to which they have legitimate access beyond the household. Research conducted by several scholars reveals that in the interest of protecting their line of credit and avoiding censure from other group members, women were occasionally forced to borrow money from the very moneylenders from whose clutches Grameen Bank was trying to extricate them, in order to repay their loans (ibid.; Rahman 1999). Women have also been shown to feed themselves and their families less in order to pay back the loans they were often forced to turn over to men (Karim 2004; Neff 1997). Other researchers question the ability of the groups to reach the poorest members of society and suggest that they are as much sites of oppression, exclusion, and violence against women as they are of support and camaraderie (Hulme 2000; Hulme and Mosley 1996; Wahid 1995). SEWA Bank does not require its borrowers to organize themselves into groups to receive credit, but a full 50 percent of women who participated in my research expressed a preference for the peer-pressure model over the guarantor requirement. These women stated unequivocally that since they lived in such

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proximity to one another and were privy to each other’s financial realities, they would be far more comfortable accepting joint liability for housing loans than approaching strangers to serve as guarantors. Microfinance institutions around the world have been quite creative in developing products and services that avoid barriers that have traditionally kept women from accessing formal financial services, for example, collateral requirements, male or salaried guarantor requirements, documentation requirements, cultural barriers, limited mobility, and literacy (Cheston and Kuhn 2002). When examples of such institutions and the requests made by members during focus groups were put to Jayshree Vyas, the managing director of SEWA Bank, she indicated that there was no stringent rule that the guarantor had to be a government employee, since it was possible to acquire proofs of income and to garnish a private sector employee’s wages just as easily.4 Vyas recognized the contradiction in terms of being unable to accept informal sector workers as guarantors but stressed that it was ironically because the bank was cooperatively owned by and accountable to its self-employed membership that it was unable to be flexible in its lending regulations. She explained that whereas formal sector banks were comfortable with a culture of default and able to write off large numbers of loans on a regular basis, doing so at SEWA Bank would be disastrous, as the bulk of its loan capital came from the savings of self-employed women who also served on its loan committee. Indeed, several finance programs in South Asia have become vulnerable to politicization and a few have succumbed because of a culture of writeoffs. In Sri Lanka, the repayment rate for the Million Houses Programme fell from 65 to 6 percent after a government decision to write off payments for members holding food stamps (Anzorena 1993). Loan recovery is generally very poor in politicized environments. For example, over the period from 1983 to 1993, the loan recovery of the Weaker Section Housing Programme (WSHP) in urban and rural Andhra Pradesh was 5.1 percent (Baken and Smets 1999). The WSHP loans were not perceived as ordinary loans but as a gift from local politicians who incessantly played down the need for adequate repayment and occasionally even forced “their” officers not to take action against borrowers (ibid.). In such environments, low-income households will obviously speculate on whether the populist moves of important politicians will free them from their obligation to repay loans. To protect the economic interests of its membership, SEWA Bank is understandably eager to avoid politicization of its lending practices and the large-scale default that may follow. According to Vyas (2003), informal sector workers were generally unable to guarantee housing loans because of the inadequacy and volatility of their incomes, yet they were able to serve as guarantors if they could secure the loans against adequate savings with SEWA Bank. She stressed that despite the bank’s attempts to treat loan applications on a case-by-case basis to

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ensure fairness, the dramatic growth in membership over the years and its current position as the largest microfinance organization in the state impeded to some extent the bank’s ability to experiment with alternate forms of collateral and lending regulations. Unsuitable Loan Amounts In addition to the guarantor requirement, study participants mentioned encountering difficulties because SEWA Bank’s housing loans were not tailored to the cost of home purchase or improvement. Instead, clients receive a preset amount that may exceed or fall short of the amount needed. This is contrary to the practices of many other microfinance institutions that have developed creative ways to peg the loan amounts as closely as possible to the client’s request or to an agreed-upon compromise (CHF International 2003). Study participants in non-upgraded and upgraded slums alike indicated that the maximum loan amount of Rs.25,000 (US$625) was insufficient for major repairs and improvements, for instance, raising the plinth of a house to protect it from flooding, adding an extra room, or upgrading from a kuccha (earthen) house to a pukka (permanent, disaster-proof) one. They mentioned that this shortfall forces those requiring major home improvements to borrow from multiple sources, including friends, relatives, and moneylenders, to cover the cost of the repairs or upgradation. Low-income public housing programs also tend to offer loans that are too small to allow for housing construction or major improvement. Baken and Smets (1999) report that the public loan-cum-grant offered through the WSHP in Andhra Pradesh covers roughly 40 percent of real unit costs. Consequently, a large number of beneficiaries are forced to obtain additional funds from informal sources which, combined with the required investment of a large share of income in the WSHP house and temporary shelter, forces many households into a debt trap. SEWA Bank’s housing products are better designed to serve women seeking to make improvements to their homes than those seeking to buy or construct new homes. This is true too of other credit unions and banks servicing the low-income housing sector. Scoggins (1995) and Ferguson (2001) note that whereas small home improvement loans are generally addressed within the framework of existing resources and policies, most credit union systems have experienced some difficulty in responding to member needs for financing of housing construction and purchase of new homes. The maximum loan amounts may have emerged out of the general understanding that the poor already own some form of housing, however inadequate, and need financial support to upgrade their dwellings. This is in sharp contrast to the findings of my study, which documented that large numbers of urban poor, and particularly women-headed households, live in extremely vulnerable informal renting, subletting, sharing, and lodging arrangements. Approximately

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25 percent of all families in the slums included in this research rent their homes. Of these, 30 percent are households where women are the primary or sole breadwinners. Such households are unable to buy their own homes because of economic insecurity and lack of financial services to meet their needs. The maximum housing loan amount offered by SEWA Bank may not be adequate to cover the cost of major improvements, but it certainly falls far short of covering the cost of an outright purchase or construction of a new home. The dilemma faced by Ushaben, an MHT fieldworker, illustrates well the situation faced by families in rental living arrangements in slums. Ushaben lives with her husband and daughter in one of the slums that had been upgraded through the Parivartan initiative. The family had moved to Ahmedabad from a neighbouring town less than five years ago and chosen to live in a slum because it was affordable. She paid Rs.1,000 (US$25) per month in rent for the one-room home that had been equipped with a toilet, water supply, and electricity connection through the upgradation project. Ushaben was the sole breadwinner in the family, as her husband had lost his factory job a few years ago. She had worked with MHT for over three years at the time of my research and spent a lot of time familiarizing herself with SEWA Bank’s lending practices and regulations. As a salaried SEWA employee, the maximum housing loan amount was easily available to her, but it barely covered a third of the cost of a one-room house in the same community she rented in. Despite being a SEWA employee, Ushaben had had no success in raising the ceiling on the maximum loan amount from SEWA Bank. She told me that to be able to purchase a house, she would have to either take another loan from a bank or supplement the SEWA Bank loan with savings and other loans from family and friends.5 The rise in property values in upgraded slums had ironically made buying a home less affordable than it had been before upgradation. Similar situations described by women in upgraded and non-upgraded slums during the course of my research point to the need for SEWA Bank to be more flexible in its lending practices, loan amounts, and loan repayment timelines to meet the needs not just of clients who wanted to upgrade their homes but also of those who currently pay rent and want to purchase or construct a new home. Introducing a mortgage option in slums with security of tenure would be a welcome intervention. The repayment periods for microfinance loans – including housing loans – were shorter because it was assumed that poorer borrowers would not be comfortable with being indebted for longer periods. Increasingly, however, there are borrowers who are willing and able to incur larger debts over longer periods. The housing microfinance products that are currently offered by SEWA Bank will probably need to be further fine-tuned in the future to keep up with the changing needs and growing financial strengths of its borrowers.

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High Dependence on Informal Credit My study revealed that large numbers of women in slums, both SEWA and non-SEWA members, borrowed from moneylenders at non-reducing balance interest rates ranging from 10 to 12 percent for microenterprise as well as housing purposes. Several reasons were offered for this by women who participated in my study. Some identified their inability to fulfil SEWA Bank’s basic lending requirement of developing a savings habit as the main reason for continuing to borrow from moneylenders. Most slum residents considered themselves too poor to have any money to save. What little they managed to scrounge was saved at home, as they assumed that it was too small an amount for any bank to accept. Along with lowness and irregularity of income, frequent financial setbacks such as illnesses and other family emergencies were offered by study participants as reasons for their inability to save even small amounts on a regular basis. A few participants mentioned their distrust of formal sector institutions and well-established bonds of trust with moneylenders as reasons for their preference. Women who borrowed regularly from moneylenders for business and subsistence purposes indicated that they were aware that moneylenders were more expensive to borrow from since they charge interest for the duration of the repayment on the total amount borrowed, unlike SEWA Bank, which charges interest on a reducing balance. They explained that the urgency of their needs and their inability to save regularly with SEWA Bank perpetuated their dependence on moneylenders. Many women had heard of other women’s unsuccessful attempts to borrow from SEWA Bank and did not want to spend time applying for loans that they may or may not get when they were assured that the moneylenders would always lend them the money, albeit frequently at much higher interest rates and within more rigid repayment time frames. Although women regularly offered jewellery to moneylenders and pawnbrokers to secure their loans, most were not aware that it was possible to offer the same to SEWA Bank as collateral in lieu of savings. Many women seemed to continue to borrow money from moneylenders because they were either ill-informed about SEWA’s lending policies or unconvinced that they would be considered creditworthy. This is surprising given SEWA Bank’s extensive mobilizing and awareness-raising efforts in slum communities – though I did observe significant differences in knowledge about SEWA Bank’s financial services in upgraded and non-upgraded slums. The number of women purchasing financial and insurance services or products seems to be much higher in areas where SEWA Bank has had a presence for a longer time. An excerpt from a profile I wrote of Kailashnagar, a community of two hundred households that was awaiting upgradation in 2003 but where mobilizing efforts had begun two years earlier, highlights the notion that communities that have been exposed to SEWA Bank and MHT for a longer

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period are more likely to buy into not just its financial products and services over those of informal sources but also SEWA’s organizing philosophy: There is a fairly dramatic change in saving behaviour in this community since its exposure to SEWA Bank and MHT. Prior to this, most women we spoke with had never attempted to save anything. Whenever they did attempt to stash the odd bill or coin under the mattress or behind a door, it was almost inevitably appropriated by other members of the family. All women we spoke with currently saved a small part of their earnings on a regular basis. They maintained control over their passbooks and deposited Rs.100 [US$2.50] on a monthly basis for Parivartan facilities. Work on the project is expected to commence in March or April of 2003. In addition to saving money for upgradation services, about a hundred women in Kailashnagar deposit money regularly into savings accounts and another fifty have availed themselves of the benefits of Jeevan Asha, a life insurance scheme offered by SEWA Bank and saved Rs.5 or 10 [US$0.13 or 0.25] on a daily basis. In recent months, women have also signed up for Chinta Nivaran, a retirement scheme, and a few women are eager to join pension schemes. Twelve women in Kailashnagar have taken loans from SEWA; eight of these are for daily-use purposes and four are for the construction of pukka houses. Many more women hope to take out housing loans within the year. They have only been saving for a few months and do not qualify yet for a housing loan. Geetaben, the bank saathi [fieldworker] for the area, estimates that the women in Kailashnagar have borrowed at least Rs.100,000 (US$2,500) from SEWA Bank thus far.

A significant number of women mentioned that they preferred borrowing from moneylenders because they could not afford to lose the money deducted from the loan amount for document fees, stamp fees, and life insurance when they took out a loan with SEWA Bank. One participant describes her preference for borrowing from a moneylender: When I approach a bank for Rs.10,000 [US$250], I need Rs.10,000. I cannot afford to go home with Rs.7,000 [US$175] after all the fees and insurance have been taken out because then I would have to go to a moneylender for the other Rs.3,000 [US$75]. If I’m going to take one loan from SEWA Bank and another loan from the moneylender, I might as well take it all from the moneylender. At least I know he’ll give me the money immediately and he won’t turn down my application.

Larger take-home amounts and not having to manage the inconvenience of paying back multiple loans were cited by other participants as reasons for borrowing from moneylenders. Most women appreciated the value of having

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life insurance, though many perceived it as a luxury they could not afford. Large numbers of women too did not seem to fully understand the concept of the consolidated life and health insurance package SEWA offered. An excerpt from the profile I wrote of a slum awaiting upgradation illustrates this: Knowledge about insurance services simply did not exist among the women in Santoshinagar, and when we attempted to briefly explain the kinds of plans that were offered, they seemed largely incredulous. Explaining the concept of insurance to informal sector workers is in itself a huge challenge. At the same time, several women spoke about spending huge amounts of money in the past year on serious illnesses and being constantly worried about losing the primary breadwinner in the family, so it’s difficult to imagine that women wouldn’t want to invest in insurance services if they understood the concept better.

Residents of another slum were reasonably well informed about insurance services but claimed that they did not have the cash flow to purchase them. Like other communities, their knowledge of insurance services seems to be focused on the fact that they would lose the money if nothing happened that required them to make a claim. Srinivasan (2009) emphasizes that the perspectives of the insured and the insurer differ greatly, leading to a low level of customization of insurance products and low demand for the limited products on offer. The high medical and hospitalization expenses borne by most residents and the high levels of indebtedness to moneylenders because of emergencies seem to suggest that residents would be interested in health insurance, at the very least, if their understanding of how it worked improved. Similar observations in other case study slums support the need for SEWA to scale up its efforts to educate slum populations about the value of insurance services. Vimo-SEWA staff members identify lack of regular contact between members and fieldworkers, lack of systematic follow up by fieldworkers, and lack of understanding of reasons for rejection of claims as the major reasons for low purchase and renewal rates of insurance policies. A study of microinsurance coverage in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu identifies inadequate marketing effort by MFIs as the major reason for low demand for insurance despite intense need among low-income populations (UN Development Programme 2007). Before January 2002, SEWA Bank had required all housing loan clients to purchase life insurance. The bank required the client to open a fixed savings insurance account and deduct the amount required for that account from the loan amount; the interest earned on the account was used to cover the insurance premium. Because of borrower frustrations such as those expressed above, as well as internal administrative changes within SEWA, the bank suspended the insurance requirement and is now reviewing its insurance

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structure. Life insurance was the largest deduction made from the loan amount, as the document fee and the stamp fee add up to a very small amount. The concerns expressed by study participants about life insurance deductions were not valid at the time the research was conducted but, because the changes to the requirement had not been well publicized in slums, most women remained under the assumption that they still applied and it continued to serve as a disincentive for accessing housing microfinance from SEWA Bank. This finding further underscores the need for SEWA to deepen and broaden its efforts to inform established and potential members about the range of financial services and products it offers, and to keep them updated about changes in bank policy and lending regulations. By 2007, SEWA Bank once again required clients borrowing more than Rs.10,000 (US$250) to purchase life insurance. A study that investigates the implications of this policy for borrowing patterns would be valuable. The issue that I want to highlight is not so much whether this policy is in place but that changes in policy “on the books” are not being communicated clearly “on the ground.” My findings emphasize, as Smets (2006) does, that even when the poor are able to obtain financial services, they may face problems of access because of cultural, informational, and physical barriers. Availability of Multiple Sources of Credit Much of the literature on microcredit asserts that poor women may already have adequate access to credit through informal means (Armendariz de Aghion and Morduch 2005; De Soto 2000). Therefore, I was not surprised to discover that women in most case study slums had access to multiple sources of funding, albeit not through formal MFIs. Besides loans from SEWA Bank, friends, and relatives, women in several case study slums could access money from local chit funds, moneylenders, pawnbrokers, and shopkeepers.6 Armendariz de Aghion and Morduch (2005) and Noponen (2005) have, among others, asserted that MFIs do not necessarily reduce reliance on moneylenders. Instead, they serve to diversify sources of borrowing and to change the terms on which credit may be obtained. Although I did not perceive the continued reliance on informal sources of credit as problematic in itself, I attempted to understand the borrowing behaviour of women and to identify the sources they relied on for acquiring credit for numerous purposes. Women in slums experience a variety of stresses and crises throughout their lives. They are also required to respond to life-cycle events that demand substantial amounts of money. Focus groups with slum-dwelling women revealed that setbacks and crises may arise from many events – for instance, the death of an earning family member, a prolonged illness, sustained medication or hospitalization of a family member, death and disease

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of poultry and livestock, and damage to dwellings because of floods, earthquakes, and riots. They also require financial support to respond to a wide range of social events – engagements, weddings, deaths, pregnancies, births, and naming ceremonies. Coping with emergencies, crises, and life-cycle events is a daunting task, and most women respond proactively by diversifying and combining economic activities at the household level and reactively by using up their savings and borrowing from diverse sources on different terms and conditions. Loans taken from different sources are not always used exclusively for the purposes for which they were intended. For example, it is not uncommon for a woman to take out a loan to repair a house but to put part of it to meet an unavoidable outstanding debt or all of it to meet the medical expenses of a sick child or an earning member of the household, to use a quarter of it as a bribe to secure an illegal electricity connection, or to put some of it into a potentially profitable microenterprise. An enquiry into credit need and the sources women relied on to meet those needs revealed some interesting patterns. In addition to SEWA Bank and chit funds or self-help groups, relatives and moneylenders represented two important loan sources in the case study slums. A majority of focus group participants indicated that they were more likely to turn to friends, relatives, and shopkeepers for frequent smaller loans with which to buy medications and essential food grains, buy bags or books for children, raise the money for travel to attend social functions, and occasionally to pay a loan instalment. They were more likely to turn to moneylenders for larger loans required for medical exigencies, home repair, and social or life-cycle events (marriages, funerals). A full 50 percent of the women who participated in focus groups mentioned borrowing from moneylenders or pawnbrokers at least once in the past twelve months. Although SEWA Bank served as the major source of credit for households that could not afford the Rs.2,000 (US$50) they were required to contribute toward the infrastructure delivered by the Parivartan scheme, a significant 17 percent of study participants described supplementing the amount received from SEWA Bank with loans from moneylenders to come up with their contribution. Almost as many had also borrowed from moneylenders or pawnbrokers to secure legal and illegal electricity connections. A small but distinct percentage of slum dwellers also borrowed from present or past employers. No interest was usually charged in these transactions, but the loans were always advanced through some form of patronage where the lender was reassured of being compensated through the free or liberal use of the borrower’s labour. Women who borrowed money from employers perceived it to be a dependable source of credit and generally considered the terms of these loans gentler than those available from moneylenders and pawnbrokers. Offering one’s own labour as well as one’s family labour

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as collateral was considered a viable arrangement by many women who participated in the research. In most cases, the employers were those in more affluent households where slum residents performed domestic chores. Slum residents indicated that besides loaning them money when they needed it, such “patron” households supported them with gifts and money during weddings, festivals, and other social events. Other authors discuss how bettereducated women are benefiting from the opening up of well-paid professional, administrative, and managerial positions to women in urban centres across Asia but relying increasingly on poorer women in slums to assist with domestic labour and care work (Huq-Hussain 1996; Momsen 1999; Tam 1999). The same authors suggest that along with the burden of guilt and dependence they create, such arrangements may increase the social and economic polarization between well-educated upper- and middle-class households and poorer households. I tried to gain a sense of borrowing patterns for housing purposes by asking participants how much major home improvements cost. They indicated that popular upgradations in slums, for example, raising the plinth of a house to prevent it from flooding during the monsoons or adding an extra room as storage or living space, typically cost between Rs.60,000 (US$1,500) and Rs.70,000 (US$1,750). To fund this upgrading, SEWA members usually borrowed Rs.25,000 (US$625) from SEWA Bank, acquiring the rest of the funds in loans from relatives and moneylenders or pawnbrokers. There was almost unanimous agreement among SEWA members that they would prefer to borrow a larger amount at a lower interest rate from SEWA Bank and to supplement the rest as necessary through interest-free loans from relatives. “I feel as if we spend our lives just paying off the interest to moneylenders while the principal amount remains undiminished,” commented one participant. This finding further strengthens the call for SEWA Bank to raise the maximum loan amounts available to members. One disturbing outcome of the availability of multiple sources of funding was the high incidence of fraud in several case study communities. Most slum residents’ faith in the formal banking sector was extremely low to begin with. Their experiences of being duped multiple times by unscrupulous people had embittered them and made them extremely distrustful of people and agencies offering financial products, services, or help. In most cases, it took SEWA Bank and MHT fieldworkers several visits to convince slum dwellers that they were an established organization and not fly-by-night operators. Such gains were frequently eroded when slum dwellers were swindled of their savings by spurious credit organizations that claimed to deliver the same products and services as SEWA at a much lower cost. SEWA Bank and MHT occasionally took slum dwellers on guided tours of all SEWA organizations in order to convince them of the legitimacy of their operations. These

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strategies did build bonds of trust between SEWA and the slum communities, yet similar strategies were used by fake organizations and banks to rob residents of their savings. For example, residents in an non-upgraded slum in the heart of West Ahmedabad mentioned that a representative from an organization calling itself “Kalupur Bank” had visited their colony a year earlier, urging residents to open bank accounts. Many residents had opened accounts at the representative’s insistence, only to have him abscond with their savings a few months later. One family lost Rs.1,000 and another Rs.2,000 in this venture. Some slum residents had also been taken to see a “bank” in Ahmedabad that had ceased to exist a few months after the visit. Whereas the availability of multiple sources of funding may help some women figure out different permutations and combinations to borrow money on affordable terms and conditions to suit their needs, others contend that it often leads to rash borrowing habits far in excess of repayment capacity. Observation of such trends motivated SEWA Bank to develop a financial literacy and counselling program to educate informal sector women about meeting their lifetime financial needs through a combination of credit, savings, and insurance instruments. Such a component is definitely a promising new addition to the range of financial services SEWA Bank offers, since, in its absence, having a repertoire of credit choices may ironically undermine women’s efforts to rise out of poverty and indebtedness. Kabeer (1998) and Randriamaro (2001) endorse the view that credit services are most successful when they include training in financial planning. Similarly, Rakowski (1999) approves of organizations that link credit to training, saving, advising, organizing, and health care. She criticizes the “minimalist” credit-only model preferred by many MFIs and bemoans its widespread acceptance as a “best practice” within the microcredit community based solely on growing clientele and high repayment. Other researchers emphasize that the rationale for operating minimalist microfinance programs are driven less by a belief that such programs have the greatest impact on poverty than by an acceptance that “sustainability” – defined as the ability of the program to continue indefinitely into the future – is an essential attribute of MFIs (Dichter 1996; Rogaly 1996). In a similar vein, Smillie (2009) notes that Grameen Bank, Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, and others offer specific loan products that they have created with specific parameters, terms, and rates of interest, designed to make the lender, not the borrower, self-sufficient. He points out that although the same organizations frequently refer to credit being a “human right,” this is not the stuff of rights that poor people can demand or even shape very much. The same researcher also notes a predictable contradiction in the ability of MFIs to simultaneously scale up and maintain the quality of their portfolio. In general, among NGOs involved in housing finance there is a preference for the non-minimalist approach.

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A review of NGO-led housing programs in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Russia reveal training, financial counselling, and even building assistance programs to be part of NGO agendas (Datta and Jones 1999). Borrowing for Social Mobility and Prestige The need to provide financial counselling alongside credit services is supported by the number of families that borrowed money from multiple sources for social mobility purposes. Since social identities in contemporary India are increasingly being shaped by conspicuous consumption of easily purchasable consumer goods – televisions, DVD players, cellphones, and the like – poor urban households experience exclusion in simple and painful ways. This further exacerbates the tendency to borrow unwisely. Indeed, helping women understand the disadvantages of non-essential borrowing and spending because of social pressure to conform or other reasons is one of the explicit objectives of SEWA Bank’s financial counselling program (SEWA Bank 2003). At least a dozen women who participated in my study reported borrowing large sums of money, sometimes up to Rs.50,000 (US$1,250), so that they could, for example, spend more on their children’s weddings or daughters’ dowries. Rankin (2004) emphasizes that spending on lavish weddings and feasts does enable families to build social status within their communities, but it also leads to high levels of indebtedness for poor families in general and for poor women in particular. Mayoux (2002) writes that even though female targeting may ensure higher repayment rates and cost-effectiveness for MFIs, in the absence of adequate support networks and training, providing credit only to women may shift the entire burden of household debt and subsistence and even of development itself on to women. In her research in Africa, Mayoux (1999) explains how microcredit programs led to small increases in income for women but at the cost of heavier workload and repayment pressures such that the growing autonomy of women had led to the corresponding withdrawal of financial and emotional support from men. My research echoes concerns expressed by others working in urban and rural contexts (see, for example, Bagati 2003; Karim 2008) about whether access to financial services for women allowed men to use women as mere conduits for acquiring credit while providing men with justification for reducing their contributions to everyday household expenses as well as long-term household needs. Indeed, men may be very supportive of women’s microfinance and other income-generating activities for this very reason. A few members of the local NGO community in Ahmedabad expressed fears that the increased availability of microcredit to women in slum communities in recent years may merely serve to keep them mired in a vicious circle of basic survival and indebtedness without significantly altering social norms or rendering gender relations more egalitarian. Vijayalakshmi Das, director

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of the Ahmedabad-based Friends of Women’s World Banking (FWWB), stresses that expenses of social activities such as marriages and of dowry demands have increased because of women’s access to finance. She emphasizes that larger family incomes acquired through women’s increasing financial viability is being put primarily toward non-productive purposes: Microcredit is a good tool, but men have manipulated it to their advantage. It was thought that financial services would enhance a woman’s status, but she is so weak in society that she is unable to use the tool to empower herself vis-à-vis the men in her life or in society at large. Because it is an inherently chauvinistic society, men are able to manipulate the tool in such a way that they retain their status in society. Whenever they’ve taken loans, they’ve never returned them, so they know that they’ll never get a loan from a bank. Now they use their wives, daughters, sister, or mothers to borrow, and women just become instrumental in enhancing the male ego. (V. Das 2003)

Given the large number of women in slums who perceive the ability to access credit as a very positive development in their lives, this is perhaps an overly pessimistic and generalized assessment of the outcome of women’s increasing access to microcredit. However, it is important to note that whereas organizations such as SEWA have devoted much energy to increasing women’s access to credit and other financial services, less attention has been paid to ensuring that women retain control over the assets created as a result of access. Loans taken for business or housing purposes are exclusively in the names of women, and the burden of repayment falls disproportionately on their shoulders, yet women are less readily able to secure assets such as houses, land, and work tools in their names. Vijayalakshmi Das (2003) acknowledges this critical deficiency when she mentions that as well as looking at whether women have adequate access to microcredit, SEWA, FWWB, and similar organizations should monitor whether women are able to retain control over the assets created. Addressing questions about what happens to an asset after a woman dies and whether female inheritors are able to reap equal benefits from the mother’s ownership is crucial if these organizations are truly committed to empowering women and transforming gender relations. Microcredit programs enjoy tremendous popularity within mainstream development organizations and donor agencies. Microcredit enthusiasts across the world vowed to provide loans to 100 million of the poorest families of the world by the year 2005, demanding at least US$21 billion from governments, aid organizations, commercial lenders, and other sources (Microcredit Summit 1997). The United Nations declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit. By the end of 2006, the Microcredit Summit Campaign claimed that its target of 100 million borrowers had been exceeded by 33

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million. The Grameen Bank and its founder, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, were awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. With renewed vigour and validation, the 2006 Global Microcredit Summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia, set itself a new target of reaching 175 million poor around the globe by 2015 (Smillie 2009). Despite global enthusiasm, deficiencies in the provision of microcredit services are gradually being acknowledged, albeit vaguely, in the assessment of the impact of financial services and products offered even by “showcase” MFIs such as Grameen Bank and SEWA Bank. In 2005, Thomas Dichter, an engaged and thoughtful critic of international development, described the unfettered global excitement about microfinance as “an almost perfect case of a phenomenon that has come to characterize much of development assistance, a widening gap between reality and propaganda” (Dichter 2005). Even more telling in its relevance for this study, the World Bank (2001) has argued that Grameen Bank loans to women tend to lead to an increase in girls’ schooling and in per capita consumption, a reduction in fertility, and increases in women’s paid work and non-land assets. Writing mostly about Latin America, Caroline Moser had as early as 1987 observed that because women accept primary responsibility for household budgeting, the financing of housing and repayment of loans is often their responsibility. Even though husbands often agree to loan conditions, wives have to balance household budgets to pay the loans back. A household’s commitment to upgrading its house to a certain standard in a certain time can have an impact on other aspects of household finance. Women may end up cutting back on food and working much harder in order to save money to repay loans. Other studies of the impact of loans on recipients reveal that although microfinance offers women opportunities to develop entrepreneurial skills and to purchase assets, it may also lead to the feminization of indebtedness (Akhter 2000). In South Africa, loan officers with the Kuyasa Fund have found that women are much more interested than men in becoming members of saving groups. On the other hand, women’s employment continues to be less well paid and more precarious than that of men, making men’s incomes a more reliable basis for accessing credit. In the past, and particularly where women have taken loans, spouses have refused responsibility for Kuyasa loan repayments despite steadier income flows. Kuyasa now requires that the spouses of married applicants co-sign loan applicants to ensure that responsibility for repayment lies with both partners and comes from both incomes (Mills 2007). Although the term itself remains deeply contested, much of the literature, including my own research, suggests that owning property is indeed “empowering” for women (Baruah 2004b; Friedemann-Sanchez 2006; Grown, Gupta, and Kes 2005). Much less evidence exists as to whether housing loans empower women. Overall, my findings seem to reinforce those of Adams and Mayoux (2001) and Rankin (2002), who suggest that credit alone, whether for housing or for entrepreneurship, is not enough to bring about

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meaningful social change and may in fact entrench rather than challenge traditional gender roles. The inherently political, complex, and potentially conflict-ridden nature of “empowerment” itself means that any one intervention, whether microfinance or other, will inevitably make only a limited contribution in isolation. Like Kantor (2005), I wish to emphasize that scholars and practitioners of microfinance must focus on ways to improve women’s status within their homes so that they can contribute to and benefit equitably from the decisions made within their households. Conclusion Impact evaluations of shelter finance illustrate that housing microfinance can serve poor households and help them improve their livelihoods and quality of life. In this chapter, I am critical of certain aspects of MHT and SEWA Bank’s philosophy and performance, but there is no doubt that such organizations can play an important role in addressing housing needs and poverty alleviation for low-income populations. I would emphasize as Schmidt and Zeitinger (1996, 248) do that the “question is not whether NGOs should be instruments of development, but how they are to be incorporated.” As the only significant financial institution providing housing microfinance to women in the informal sector in Gujarat, SEWA Bank has gained considerable experience in developing products and services to meet the needs of its urban and rural membership. Most external evaluators give SEWA Bank very high ratings for operational and administrative efficiency (CHF International 2003; USAID/DAI 2000). However, the same evaluations stress that despite SEWA Bank having reached full financial self-sufficiency and institutional maturity, its outstanding portfolio does not match its far greater potential. I have described above how the successes enjoyed by SEWA Bank in providing housing microfinance to low-income self-employed women have ironically led to second-generation problems, most notably the need to scale up outreach capacity and to diversify collateral requirements and financial products in a sustainable manner. SEWA Bank and MHT should judge carefully how to engage in collaborations with public and private entities if they are to avoid the risk of bureaucratization and politicization. Dovetailing products and services with government and privatesector initiatives designed to serve low-income populations, even if frequently fraught with conflict between the different players, offers immense potential for scaling up outreach, as does the possibility of SEWA Bank serving as a liaison to connect low-income urban populations to subsidized government housing schemes that they would not otherwise be able to access on their own. Gaining more donor support and government recognition will be valuable too in ensuring long-term financial sustainability. SEWA Bank and MHT have successfully used the Parivartan project, which aims to deliver basic infrastructure to people living in slums, as a vehicle to expand

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its client base beyond the existing membership in Ahmedabad slums. However, loans for infrastructure retrofitting represent only 4 percent of SEWA Bank’s total housing portfolio. Because SEWA Bank and MHT fieldworkers have already established a relationship with families participating in the Parivartan project, these families are excellent candidates for future home purchase and improvement loans. Other researchers have arrived at similar conclusions about the potential of providing microfinancing for low-income households wishing to invest in improved water supply and sanitation services. Through in-depth interviews with more than eight hundred households in the city of Hyderabad, Davis and colleagues (2008) concluded that a substantial proportion of low-income households would invest in water and sewer network connections even if they were provided with market (not concessional) rates of financing. SEWA Bank and MHT are extremely well positioned to increase the size of their housing portfolio in such communities. On a broader scale, a recent study conducted for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of thirty-eight countries in three subregions – East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa – revealed significant potential demand for housing microfinance in all regions (M. Mehta 2008). In terms of country estimates, India accounted for nearly 44 percent of the global potential demand for water supply and 46 percent of the global demand for sanitation. The same review highlights that only a few large MFIs have shown an interest in the water and sanitation sector, as it continues to be relatively unknown and is perceived as high risk. Organizations such as SEWA Bank and MHT can play a very important role in meeting water and sanitation needs not just by scaling up their own operations but also by demonstrating incentives and providing leadership for other MFIs to join the sector. Countries that have a good balance between the size of potential demand for water and sanitation services and the size of the microfinance and wider financial sectors – for instance, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, South Africa, Senegal, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Kenya – offer immediate potential for scaling up. Whereas affordability for a lender is usually a function of operational and financial sustainability, affordability for a borrower is a function of capacity to pay, loan terms, and cost. To reach low-income households with housing finance, innovative schemes and institutional arrangements are required. Insight into the livelihood strategies of poor urban households is extremely useful too. My fieldwork with SEWA’s membership in urban slums identified meeting salaried guarantor requirements, developing a regular savings habit as a precursor to borrowing, and acquiring loan amounts suitable for purchase or improvement of housing as key challenges self-employed women face in securing access to housing microfinance. Suitable policy responses from

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SEWA Bank might include experimenting with alternate collateral requirements in the form of group liability or other social collateral; durable goods and mortgage liens to offset the requirements of salaried guarantors and savings; raising the ceiling on maximum loans amounts to facilitate not just home improvement but also new purchase and construction; and encouraging women’s participation in financial literacy and counselling programs, through financial incentives if necessary, to discourage reckless borrowing from multiple informal sources. I discovered that a large number of women in slums continued to rely disproportionately on moneylenders and pawnbrokers over formal MFIs such as SEWA Bank because they were ill-informed about the lending policies of formal financial institutions. SEWA Bank frequently revised lending regulations and criteria to better suit the needs of its membership, but because most potential borrowers remained uninformed about such policy changes, they continued to view attempting to borrow from formal financial institutions as exercises in futility. Stepping up efforts to deepen and broaden borrower knowledge of institutional policies and lending regulations would serve the interests of SEWA Bank and its current and future clientele. SEWA Bank and MHT have made remarkable progress in increasing women’s access to housing and other financial services, though less attention has been paid to ensuring that women retain control over the assets created as a result of increased access. Among study participants, it was much more frequently the housing loan and not the house that was in the name of women. MHT has successfully lobbied the local municipality to issue water tax and electricity bills in the names of female heads of households; however, SEWA Bank encourages but does not require that women have their names on property titles when receiving housing loans. In the interest of enabling women to retain control over assets, it must be mandatory and not just desirable for women to have their names on housing documents before securing housing microfinance. (Policy changes to facilitate inclusion of women’s names on property titles are discussed in detail in the previous chapter.) It is imperative too that housing loans are defined as family loans, where both husband and wife are held responsible for repayment. N. Datta (2006), for instance, has written about the positive effects on women of joint titling of houses in urban informal settlements in Chandigarh, India. Over the past three decades, microfinance has grown dramatically in popularity and outreach to become a widespread and mainstream development intervention. When identifying ways to make microfinance more accessible and affordable to low-income populations in general and women in particular, it is difficult to ignore that the use of microfinance carries implicit assumptions about how development should occur. As a development methodology, it is firmly embedded within a neo-liberal framework

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that seeks to increase access to existing financial resources without really challenging the entrenched status quo of unequal power relations between various groups of people. Speaking about inequality in Brazil, Archbishop Helder Camara once wryly observed that when he fed the poor, he was called a saint, but when he asked why they were poor, he was called a communist! Despite some calls for less capitalistic and more radical approaches to address poverty and inequality on a global scale, microfinance has enjoyed tremendous popularity precisely because it sits easily with the broader neo-liberal macroeconomic trends around the world. Microfinance and its associated goods and services will probably continue to enjoy tremendous support from governments, NGOs, and donor agencies for some time to come. This should not foreclose the possibility for more creative and complex engagement with the deep-rooted structural inequalities that permeate human societies around the world today, as well as for more Promethean visions and innovative solutions to promote human dignity and social justice.

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7 Partnership Projects for Urban Basic Services

This chapter addresses the opportunities and constraints that organizations such as MHT and SEWA Bank face in meeting the needs of their members and advocating on their behalf within the context of multiple-stakeholder partnership projects such as the Slum Networking Project (SNP). In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, I addressed the primary objectives of this book by outlining in detail the grounded constraints and opportunities low-income urban women face in securing access to land and housing. I discussed in Chapter 2 how women’s ability to organize themselves into large cohesive collectives significantly improves their ability not only to muster support from civil society organizations seeking reform but also to bargain with the state for genderprogressive legal and policy reform. In the same chapter, I highlighted the importance of sustaining strategic alliances between women’s organizations and the state, since the latter has the power both to enact laws and formulate policies in women’s favour, and to increase women’s access to productive resources. Maxine Molyneux’s conceptualization (1985) and classic distinction between women’s practical and strategic needs may apply as well to women’s organizations. The process of meeting the practical needs of women’s organizations may transform into fulfilling more strategic goals of gender equity and social justice. The research for this book was conducted in collaboration with MHT and SEWA Bank. Both are organizations with explicit mandates to organize lowincome women around their housing needs and to optimize women’s access to housing financial services. All research participants were members of the umbrella SEWA organization, within which MHT is an independently registered NGO, and SEWA Bank is an independently registered cooperative bank. Since I was located within MHT for the duration of my fieldwork, I had the opportunity to observe first-hand some of the challenges and opportunities organizations engaged in housing activities face in accomplishing their objectives. Because much of the momentum for the mobilization around land and housing issues for women comes from organizations such as MHT,

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the opportunities and constraints they face in performing their duties are as relevant to my research as those experienced by the women these organizations represent. In addition, because my research was conducted within the context of a city-wide slum upgradation partnership project between the public sector, the private sector, NGOs, and community-based organization (CBOs), it provided me with the opportunity to shed light on the content, process, and politics of such partnerships. Attempting to engage with the interactions between stakeholders in such partnerships, even when they do not relate directly to gendered needs or concerns, is essential because slum upgradation initiatives across India are increasingly being implemented through partnerships among state, civil society organizations, CBOs, and other actors. These partnerships are sites within which urban women’s specific needs and entitlements to landed property are likely to emerge in the future.1 This chapter attempts to address these institutional and partnership issues. I begin by briefly exploring the literature on partnerships to arrive at a definition that provides a lens for analyzing the interactions between the different actors in the Slum Networking Project. I follow this by outlining why providing adequate housing to urban populations, and especially to the economically disadvantaged sections among them, has emerged as a key challenge in rapidly urbanizing South Asia. I describe the evolution over the decades of governmental attitudes toward slums and squatter settlements and the entry of NGOs in the region into the domain of housing and housing infrastructure provision. Most of the material presented here is based on information derived from formal and informal interactions with the staff and fieldworkers at MHT and SEWA Bank, other local NGOs, the private sector, CBOs, funding organizations, and the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC). I document and critically analyze the experiences of MHT and SEWA Bank in partnering with the state, the private sector, multilateral funding agencies, CBOs, and other NGOs in developing and delivering housing infrastructure programs for low-income urban families living in slums. Using MHT as a case study, I elaborate on challenges and opportunities NGOs engaged in housing activities may face in collaborating with partners with different core philosophies, motivations, working styles, strengths, and constraints. I conclude the chapter with recommendations that would enable stakeholders to play an optimal role in partnerships designed to improve the living and working conditions of urban low-income households. My research participants are all members of SEWA. Since the overarching objective of SEWA and its sister organizations is to organize women to struggle for better living and working conditions and, specifically, for greater overall empowerment of informal sector women, I also briefly discuss the potential for organizing women around their needs for land, housing, and

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Partnership Projects for Urban Basic Services 177

housing infrastructure to secure more strategic gains in political participation, community leadership, and gender relations within and outside the household. Partnerships for Development: Purposes and Perspectives The concept of partnerships has assumed a new salience in recent times in development practice and policy, though the extent to which they represent a transformation of development is deeply contested (Bakker 2007; Crawford 2003; Mallarangeng and van Tuijl 2003). Ideologically, partnerships are being heralded as a landmark paradigm shift in development discourse (Osei 2004). To the pragmatists, however, they are regarded as a compromise solution and a replacement for the dogmatic pursuit of market economics and state-led development. In effect, they are sometimes seen as a compromise between capitalism and socialism. Even those supportive of the general thrust of partnerships frequently draw attention to the difficulties in achieving “genuine” partnership based on equality and mutual respect in a context where one party is in possession of the wallet and the other the begging bowl (Maxwell and Christiansen 2002; Maxwell and Riddell 1998). More explicitly, critical voices maintain that partnerships are merely about contracting out arrangements with a few rhetorical caveats to make them look less like a servant-master model, and often the partners are in a “marriage of convenience” rather than having genuinely shared beliefs and goals (Faulkner 2004). The term public-private partnership (PPP) has gained currency in recent years in development practice, though the involvement of the private sector in the delivery of public services is not a new phenomenon. A brief history of concessions to the private sector and of the opportunities and constraints presented by PPPs is provided in a UN publication (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe 2000). In recent years, there has been increasing interest in PPPs around the world, and major international financial institutions, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development have been supporting and promoting PPPs (Jones 1999). Some definitions of PPP implicitly or explicitly privilege access to private resources as the primary motivation for the existence of these partnerships and emphasize the flow of resources from private to public, rather than the flow of resources and know-how in both directions (Foster 2004). Such definitions also imply the transfer of risk from the public to the private sector. Others contend that partnerships have evolved over time and are better defined today as a collaborative relationship to achieve common aims and objectives, which necessarily implies a concern with sharing risk and accountability, rather than transferring them (Brittan 2001; Foster 2004). For the purposes of this book, I have chosen to use the

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latter definition as an anchor with which to examine the content and politics of partnerships. I have also chosen a broader usage to describe partnership endeavours that don’t just involve the public and private sector but that are inclusive of a wider range of actors, for example, NGOs, CBOs, informal service providers, and politicians. Although acknowledging that partnership relationships at the multilateral level tend to be unequal because of the imbalance of power relations and the common notion that “whoever pays the piper picks the tune” (Raffer 2001), I operate from the more optimistic perspective that there is potential for different actors to learn from each other in partnership projects and in the process to bring about changes in their “way of working” and hence their organizational culture. Shelter for the Urban Poor: Housing as a Development Intervention It is estimated that by 2020 nearly 1.4 billion people will be residing in the urban slums of developing countries (UN-Habitat 2006). Asia is expected to continue to have the largest slum-dwelling population in the world. Therefore, providing adequate housing and housing infrastructure to urban populations, and especially to the economically disadvantaged sections among them, has become a much-needed development intervention in South Asia, and in the rapidly urbanizing Asia Pacific region in general. In India, only 38 percent of the population has access to sanitation services and only 75 percent has access to a reliable supply of water (World Bank 2007). Governments across the region have made new efforts to meet the challenges through measures such as formulating national housing policies; strengthening existing institutional apparatus; and creating new housing institutions to scale up housing supply, credit facilities, production of building materials, training of personnel for human settlements management; and the review of existing legislative frameworks and regulatory machinery to augment land supply (K. Shah 1990, 1993). These are hopeful signs, but they still constitute woefully inadequate responses given the scale, complexity, and gravity of urban poverty and its associated problems in the cities and towns of South Asia. In 2003, of the estimated 865 million slum dwellers around the world, 550 million lived in Asia (UN-Habitat 2003). K. Shah (2003) identifies the following key reasons for the continued and growing marginalization of the urban poor in the fierce competition to acquire living spaces within cities: rapid growth of slums and other forms of informal and irregular settlements, and their occasional uprooting through demolitions and evictions; overcrowding; deterioration of quality of old housing stock; rapidly depleting affordable rental housing stock; unaffordable land and housing prices; high vacancy rates despite rental housing shortages; inadequate supply of formal housing; inadequate or inappropriate credit facilities; declining standards in the availability and quality of infrastructural services and amenities; inequitable distribution of space and

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services among different socio-economic groups; and the increasing control of urban land and other key components of housing production by local elites and other vested interests. Governmental attitudes toward slums, shantytowns, and other types of grossly inadequate but burgeoning informal human settlements have also changed over the decades. The post-independence enthusiasm for modernizing and industrializing India had led governments to seek aggressive bulldozing and eviction initiatives to clear slums, without any attempt to understand the harsh realities faced by the urban poor in seeking to find work and shelter in crowded cities. When these efforts failed to rid cities of slums, successive governments attempted to relocate slum populations to the outer peripheries of cities and towns. Because people live where they can find work and because the cores of cities are also the hubs of low-wage informal employment, it was only a matter of time before slums and shantytowns sprang up again in the hearts of cities. New communities were frequently relocated near industrial zones, reflecting a strong male bias in location. Women were especially inconvenienced by such relocations because of their need to combine domestic and economic roles. Between 1975 and 1977, for example, there was a massive relocation in New Delhi of 700,000 squatters to seventeen resettlement colonies on the outskirts of the city. Because the cost of public transportation cut so deeply into their meagre means, women could no longer keep their previous jobs as domestic helpers to middle-class families. The rate of male employment fell by 5 percent, whereas the employment of women declined by 27 percent (A. Singh 1980). Mass evictions are less common now than they were in previous decades, yet the loss of homes and livelihoods because of eviction, relocation, and resettlement is a reality for many slum communities even today. In response to so-called public interest litigation filed by elite groups, the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India have in recent years passed controversial verdicts that have enabled municipalities to carry out large-scale home demolition and eviction of poor urban populations in New Delhi. Several researchers have written about the general impacts upon the urban poor of such regressive rulings (see, for example, Bhan 2009). Similarly, as recently as 2008, one woman in a Mumbai slum threatened with eviction describes her dilemma to researchers from the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions: We are told that our huts and houses will be bulldozed and that we will be given [a] place to stay in government-built buildings, but in far, suburban areas. I’m working as a domestic servant, and my husband runs an auto rickshaw. What will be the use of such a house if it snatches our livelihood? How are we supposed to earn and maintain our lives if we lose our jobs based in this area? (COHRE 2008, 53)

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After experiments with relocation, governments attempted to resettle people to new areas and rehabilitate them by providing alternate sources of livelihood. These well-intentioned efforts were only partially successful, as the demand for new jobs and vocations far outstripped the rate at which governments were able to provide them. Attempts at in situ slum “improvement” emerged during the 1970s partly because of the failure of previous strategies and partly because governments had, for the first time, come to appreciate the sheer magnitude of the problem of urban housing and the futility of attempting to solve it through poorly planned and vastly inadequate resettlement and rehabilitation schemes. The previous record of slum demolition and removal had also proved politically damaging to the ruling Congress Party, particularly in the mid-1970s. In north India, such policies had led to a noticeable decrease in the party’s vote. The Congress Party had previously projected itself as a party of the poor, including the urban poor, under Indira Gandhi’s populist slogan of “Garibi hatao,” which translates loosely into “Let’s get rid of poverty.” But the policy of demolitions was perceived by many (and exploited for political mileage by Opposition parties) as the Congress Party’s covert attempt to eradicate not poverty but poor people. The Indira Gandhi government commissioned a nationwide slum survey in 1976 to estimate the size of slum populations and to gain an understanding of the day-to-day realities of the lives of the urban poor. Such efforts led to some rethinking and to the subsequent policies of in situ slum improvement, and later, slum upgradation. These policies recognized that people who came to cities to work would squat on vacant land if there was no affordable housing available to them. Rather than chase them away, it was more economically and politically prudent to provide them with basic amenities. The fundamental difference between in situ slum improvement and in situ slum upgradation, as described by municipalities and urban planners, is the extent to which the slum populations were consulted on their needs. Slum improvement consists of top-down interventions where governments basically decide what basic amenities poor people require and then deliver them without seeking their consent or feedback. Slum upgradation as it is currently envisaged, at least on paper, implies a more participatory and bottom-up initiative to treat poor people and their collectives as partners in the development process instead of as recipients, and to seek from them not just financial contributions but also an understanding of their priorities and constraints.2 The incorporation of a “software” component of community development, delivered through services such as health, education, and vocational training, to complement the “hardware” represented by water supply, sewerage, electricity, and other amenities is another distinguishing feature of the current slum upgradation philosophy. Single-faceted strategies and programs are still common, though several researchers emphasize that habitat

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improvement schemes are generally more successful if different programs, such as those dealing with income generation, housing, and neighbourhood improvement, are integrated in such a way that social, economic, political, and environmental problems are taken into account (Mitlin 2000; Wratten 1995). State interventions of the early 1990s, for example, Sites and Services, Urban Community Development projects, Integrated Child Development Services, Basic Services Approach, Mid-Day Meal Scheme for School Children, and Small and Medium Town Development programs, represent a relatively better assessment of the situation, a more realistic attitude to resource constraints, a broader framework, and possibly even a new awareness of social responsibility. Further, the 1992 Seventy-fourth Amendment Act of the Indian constitution provided new impetus to participatory processes by requiring larger representation of women from weaker classes in urban local bodies and by requiring formal involvement of NGOs and CBOs in the ward committees that municipalities set up in cities with populations of over 300,000 people (Dutta 2002). NGOs and Shelter Activities Creating a space for the entry of non-governmental actors in the provision of housing and other public services and a new orientation of the state as “facilitator” and “enabler” instead of as the more traditional “provider” signifies one of the more recent strategic changes on the part of the government. Despite the state’s increasing willingness to work with civil society partners to deliver housing and housing infrastructure in both urban and rural settings, the entry of NGOs into shelter-related activities in South Asia has been slow and erratic when compared to levels of participation in other activities, for instance, health, education, and microcredit. Even NGOs that have established records of participating in welfare activities, emergency relief, rural development, and new social movements, and those that have enjoyed successes in advocating causes, building institutions, mobilizing community resources, providing essential services, and attracting large bodies of volunteers have shown reluctance to involve themselves in shelter activities. An understanding of planning procedures and regulations, and involvement in the unfamiliar terrain of municipal politics and business practices, are unattractive propositions for NGO staff, who typically have little practical training in economics, law, or administration (Abugre 1993; Johnson and Rogaly 1997). Also, the complex process–oriented nature of organizing people around their housing needs to create private assets does not appear to have the same emotional appeal as other interventions that are more easily delivered and evaluated. This is particularly true of NGOs with more strongly social democratic and Marxist leanings. Agarwal (2003) writes that some left-oriented NGOs even felt that advocating individual

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property rights went against their understanding of a socialist society. The requirements of substantial funding and technical expertise have also served as barriers to the entry of NGOs into shelter and shelter-related activities. Inadequate or substandard housing is a highly visible dimension of poverty and vulnerability. The low enthusiasm on the part of NGOs to participate in shelter activities may also be because the role adequate housing and housing infrastructure can play in improving the overall quality of life of lowincome households is not fully appreciated. The home plays a central role in the economic activities of poor people regardless of whether they are cultivators, vendors, artisans, or rag pickers. Besides being workplaces, homes are also workshops, warehouses, stores, and the site for inputs such as water and electricity into their production processes. This is especially true for low-income women, for whom a home is very frequently the locus not only of domestic and parental responsibilities but also of economic activities. Living in cramped surroundings with no privacy and no sanitation facilities and constantly struggling to procure water, a task seen primarily as women’s work in the South Asian context, makes living in under-serviced slums and shanties a bigger burden for women than for men. Therefore, well-serviced homes are productive, wealth-creating, and dignity-sustaining assets for poor people, and a handful of organizations in the region are beginning to engage in demonstrating housing as a factor of production in the lives of the self-employed poor, and in facilitating their access to urban land, housing, and housing infrastructure. According to the Ahmedabad Study Action Group, most NGOs in Gujarat were drawn into shelter activities as a result of their efforts in recent years in disaster relief, reconstruction, and rehabilitation. This entry point opened up a range of opportunities, and a limited number of NGOs in Gujarat now play multiple roles in shelter provision in both rural and urban areas, including emergency housing for disaster relief; protest action against evictions and demolitions; organizing for land tenure and housing rights; participation in policy formulation exercises; research and advocacy to influence policy, program design, investment, and resource allocation decisions; formulating and implementing housing pilot projects to demonstrate appropriate technologies, low-cost solutions, and community-building resources; networking and capacity building within the NGO community; and advocacy efforts at local and national levels on behalf of disadvantaged groups. The small number of NGOs involved in shelter activities, their wide canvas, and multiple role-playing ability, as well as the new attention governments and funding organizations are focusing on them, make it imperative that attention also be paid to issues related to the internal capacity building of NGOs. These may include NGO priorities in shelter activities, role definition in partnership projects, and relationships with the communities NGOs represent and the socio-political environments within which they operate.

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Below, I provide some perspective on these issues by documenting and analyzing the experiences of MHT in serving as the NGO partner in a large Slum Networking Project (SNP) in Ahmedabad. The other partners in the project are the slum-based CBOs, the AMC, the private sector, and international funding agencies, including the World Bank and USAID. Although the opportunities and constraints MHT faces in working with other partners in collaborative projects may be relevant and useful for other women’s organizations interested in engaging in collaborative projects, they do not in any way represent the “norm” for NGO interactions with state agencies, the private sector, and other actors. As a SEWA sister organization, MHT enjoys a reputation and legitimacy that may not be available to smaller, less-established NGOs. Nevertheless, since an increasing number of explicitly pro-women NGOs are entering into multiple-stakeholder projects, I hope that sharing MHT’s experiences of collaborating in partnership projects, from my location as an independent researcher within the organization, will provide organizations with similar aspirations, with useful ideas for goals to aspire to, as well as pitfalls to avoid, in building successful partnerships. MHT and Slum Communities The partnering NGO’s primary responsibility in the SNP is to motivate and mobilize the slum communities to participate in the upgradation process. It also facilitates the formation of registered CBOs, consisting usually of women in the communities, to represent residents’ interests and engage in dialogue with the municipal corporation. The NGO helps the CBOs build internal capacity so that they are able to effectively maintain the newly acquired infrastructure. It is largely responsible for the implementation of the community development program, including community health services, adult literacy, and child care. MHT fieldworkers are quick to point out that motivation and mobilization are frequently the most challenging aspect of their duties. Attempts by those with vested political interests to convince slum residents that such amenities are available free for the asking, combined with residents’ suspicions of organizations and their experiences of being cheated in the past, serve as powerful deterrents to the organizing process. Universal adult franchise in India makes slums large and easy vote banks, and politicians have exploited the physical, social, and economic vulnerabilities of slum dwellers for decades to feed their political ambitions. Slum residents are openly contemptuous of politicians and pre-election promises of “bread, clothing, and housing” that never translate into anything but rhetoric in the years that follow. Municipal councillors who were backed heavily by slum populations and came to power as a result of their support did on the odd occasion make the effort to divert funds under their discretion in local municipal budgets to

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provide slums with water supply, paved roads, and other amenities. However, residents were consulted so poorly – if at all – about their needs, and the delivery of the infrastructure was so riddled with corruption, incompetence, and nepotism that it just was a matter of time before the infrastructure broke down all together. As R. George (2008) asserts in her book about the global sanitation crisis, services for the poor frequently end up becoming poor services. Political factors also frequently decided who got what services in slum areas. It is not uncommon to find half or part of a slum, representing a local politician’s vote bank, covered quite adequately by public services, while people in other parts of the slum are left to fend for themselves. Because slum dwellers were not required to make any financial contribution toward these services, their sense of entitlement or of indignation at the injustices was also largely absent. This welfare-oriented approach to slum development created an overall view that slum dwellers were lazy and incompetent second-class citizens of cities for whom governments had to do everything. Of even greater concern is that, as I have observed, slum dwellers have themselves internalized these perceptions, contributing to their low sense of entitlement and diffident attitudes. The availability of partial amenities, albeit inadequate or ill-maintained, sometimes made it difficult for MHT fieldworkers to motivate slum dwellers to buy all (seven) services as a package deal. In this matter, the AMC must be commended for its foresight and flexibility in working out alternate pricing policies to suit the needs of families with access to partial amenities. Accordingly, families that had built private toilets, for example, out of their own resources were able to pay a lower price for the delivery of the other six amenities. The NGO partner played a significant role in liaising between the slum dwellers and the AMC, and apprising the latter of the slum residents’ concerns and limitations. The NGO perceived it to be its duty to sensitize the other partners in the slum networking initiative to the harsh challenges and deprivations experienced by the urban poor in the course of their dayto-day lives. As well, MHT made a concerted effort through workshops and seminars to sensitize the municipal corporation, the corporate participants, and the CBOs to the philosophy, working style, limitations, and strengths of civil society organizations. Since the other partners had almost never worked with NGOs in the past, they deemed this to be an extremely educative experience. The challenges NGOs face in motivating slum dwellers to contribute financially toward slum upgradation and to participate in the process of needs assessment are exacerbated by the presence in many areas of charities such as World Vision and other Christian organizations that offer slum dwellers the same services free of charge. Given its role as a facilitating NGO as opposed to a charity, MHT is unable to offer outright subsidies like charities tend to do. SEWA Bank does offer loans to slum dwellers at market rates to

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help them contribute toward the project, but given how economically vulnerable slum populations are, it is understandable that they would find it hard to turn their backs on large no-strings-attached subsidies. World Vision and other charities are quick to admit to being very willing to work with MHT and SEWA Bank in slum upgradation, but by offering such large outright subsidies they may inadvertently undercut MHT’s organizing and mobilizing efforts. Poverty is an excellent proxy for illiteracy and vice versa in India. Literacy levels in slums are much lower than those for the rest of the city. The difference is even more pronounced between men and women in slums. Kundu and Mahadevia (2002) indicate that 54 percent of the total population in the slums of Ahmedabad is illiterate – this represents 46 percent of men and 69 percent of women. The experiences of deprivation in education and other social development services are further exacerbated by class and caste identities. Women and girls belonging to the lowest rungs of the caste and class hierarchies almost inevitably have the lowest levels of education. MHT seeks to organize women in the slums into CBOs, but given their extremely low levels of education and limited experiences of participating in development activities, women in slums struggle to understand the process of organizing into collectives and the purposes they are intended to serve. Much effort is required on the part of the NGO to educate and motivate women to participate in the CBOs. It is more the norm than the exception for MHT fieldworkers to spend up to a year in repeated visits trying to get women to join the CBOs. MHT staff also face major difficulty finding literate women to fill the posts of president, vice-president and treasurer of the CBOs. Women in the slums are circumscribed too in their ability to participate in the project by their domestic, economic, and societal responsibilities. Consequently, the project has seldom been able to secure the participation of the poorest and most disadvantaged women in the community. It is much more the norm that women who are marginally secure in their economic status are able to participate actively, whereas poorer, more vulnerable women are seldom able to do so. Women-headed households, especially those without adult earning sons; divorced or separated women; unmarried women; and widowed or disabled women are frequently the most disempowered and most unlikely to be able to spare the time or to have the confidence to participate in such collectives. Although such underrepresentation of the most disadvantaged is not unusual in the Indian context and has been documented by other researchers (Madeley 1991), this is a serious limitation, and MHT acknowledges that it needs to devise strategies and incentives to encourage the most disadvantaged women in the community to participate in the CBOs. Given the general expectations of handouts and freebies in some communities, MHT fieldworkers find it very challenging to explain the contributory nature of the upgradation scheme and to motivate women to open

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savings accounts with SEWA Bank. They have evolved a strategy of explaining to slum dwellers that making a financial contribution toward the project enables them to have a say in how the project is implemented and how the infrastructure is maintained. It also empowers them to hold the other partners in the project accountable for failing to carry out their responsibilities. Because of the long history of receiving substandard services in the form of handouts, slum dwellers generally respond well to this argument. MHT has attempted to work around the issue of distrust by taking women to visit slums that have already been upgraded under the SNP initiative. Speaking to residents of upgraded slums motivates women to contribute toward the project and it helps to convince them that MHT is a credible organization unlikely to abscond with their money. Visits to the MHT office and SEWA Bank and a basic orientation to the history and work of the organizations also convince slum residents to take the initiative seriously. Because women in slums were typically not used to handling money or administrative matters in a formal capacity, the men frequently volunteered themselves for CBO positions instead of the women. MHT staff faced the additional hurdle of explaining to them that although men could be part of the CBOs, the CBOs had to consist of at least 60 percent women. As described above, residents’ faith in the formal banking sector was extremely low. Their experiences of being duped multiple times by unscrupulous people had embittered them and made them extremely distrustful of people and agencies offering financial products, services, or help. Many were just beginning to test the waters with SEWA and MHT. Their ability to approach banks was also hindered by their lack of basic literacy. “How can we go to a bank when we don’t know how to read and write?” asked one man. The idea of a bank that would come to them instead of them having to go to it created skepticism among residents, and it usually took a year or more of regular visits from MHT and bank staff before people started to demonstrate some faith in the organization and its fieldworkers. Despite these problems, MHT has been successful in forging solid partnerships with slum communities. Development of infrastructure and the provision of basic amenities have a positive influence on health, education, and income, as well as on the social life and confidence of slum residents. Women, for example, have been spared the humiliation of morning rituals of defecating in the open or collecting water from private bungalows and housing societies. The easy availability of water has saved time and effort, especially for women and children, and water-related conflicts have been considerably reduced in upgraded slums. Incomes have gone up by an average of 35 percent in upgraded slums, and school attendance has improved by 15 percent thanks to reliable water supplies (MHT 2002b). Other documented benefits of the program include lower incidence of illness and thus lower health

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expenditures, better marriage prospects for women and men, and higher status and greater respect in the community for women borrowers (ibid.). Through their participation in the CBOs, women have become much more vocal about their problems and have acquired the skills and confidence to interact with municipal authorities. Instances were recorded of women from upgraded slums giving information and guidance to women from other slums to join the project. Formal land titles and sale deeds are still not available to slum dwellers, but MHT has intervened to ensure that documents such as electricity, water, and rent bills are issued in the names of women. People who have lived on the margins of society all their lives are eager to buy into all such symbols of recognition or of the very acknowledgment of their existence. Women perceive these documents to be empowering because they strengthen their right of residence in their homes and elevate their status within their households and communities. MHT and the Public Sector As previously discussed, governments and their agencies are beginning to recognize NGOs and the role they can play in meeting housing and other challenges of urban poverty. They are becoming increasingly interested in partnerships with NGOs but continue to remain extremely selective about the roles that NGOs could play in the development processes. This choice is overwhelmingly guided by the perception that NGOs are better suited to deliver services at the grassroots level in a cost-effective manner. Indeed, out of the many functions NGOs perform in the Indian context, including the watchdog role, the protest action role, corrective role, and change agent role, the service provider role appears to suit governments the most. Consequently, the relationship between governmental agencies and NGOs tends to be mostly project centred, and revolves around delivering services or implementing schemes conceived of by the former. Because governments control the bulk of the resources and consider themselves the principal decision makers, the alliance is often unequal and one of mutual distrust. NGOs are rarely if ever treated as partners and more often considered subcontractors of government projects. The literature on state-NGO collaboration seems to suggest that few institutions can maintain a cooperative relationship with the government without either becoming subcontractors or entering into conflict with it (Edwards and Hulme 1992; Patel 1999). Cooperation almost always devolves into co-option when governments and their agencies look upon NGOs as pro bono agents that implement “their” projects and schemes. The degree to which genuine partnership is feasible in the state-NGO interface has been questioned in many countries and contexts. Bovaird (2004), for example, writes that the conceptual framework and language of “partnering” or “relational contracting” may often be used in such arrangements,

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yet the actual relationships appear often to reflect traditional transactional or even confrontational contracting. Over the years, some state-NGO relationships have evolved into mutually beneficial and trusting partnerships, but these are more the exception than the norm. When the AMC decided to implement the SNP in city slums, it held an information session and invited local NGOs to attend. Out of the forty or more NGOs that attended the session, only about five expressed an interest in partnering with the AMC. Of these, only two, MHT and Saath, finally served as NGO partners in the project. (I discuss the general lack of interest from NGOs for shelter-related activities in a previous section.) Although the relationship between AMC and MHT was earlier fraught with some of the issues of power and distrust, it has over the years evolved into a more amicable and mutually beneficial partnership. A review of NGO-government strategies conducted by Edwards and Hulme (1992, 212) concluded that collaboration usually involves “poorly resourced, poorly motivated, usually bureaucratic agencies that are resistant to change.” Some of the problems MHT continues to face in working with AMC arise because they are essentially dissimilar organizations. They vary vastly in constitution, form, approaches, value systems, and perceptions. Therefore, in shaping partnerships, it is helpful to recognize that the tensions in the relationship are frequently intrinsic to the nature and identity of the partners. One of the big stumbling blocks in the partnership is the AMC’s inability to change its role from being a provider, and the inherent prestige and power that goes with it, to being a facilitator and an enabler. Moving from controlling to facilitating, from providing to enabling, and from giving to empowering is indeed a timely orientation on the part of the state. It helps create space and an enabling environment for the NGOs and also for the communities and their CBOs, which have shown capability in providing creative inputs into the process. However, the trouble remains that the enabling role for the state is still mainly rhetorical. Not many people in governmental agencies see the underlying rationale behind the enabling approach, which grew out of the twin reality of the system’s failure to deliver and people’s potential to contribute. The conviction that ideas such as people’s participation and the “enabler” role should translate into direct executive action and not merely decorate public documents is largely missing. The understanding of the concept of people’s participation differs significantly among partners. The state and the private sector are primarily interested in the instrumental aspect of participation, represented by people’s ability to contribute financially toward the project and their ability to maintain water supply and sanitation infrastructure; the NGO partner tends to be more process-oriented and much more interested in gains such as community empowerment, political participation, and transformation of gender

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relations within and outside the household. These concerns about different interpretations of community participation are echoed by other researchers studying partnership projects (Dutta 2002; Sato 1999). One of the major difficulties MHT continues to face in working with AMC is AMC’s inability to meet deadlines for service delivery. In my many forays into slums with MHT fieldworkers, I have repeatedly observed the difficulties staff face in explaining to residents that even though MHT can pressure the AMC to initiate the physical process of upgradation, they cannot actually force it to actually start work. Consequently, MHT fieldworkers frequently bear the brunt of slum dwellers’ anger and frustration when the money has been deposited with SEWA Bank but the AMC has not delivered services within the estimated time frame. “We took food out of the mouths of our children to deposit money for gutter-pani [drains and water],” exclaimed one indignant woman. “How can you expect us not to be upset when months go by and nothing happens?” Another man taunted the MHT fieldworker assigned to his community by asking how many more decades it would take for the work to be completed. Given these frustrations, it may be very worthwhile for MHT to look into developing a protocol of how to address problems of delay in delivery of infrastructure, perhaps by exploring the experiences of other organizations working on infrastructure projects in slums. This will help the field staff to continue working with slum dwellers when things are not progressing as smoothly as planned. There are many reasons for the AMC’s failure to meet deadlines for service provision. Primary among them is the fact that slum upgradation has not been accorded the importance it deserves within the bureaucratic structures of the organization. Within the AMC, three important departments – town planning, engineering, and urban community development – and their various subdepartments have important responsibilities in the execution of the project. Involvement of so many different actors calls for efficient coordination and communication. To facilitate this process, a Slum Networking Project cell was established in the AMC in 1996. The cell has been successful in ironing out some of the difficulties in coordination and communication, but without any dynamic leadership, it has largely remained an appendage to the AMC, with limited financial and technical autonomy. Staff within the cell indicate that slum upgradation activities have such a low profile within the AMC that technical professionals and management graduates consider it a “punishment posting” if assigned to it. Also, many officials have never worked in partnership projects and view other actors as unnecessary irritants encroaching on their domain. MHT and Saath have addressed this problem to some extent by organizing seminars and workshops to familiarize officials from the AMC with the philosophies, structures, and goals of NGOs and CBOs, but much more sensitization remains to be done for government

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officials to internalize the values of the project. Others, including Plummer (2002), agree that it is also incumbent upon state actors to expend greater effort to build capacities for governance through partnership. MHT and the Private Sector The participation of the private sector in the Parivartan initiative has been primarily financial and somewhat erratic. The most vociferous corporate proponent for the project was Arvind Mills, an Ahmedabad-based textile company that had global export ambitions during the years following economic liberalization in the early 1990s. The company made no bones about its wanting to contribute financially toward the SNP out of “benevolent self-interest,” since it saw the importance of improving the image of Ahmedabad within and outside the country to more closely suit the urbane “Western” image it wanted to portray of itself and its denim products. As well, a large number of the mill’s workers lived in slums, and the company wanted to improve the environments of the slums in response to global calls for corporate social responsibility. That one of the earliest upgradation projects was conducted in a slum occupied overwhelmingly by people employed by Arvind Mills is indicative of how influential the private sector can be when it does decide to get involved. On the flipside, it is important to remember that corporate benevolence is vulnerable to market forces, competition, and fluctuations in the global economy. Much of the cotton textile sector in Ahmedabad collapsed over the next few years of the 1990s because of the inundation of the market with cheaper imported synthetic textiles and the inability of local mills to withstand the competition from larger mills brought on by the Indian government’s enthusiastic endorsement of free-market economics. Quite predictably, Arvind Mills abandoned its global aspirations and its interest in the SNP soon after. Private sector participation has been ad hoc and erratic ever since and completely absent in the work undertaken in many new slums. After the pilot project and the subsequent withdrawal of Arvind Mills, no other corporation has shown significant interest in the project. The Lions Club and the State Bank Employees Union have made limited financial contributions toward the program but never shown any interest in participating in project implementation or community development programs. Like the public sector, the NGO’s problems in dealing with organizations in the corporate sector have to do mostly with the fact that they are fundamentally different types of organizations. The lack of “cultural fit” between parties in partnership projects is widely acknowledged in the literature on partnership. Waddock (1989), for example, writes that because social partnerships bring together individuals and organizations with different ideologies or values, strongly held stereotypes may inhibit productive interaction in a partnership situation. Similarly, Klijn and Teisman (2003) suggest that

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the public domain is characterized by the “guardian syndrome,” whereas the private sector is characterized by the “commercial syndrome.” Despite such assertions, it is important to acknowledge that each partner may have its own reason for wanting to realize the same goal. By harnessing different but distinct thoughts and skills, the same goal can be realized sooner, more completely, and with more efficient use of resources. The private sector entered the SNP with the quintessential corporate philosophy of efficiency – achieving targets within a stipulated time to avoid project cost overrun. This strategy may lend itself well to the delivery of the physical component of the project by motivating other partners to be more deadline-oriented, but it does not work well with the community development component, which is much more process-oriented. Since the private sector’s primary interest in the project is the delivery of the hardware, it makes no particular effort to understand the importance of the community development component and the constraints the partnering NGO faces in delivering these services and securing people’s participation in the process. Because of the sheer amount of time it frequently takes to motivate people to participate in the CBOs, MHT’s efforts to deliver the community development services in a participatory manner often push project completion beyond the targeted time scheduled, and this becomes one of the major areas of conflict between the private sector and the NGO. Both NGO and AMC staff mentioned that the overambitious zeal and corporate work culture of the industry partner frequently alienates and marginalizes the other partners. Kamieniecki, Shafie, and Silvers (2000) have, in their review of partnership projects in environmental management, suggested that marketbased development approaches frequently fail to meet social justice and public participation objectives. Private sector representatives, on the other hand, contend that NGOs’ commitment to “process” sometimes makes them almost oblivious to “results.” This is a valid argument, since the two are not mutually exclusive or contradictory. Although it sounds paradoxical, NGOs may have to learn to compromise to some extent on their ideologies to optimize their performance in partnership projects. K. Shah (1993) supports this view when he writes that even if NGOs do not like the words, they will have to “perform,” they will have to “deliver,” and, in doing so, they will have to be “efficient.” The NGO and the corporate sector have also locked horns over issues that have had significant impacts on the lives of slum dwellers and eroded community confidence in the partnership. A good example is the difference in opinion over how the NGO should treat outstanding loans taken from SEWA Bank. Arvind Mills, represented by its corporate trust, believed that unless all the households paid back the loans, none should be electrified. The NGO partner opposed this idea, stressing that the defaulting households were poorer than the average slum household and should be given a few

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extensions. The NGO stressed too that because a majority of households had repaid the loans, they should not be penalized because other households had defaulted. The slum community is inevitably at the receiving end of such conflicts, which serve to lower its collective morale and motivation. MHT and Other NGOs Acharya and Parikh (2002) suggest that NGO collaboration in Ahmedabad is weak, ad hoc, and project or issue based. They indicate that fruitful collaboration is constrained by competition for funding, geographical orientation, lack of cooperative experience, and differences in ideology. I indicated above that the AMC has had limited success in soliciting the participation of city NGOs in the SNP. Discussions with the city’s prominent NGOs, including the Ahmedabad Study Action Group and Disha, reveal that they are not very enthused by the concept of the Slum Networking Project or by the partnership approach followed in implementing it and prefer to invest their energies in other activities. Many within these NGOs believe that the participatory processes that are supposed to distinguish slum upgradation from the more technocratic and top-down slum improvement and basic needs approaches of the 1970s remain largely tokenistic and that the vast majority of slum dwellers were not given any genuine opportunity to influence project design or delivery. In addition, they emphasize that the SNP does not address the structural issues of urban poverty and that design-based strategies and responses are merely cosmetic if the underlying issues of land redistribution and tenure rights are not addressed at the city, state, and national levels. They emphasize, as Verma (2002) does in her scathing critique of the SNP concept, that from the perspective of land supply, slums are not so much the problem as the manifestation of the larger problem of inequitable land distribution among different socio-economic groups. The history of the civil society movement in India indicates that NGOs themselves shy away from addressing hard issues such as land and tenure rights (Thomas and Acharya 1996). Indeed, the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) was set up in Mumbai in 1984 by professionals working on urban issues as a reaction to the perceived limitations of other NGOs that were focusing on service delivery without seeking to address the causal factors that impoverish low-income households (Mitlin 1997). Many NGOs do not want to be part of the SNP because they believe the process will ultimately lead to the gentrification of upgraded slums and further marginalization of the urban poor. Finally, many NGOs are wary of the Parivartan project because they remain skeptical about the sincerity and long-term commitment of the AMC in wanting to improve the lives of slum dwellers. Contradictory policies and programs implemented by the AMC in recent years – for instance, the almost simultaneous launch of the propoor slum upgradation project alongside market-oriented pro-rich city

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beautification and riverfront development programs that necessitate largescale displacement of slum communities and demolitions of slums – dilutes the relevance and importance of the SNP and raises the cynicism of local NGOs. Segbers, Raiser, and Volkmann (2005) emphasize that the administrations of large “global” or “globalizing” cities are experiencing a double challenge. On the one hand, they have to make their city attractive for transnational investment, usually in the form of capital, infrastructure, and human resources. On the other hand, they have to avoid leaving significant segments of their citizenry behind. These conflicts between global competitiveness and internal viability may explain contradictory policies and programs implemented by municipalities in recent years in many cities of the global South. MHT has not had to face too many difficulties in working with other civil society partners simply because local NGOs have not shown much enthusiasm for participating in the project. But there are those in Saath and other NGOs who are quick to point out that MHT has benefited so greatly from SEWA’s established domestic and international reputation that it has an unfair advantage in the project compared with lesser-known or smaller NGOs, which may be required to work much harder and deliver better results to protect their funding and other interests (Joshi 2003). Also, because of the size of its operations and the privileged position it enjoys as a SEWA sister organization, MHT is able to make its presence felt in many more communities than smaller NGOs, including Saath, that have more limited financial and human resources. MHT acknowledges its advantages over smaller NGOs in terms of having more resources, easy access to SEWA Bank services, a huge membership, and an international reputation but also stresses that in some ways being small can be advantageous. MHT coordinator Bijal Bhatt argues that Saath, for example, does a very competent job of providing health, education, and microcredit services, albeit in a smaller number of slums than MHT. She emphasizes that knowing its significantly smaller client base at a very personal level and being able to experiment with different systems of collateral and credit gives it an edge that a large established organization such as SEWA Bank, with its broad, diverse portfolio and the constraints of less flexible lending structures, is unable to provide to its clientele. Although MHT has never been accused of attempting to stop other NGOs from engaging with the SNP process, it has been criticized by smaller NGOs for not taking more interest in training other local NGOs to serve as partners in the slum upgradation initiative. This is a fairly serious criticism because many within the development community believe that the SNP can be scaled up to cover the entire city only if more NGOs participate actively in it – though some researchers emphasize that there are simply not enough sufficiently experienced urban NGOs in India to engage in innovative housing

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and slum upgradation programs (Desai 1995). MHT responds to this criticism by claiming that other local NGOs have never shown any interest in the Parivartan project – that they are more interested in being involved in providing health and education services and quite intimidated by the hardware component that forms the backbone of the slum upgradation project. MHT staff and leadership state that despite their willingness to support and build the capacity of NGOs interested in participating in partnership projects such as Parivartan, they have never been approached for guidance or help. Speaking candidly to me, MHT coordinator Bijal Bhatt summed up her response to the criticism: If there’s very little interest from other NGOs, why should we try to convince them to do Parivartan work? If they want to join, we have no objections to sharing information and experiences, but if we have to hold their hands and walk them through all of it, we would prefer to do it ourselves. We can hire new staff if we have to. We have all our experienced staff and all our collective in-house learning, and they would be able to guide the new staff.

Although MHT staff members expressed willingness to support NGOs genuinely interested in Parivartan, they had reservations about too many NGOs joining the project for the wrong reasons. They cite several cases of aspiring municipal councillors being intimidated by MHT’s work in the slums and viewing it as detrimental to securing votes from slum dwellers. In two slums, local politicians registered their own NGOs and are independently applying to work with the other partners on slum upgradation. Given the relative ease with which NGOs can be registered in India, it is feasible for parties with vested interests to start their own NGOs and to co-opt the slum upgradation project and process for a variety of purposes. MHT and Funding Organizations Funding significantly affects not just the organizational culture of NGOs but also the kinds of services they are able to provide. The expansion of NGOs in public service provision has been encouraged by the availability of funding from domestic public sources and from official bilateral and multilateral sources. Because of SEWA’s reputation within development circles, accessing funding from domestic and international funders for its activities has not been too much of a challenge for MHT. The problems in the MHT-funder relationship arise more out of the fact that housing and housing infrastructure provision is not recognized and prioritized as a strategy for poverty alleviation to the extent that it should be in international development circles. Between 1980 and 1993, less than 3 percent of development assistance went to housing finance and other housing programs. Many funding agencies gave no support whatsoever to either (Satterthwaite 2001).

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In contrast to programmatic priorities of donors, surveys of low-income households in developing countries typically show that housing has a higher priority than even education or health care (Ferguson 2001). Donors understand and can easily evaluate interventions such as SEWA’s microcredit and health programs, but they are less readily able to understand and evaluate the process-oriented nature of MHT’s housing activities. MHT’s administrative expenses are a case in point. Funders are increasingly demanding that administrative expenses be reduced, without fully understanding that for an NGO like MHT that attempts to organize and mobilize people around their housing needs through human-resource-intensive strategies of multiple field and exposure visits, motivation meetings, painstaking grassroots education, and awareness raising, large administrative expenses are inevitable even if the NGO is extremely frugal and does not provide its staff with any amenities other than those absolutely necessary for them to perform their duties. Most funders expect MHT to keep its administrative costs below 1.5 percent of the total funding awarded (B. Bhatt 2003). Although MHT, like other SEWA sister organizations, subscribes to Gandhian philosophy in its operations and does not allow its staff any amenities that may be considered remotely luxurious, it still finds reducing administrative costs to less than 2 percent extremely difficult. The MHT coordinator explains that funders themselves have administrative funds that amount to 13 or 14 percent of their budgets, so they need to do some serious rethinking and analysis to understand that it is impossible for a highly human-resource-dependent and process-oriented NGO to perform well at such low administrative costs. This is especially important because funders are demanding increasing levels of corporate-style professionalism even from grassroots NGOs, often compelling them to hire professionals and consultants at higher wage levels. Since professionals and funders share a common language of development – “sustainability,” “participation,” “empowerment,” and “indicators,” and so on – they serve not only to smooth communication between the NGOs and funders but also to enhance the legitimacy and validity of NGO activities. However, as people with PhDs and master’s degrees expect to be paid much more than grassroots field staff, they can be a big drain on the already stretched budgets of NGOs. Funders also do not seem to fully appreciate that the NGO’s role in the Parivartan project is long term and that funds will be required for maintenance and upkeep of the infrastructure, and to some extent the activities of the CBOs, long after the hardware has been delivered to the slum communities. An MHT staff member elaborated: If we upgrade fifty slums, we will need the organizational and financial resources to maintain those areas. Asking the CBOs to do all of it is simply too much. There are problems of capacity and corruption, so the NGO always

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has to be involved, whether they are taking the lead or serving as a watchdog. Now, who’s going to provide the funding for this unendingly? To be constantly in touch with the CBOs, to liaise with them, to constantly monitor them. That component of our work will have to be filled in with some other chunk of funds if funding is not directly available for it. Establishing the CBOs is a challenge, but keeping them relevant over the years after the infrastructure has been delivered is an even bigger challenge.

The lack of understanding among funding organizations, usually located in North America and western Europe, of the ground realities of NGOs and the constraints under which they operate was raised quite frequently by the MHT staff and leadership. One consequence of the increased demand from funding organizations for NGOs to professionalize their operations is the increased reliance among NGOs on narrow and often inappropriate systems and tools to evaluate the performance of staff. MHT, for example, relies heavily on a management information system (MIS) that measures how many accounts each staff member was able to open in the slums and how much money she was able to collect in a month, as an indicator of staff performance. Tools such as MIS and logical framework analysis (LFA) are usually developed in response to funders’ demands for easily quantifiable valuations of success and failure. Because of their technocratic and reductive nature, they frequently fail to capture the range of activities staff perform and the other values they take with them to the field. One frustrated MHT staff member explained: Sometimes I have to go to the same slum seven or eight times before anyone will pay heed to what I have to say, but I have to keep going back even if not a single account is opened or a single rupee deposited. MHT may have to spend Rs.1,200 in conveyance expenses for me in a month and I may only bring back Rs.500 in deposits, but this does not mean that I’m not working hard enough at my job or that I will not eventually be able to convince people to join the project.

I discussed earlier how NGOs face challenges in reaching the most economically disadvantaged members of communities and consequently end up working only with those who can more easily be lifted out of poverty because they already have some asset base. Under pressure to meet development targets and to answer to funders and governments, NGOs may find it increasingly expedient to neglect the worst off. Under such circumstances, CBOs may be unwilling or unable to bear the extra work involved in bringing the most disadvantaged members of the community on board. One anthropological study of Grameen Bank indicates that the inclusion of dropouts and villages away from the key success areas would substantially

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increase estimates of negative impact and reveal more cases of serious disempowerment (Khandker 1998). Instead of giving the most disempowered people within a community a genuine opportunity to participate in development, tokenistic and ad hoc participatory processes may serve to encourage politicians and local elites to take advantage of their opaque and frequently unaccountable positions to exploit their constituencies. Since funders expect NGOs to send standardized reports and studies that detail physical and financial information, NGOs feel compelled to focus more attention on easily measured and quantifiable aspects of their work. Other field-level contextual information, process data, case studies, sociological and anthropological studies, and analyses are for the most part left out of the progress reports and annual summaries sent to funders. Standardized evaluation systems and tools motivate NGOs to focus disproportionately on success stories while overlooking less successful but potentially more instructive experiences. As well, they force NGOs to redefine their own understanding of success and the value of their work based on the requirements of funders. In effect, many NGOs start equating target achievement – in simplified, quantitative, and depoliticized terms – with success. Some funders understand the limitations of standardized reporting formats and may even encourage NGOs to pay more attention to the political, cultural, and social dimensions of their work, but they rarely, if ever, back this up with support in terms of funds or expertise, or by relaxing the demands for more quantifiable data. Changes in Family, Community, and Gender Relations Previous chapters document how informal sector women’s experiences of poverty and vulnerability are more intensive than and different from those of men in their families and communities. I have also described and analyzed how the multiple and synergistic sources of women’s vulnerability influence their ability to purchase landed property and to make long-term plans for their future. Since I affiliated with SEWA and its sister organizations MHT and SEWA Bank to conduct my research, and since it is SEWA’s overarching goal to empower informal sector women within and outside their homes, it is imperative that I conclude this chapter with brief comments on whether organizing low-income urban women around their needs for land, housing, and basic sanitation services translated into more strategic gains, including political participation and changes in gender relations within the household and community. Because slum populations are extremely heterogeneous and marked by divisions of caste, religion, language, political affiliation, and socio-economic status, it is difficult to talk about slum-dwelling women en bloc when discussing whether organizing around housing rights and needs can serve as a vehicle for transforming gender relations within and outside the household. Nevertheless, based on my extensive interactions with women

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in slum communities, I would like to share key insights into whether participating in SEWA and MHT’s mobilizing efforts had influenced their ability to initiate changes in family, community, and gender relations. Women and Political Participation Talking about slums in the south Indian city of Chennai (formerly Madras), de Wit (1997) notes that both men and women are engaged in community activities but in markedly different ways because of a spatial division between the public world of men and the private world of women. This certainly applies to the context of my research, where men have community leadership roles in which they organize themselves at the formal political level, generally within the framework of national or state-level politics. In contrast, women do not generally play active political roles or demonstrate an interest in local or national politics, and their community management role is based primarily on attempting to secure items of collective consumption, for instance, water and sanitation. This is not to suggest that slum women are politically inactive but that, despite SEWA and MHT’s organizing efforts, they continue to play roles in keeping with gendered customs according to which men are the public actors and representatives of households, while women held power in varying degrees in matters related to the home and household management. The potential certainly exists for women to use their community management roles as a platform for organizing themselves at the formal political level, but there is not enough evidence based on my research to suggest that this is happening. While making such generalizations, it is important to acknowledge that for thousands of informal sector women, membership in an organization such as SEWA represents the first institutional affiliation beyond family and kinship. Carr, Chen, and Jhabvala (1996) confirm that this is significant even if just from a symbolic perspective because it provides women with a source of affiliation external to the family. For most women who participated in my research, coming together to form a CBO represented their first efforts to organize formally as a collective within their communities. As mentioned earlier, although membership is not closed to men, MHT does require that women represent 60 percent of the CBO and that the positions of president, vice-president, and treasurer be filled by women. Limiting my analysis of the CBOs to head counts alone would have allowed me to infer that MHT had succeeded in organizing unprecedented numbers of women in the slums of Ahmedabad into collectives capable of representing their needs and interests to other partners in the slum upgradation project. How competent the CBOs were in matters of internal administration and communication with other partners in the slum upgradation project was usually a function of how long they had been operating. Quite predictably, the CBOs in upgraded slums were better organized and better run than their counterparts

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in non-upgraded slums, where in many cases MHT fieldworkers were still struggling to persuade women to participate. Women representing the CBOs in a few upgraded slums had not only succeeded in learning the administrative functions of their collectives but had also demonstrated ingeniousness in devising strategies to ensure the financial self-sufficiency and sustainability of the groups. A few of the CBOs had, for example, successfully negotiated contracts with the Ahmedabad Electricity Company (AEC) for the reading and reporting of electricity consumption in slum households. The managers at AEC were not too keen on sending their own staff into the slums to read the meters, so they were only too pleased to be able to pay the CBO in the slum to do the readings. In another community, the CBO had as a group applied for a loan from SEWA Bank to build a courtyard and a community hall that would be a gathering place and also a venue that residents could rent for marriages, engagements, naming ceremonies, and other events. I was very impressed in general with how well administered the CBOs were, but a closer look at the composition and dynamics of the groups revealed a few problematic trends. One of the most obvious characteristics of CBOs in all communities was the overrepresentation in them of women who were related to men in politically powerful positions in the slums. It was more the norm than the exception in almost each case for CBOs to be headed by wives of locally prominent men – political organizers, moneylenders, and chit fund managers, and the like. More marginalized groups, including female-headed households, were conspicuous in their noninvolvement in the CBOs in almost every community I researched. I noted elsewhere in this book that the poorest and most vulnerable households in slums frequently did not participate in the slum upgradation project. This is true too of their participation in CBOs. More incentives may need to be built into the process of organizing CBOs to ensure that they do not represent just the voices of the relatively affluent members of slum communities. In general, women’s participation in urban and rural local-level politics has grown in response to the Seventy-third Amendment to the Indian Constitution, which provided for the reservation of one-third of all seats in Panchayati Raj institutions (local governance bodies) at gram (village), taluk (subdistrict), and zilla (district) levels for women. However, studies have also shown that even if such reservation is a necessary condition for “engendering” governance, it is by no means sufficient to ensure women’s participation in political processes, as they are prevented from making effective use of the political spaces provide by the constitutional amendment for a variety of reasons that include the existence of vested interest groups; lack of party support; the criminalization of politics; and women’s lack of mobility, education, and resources (Nanivadekar 1998; Narayanan 2002). The large-scale appropriation of these reservations and quotas by politically powerful men who perceive it as an opportunity to consolidate power and

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status by ensuring the election of female family members is as visible in the literature on women’s election to Panchayati Raj institutions as it was in the CBOs in the slum communities I researched. There is a very real danger in such situations that women will remain mere mouthpieces for their male kin or, as S. Sen (2002) describes, that a biwi (wife), beti (daughter), and bahu (daughter-in-law) brigade will come into power in local and national politics. Such a prophecy is already beginning to fulfill itself in the collectives that represent slum communities; however, it is also possible, from a more optimistic perspective, that wives and daughters of politicians and local elites will be able to build coalitions among themselves and use the power bestowed upon them to subvert gender norms and to encourage women without political connections to enter the political arena. Kin-based patronage networks form the bedrock of politics in many countries, but they are usually exploited for the benefit of male relatives. Wives and daughters usually benefit materially and derive status and authority, but they do not usually qualify for positions of political patronage except in the absence of sons or the existence of reservation quotas specifically for women. Even if the wife or the daughter initially merely serves as a proxy for a man, it is not too optimistic to hope that she would be able to use the family to access political power and then use that same power to question and subvert the hierarchical structures of the family and the community. This has certainly happened in the slum context, where several women initially joined the CBOs at the behest of their husbands but went on as a result of their own efforts and interests to mentor other women in the community and to forge alliances with other organizations. NGOs working for the urban poor in other parts of India have made similar observations. The National Slum Dwellers Federation in Mumbai, for example, reports that more and more women are entering leadership positions – this in contrast to the past, when slum-based organizations were largely male dominated and women used only for demonstrations and protests (SPARC 1991). Gradually, the realization has dawned that giving women access to power and acknowledging the important role women play in accessing housing is not an admission of defeat but the creation of new relationships between men and women. This, in turn, can result in increased access to resources for low-income communities (Patel 1999). Even though my research findings did not actively confirm that organizing and mobilizing around housing needs translated into any strategic gains in political participation for women, there is reason for cautious optimism that it could in the future serve as a platform for women to enter politics at the local, state, and national level. Changes in Gender Relations Given the other variables that come into play, it is difficult to gauge whether gender relations had been transformed to any extent solely as a result of

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women’s organizing around housing needs. According to some women, the tension between remunerative work, CBO work, and household management had been resolved to a certain extent by men taking over some domestic responsibilities. They credited this change in the previously non-negotiable gender division of labour in the household to men’s recognition that women were contributing significantly to the household’s financial stability and that any disruption in women’s remunerative or CBO work could result in less income or fewer services and facilities for the household. I mentioned in a previous chapter that a majority of men were supportive of their wives’ participation in the CBOs. I also documented that although men registered no complaints about the services such as electricity and the water tax resulting from slum upgradation being registered in women’s names, this did not necessarily point to the ushering in of more egalitarian gender relations, since such changes did not in any way challenge or undermine more entrenched privileges men enjoyed. Whether gender relations within the household are changing depends to a large extent on the indicators one uses to monitor and evaluate such changes. If it is about more men taking on housework or caring for children, the results of my research are encouraging. However, if we look at more deeply entrenched attitudes toward dowry and toward daughters inheriting parental property, for example, the findings are disappointing at best and dismal at worst. One could argue that social change is an inherently slow process and that deeply entrenched norms and perceptions need to be studied over a much longer period. Also, if one were to think of small changes in the gender division of labour between men and women in the household as a point on a continuum that leads to more egalitarian gender relations in broader spheres of society, then participants in my research were definitely making transformative gains. This is especially true since what may seem like simple gains in women’s status within the family represents significant gains in women’s perceptions of themselves. Making Partnerships Work: Conclusions and Recommendations Attempts by governments to scale up the provision of housing and housing infrastructure to low-income populations have been woefully inadequate to address the magnitude of the problems of urban poverty and the spread of poorly serviced slums and shantytowns in South Asia. Creating a space for the entry of other players in the development and delivery of housing and other public services is a timely and strategic response on the part of governments. A handful of NGOs are carving out a niche in this space and beginning to engage not only in demonstrating housing as a factor of production in the lives of the urban poor but also in facilitating their access to urban land, housing, and housing infrastructure. Partnerships have emerged between NGOs, the state, the private sector, multilateral funding agencies, and CBOs, and even though they are still by no means commonplace, they

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provide insight into the challenges, opportunities, and dynamics of such collaborations. This chapter documents the partnership experiences of MHT. The frequent face-to-face interactions between NGOs such as MHT and their memberships equip them to understand grassroots realities and constraints much better than other players in the partnership. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon to find that the most disempowered members of communities do not receive adequate representation in development projects. This is a serious shortcoming, since these NGOs have explicit mandates to reach the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. NGOs need to devote more time and resources to encourage the most disadvantaged members of their constituencies to participate in the processes of development. Funding organizations should support such endeavours not just by making more funding and resources available to NGOs but also by monitoring NGO activities to ensure that the poorest and most vulnerable people in communities are participating in the process and reaping benefits from it. The difficulties in the NGO-public sector relationship arise largely because they are essentially dissimilar organizations in terms of structure, form, working styles, and motivations. Although the state has, at least in principle, attempted to move away from the provider role in favour of the facilitator role, it seems to not have made much progress in actually moving away from the power, prestige, and control associated with the provider role. It has become increasingly accepting of NGOs in public service provision, yet the state has remained unwilling to give NGOs equal access to decision making and power or to view NGOs as equals in the development process. Such a paradigm shift is necessary and would significantly alleviate tensions between the state and civil society. A broader and less instrumental understanding of the concept of partnership – one that incorporates gains such as community empowerment, political participation, and gender equality – is also necessary and timely if partnership projects are to provide lasting solutions to the problems faced by poor people. Through advocacy and leadership, the state needs to raise the profile of pro-poor activities within its bureaucratic structures so that professional staff assigned to slum upgradation projects do not feel demoralized. Middle and lower-level government staff frequently contribute tremendously toward partnership projects but hardly ever receive recognition for their efforts, since it is senior members of the staff who are usually called on to attend award ceremonies or to speak at conferences and seminars. Boosting the morale of more junior staff will go a long way toward forging more amicable partnerships between the state and its agencies and other actors in development. Like the state, the corporate partner needs more sensitization toward the NGO sector in general and to the limitations and constraints of organizations such as MHT in particular. Although the private sector has frequently

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motivated other partners to pull up their socks to match its commitment to the economic bottom line and to achieving targets within stipulated periods, an overzealous corporate philosophy of efficiency has sometimes impeded its ability to appreciate the challenges NGOs face in attempting to deliver services to poor people in a transparent, accountable, and participatory manner. NGOs themselves can and have taken the initiative to build the capacity of other partners to understand the challenges and opportunities they face in performing their responsibilities. The private sector, like the state, needs to be more open to the idea of learning from the experiences of NGOs. Because significant human and financial resources are required for participating in large-scale partnership projects, they have become the domain of larger, better-funded NGOs. Yet, because they frequently know their constituencies intimately and can afford to be more flexible and creative in their services and operations, smaller NGOs have certain advantages that their larger counterparts do not. Smaller and mid-sized NGOs can draw on the experiences and expertise of larger NGOs to participate in partnership projects. Funding organizations and larger, more-established NGOs can support the efforts of smaller NGOs by building their capacities to partner with other actors. The availability of funding significantly impacts the services NGOs are able to provide and the partnerships they are able to forge. For their part, funding organizations need to familiarize themselves with the ground realities of the NGOs they support and to devise more inclusive and less rigid systems of evaluating their performances. The NGO-funder relationship should be more about accountability than accountancy. The disproportionate use of simplified, easily quantifiable tools to monitor and evaluate NGOs fails to capture the social, political, and cultural realities within which such organizations operate and the rich contextual knowledge they generate in the course of performing their duties. One of the oversights of the SNP is that it has not sought the alliance of an important actor in a democracy – the local politician. Despite their negative image, politicians are the legitimate representatives of the people. To exclude them from major development projects on the assumption that all politicians are corrupt and self-serving is to undermine the institutional basis of democratic decentralization, which all participatory processes, including the 74th Amendment Act, envisage. Certainly, some politicians have actively raised suspicions in the minds of slum dwellers about the project and even actively mobilized people against the SNP, yet others have maintained a good rapport with AMC officials and played significant roles in liaising between slum residents and the municipal authorities. An evaluative study of the SNP conducted by Acharya and Parikh (2002) indicate that politicians do have considerable influence in slums. They can play a very

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crucial role in the project provided their interest is genuine. Field observations suggest that politicians can sometimes help the municipal authority by employing their powers of persuasion to convince slum dwellers to participate in the project and to organize themselves into CBOs. The finances available to Members of Parliament, Members of the Legislative Assembly, and municipal councillors for providing infrastructure facilities in their constituencies or cities could be dovetailed with the SNP’s resources, and the politicians could become legitimate contributing partners and stakeholders in the partnership process. Instead of alienating politicians by not including them at all in the SNP, it might be more effective to enlist their cooperation in a strategic manner in the design, delivery, and maintenance of services and facilities to the urban poor. The conflicts between the various partners in the Parivartan project are compounded by the absence of a legal document or memorandum of understanding (MOU) between them that defines the specific roles and responsibilities of each partner. The involvement of partners with such a wide range of ideologies, sizes, structures, and experiences underscores the importance of developing such a document. Constructive debate about how specific project challenges can be met can be better encouraged, and outputs and consequences of the project more clearly defined, when the relationship between the various parties is set in a formal framework. The lack of an MOU causes overlaps in function, weakens accountability, and exacerbates conflict between the partners. By the summer of 2006, the SNP had reached 35,500 slum dwellers in Ahmedabad with its services (Baruah 2007), but there had been no effort to prepare such a document to formalize the partnership roles and responsibilities. Since the partnership concept envisages involvement of partners with different core competences, and since there are plans to scale up the SNP to cover slums in the entire city, the importance of implementing appropriate legalized institutional structures for defining responsibilities and accountability could not be more pronounced. Experiences of stakeholders in other Indian cities where partnership projects have worked well support the importance of drawing up clear roles and responsibilities for the various actors. Describing two decades of experiences and achievements of the city of Visakhapatnam in slum upgradation and regularization, B. Banerjee (1999) stresses that even if it is possible for diverse institutions with different activities to work in an integrated way, this does not happen automatically. She goes on to emphasize that the support of the state government is a crucial element in the process, as are clear procedures and mechanisms for institutional development. The establishment of a special purpose vehicle – as an autonomous legal and administrative entity to bring together the parties involved in the partnership project in order to manage the project and share its risks and rewards – would also enhance the credibility and legitimacy of the MOU.

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While documenting and analyzing the constraints MHT faces in working with various stakeholders in the SNP, it would be remiss not to re-emphasize that SEWA’s stature as a development organization of national and international repute plays a tremendous part in enabling MHT to negotiate a pivotal role for itself in its interactions with the other partners. Despite all the conflicts in the partnership, it would be extremely imprudent to suggest that the institutional clout MHT enjoys while partnering with other actors in the slum upgradation project is the norm for other women’s organizations engaging in collaborative projects. I was very impressed, for example, by the non-hierarchical nature of the interactions between MHT fieldworkers – predominantly young women – and AMC bureaucrats – predominantly older men – during project meetings in AMC boardrooms, but it would be misleading to suggest that all women’s organizations are accorded the same respect in their collaborations with state agencies. Although I did not engage actively in this study with how smaller, lesser-known women’s organizations in Ahmedabad and in the rest of India interact with state agencies and other stakeholders in partnership projects, it would probably be safe to assume that the respect SEWA commands in the projects it participates in would not be easily available to organizations with less publicized histories and accomplishments. Exploring the politics, opportunities, and constraints of the involvement of smaller, less-established women’s organizations in multiple-stakeholder partnership projects may shed light upon institutional and partnership issues that have less relevance in the context of SEWA and its sister organizations.

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8 Conclusions: Seeing the Forest and the Trees

In a recent book documenting the remarkable accomplishments of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, Smillie (2009, 41) identifies land as the most prominent form of capital accumulation and the most important indicator of status in Bangladesh: “Those with land are not just better off; they are important. Those without it are nothing.” Private ownership rights in landed property also hold a very privileged position in the rest of urban and rural South Asia. I was motivated to explore the relevance of landed property in the lives of women for several reasons. Women make up half the world’s population, perform two-thirds of the world’s working hours, receive one-tenth of the world’s income, and own only one-hundredth of the world’s property (Abbott, Wallace, and Tyler 2005). The gap between women’s and men’s education and income levels is narrowing gradually all over the world, but the disparity in property ownership is stark and seemingly intransigent. Even in countries where women consistently outperform men in educational attainment – as in countries of the English-speaking Caribbean – they remain extremely marginalized in property ownership (Antrobus 2005). Consequently, there is growing acknowledgment that women are particularly discriminated against in their right to land and property (UN Development Programme 1995; UNIFEM 2000; World Bank 2001). In India, I observed that despite the significant amount of state, NGO, and donor agency interest in recent years in increasing women’s access to emerging economic opportunities, there was virtual silence, or at best very tokenistic attempts, in engaging with women’s efforts to acquire and, more importantly, to retain control over landed assets created as a result of increasing access to opportunity. According to statistics maintained by the Registrar General in India, the proportion of Indian women in the workforce in 1981 was 19.67 percent. It rose to 22.7 percent in 1991 and to 25.7 percent in 2001. Predictably, the few available statistics on women’s ownership of property in India (Doss, Grown, and Deere 2008; RDI 2009) do not correlate even remotely with optimistic trends and predictions about women’s

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Conclusions 207

participation in the workforce. And yet, answers to the questions I was asking about the persistence of such glaring inequalities in property ownership were far less readily available than glib answers to questions about emerging economic opportunities for women within the liberalizing economy of India. My interest in this topic solidified even further when I realized that the gap in knowledge of gender and property ownership was even more pronounced for urban women than it is for rural women. In the rural context, women’s entitlements to agricultural land in South Asia have been documented and justified quite extensively – very notably by Bina Agarwal – but the corresponding land and housing requirements of urban women in terms of land tenure, financial services, water, sanitation, electricity, space for economic activities, and access to public services have received very little attention not just in development practice and policy formulation but also in academic scholarship. Numerous clear policy recommendations emerge from the extensive fieldwork I conducted in Ahmedabad in collaboration with the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) to understand the nature and magnitude of the challenges and opportunities facing urban low-income women in securing access to and control over landed property. First and foremost, findings from this research identify urban land tenure as a socio-political process with many grey areas and unresolved tensions between legitimacy and legality. Both formal and informal mechanisms can provide different levels of protection from eviction for poor urban communities, though my findings emphasize the need for a strong legal basis to improve women’s access to landed property in urban low-income settlements. In the absence of legal land tenure, slum communities rely on a variety of mechanisms to ensure tenure security. The politics and the politicking involved in negotiating informal tenure security – whether it is through building political patronage or brokering power with land speculators – remain an almost exclusively male enterprise. Women have too little political voice within formal law and government, and in their inability to negotiate security through informal or illegal means. If some form of full legal land tenure continues to remain unavailable to slum populations, it will increase men’s dependence on informal processes to ensure tenure security. This will further undermine women’s agency by increasing their dependence on men and men’s networks of informal or illegal power structures. These findings provide further evidence of the possibility suggested by Jackson (2003) that the marginalization of women in property ownership is often not necessarily an outcome of male desire to subjugate or oppress women. Rather, it may be a consequence of competition between various groups of men, or of the inability of certain groups of men to acquire control over landed property. As long as legal tenure remains unavailable to poor urban communities, women will be twice removed from any real access to and control over landed property. Legal

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208 Conclusions

tenure in this context does not necessarily mean individual land titles; collective tenure may also work well so long as women have access – through joint titles, for example. In contrast to Agarwal (1994a), who identifies independent titles, even for married women, as the optimal solution for improving women’s access to rural land, this research recommends joint titles to marital property as the most practical strategy to increase urban married women’s access to and control over landed assets. However, the concept of joint ownership excludes large numbers of women who may not be able to prove any relationship with a man. This gap is a major challenge for single women, widows, deserted women, and elderly women. Since daughters are often excluded from inheriting or staking a claim to parental property, they may not benefit directly from joint titling initiatives. Therefore, enhancing women’s ability to secure independent titles to urban land and housing is certainly a worthy long-term goal for women’s organizations, but joint titles also represent a realistic and effective strategy to enable large numbers of married women to gain greater access to landed resources in urban areas. The two strategies do not have to be mutually exclusive. Some of my other findings – about the conflicts between formal laws and customary inheritance practices, for example – corroborate issues that are already widely established in the scholarship on gender and property as being impediments to women’s efforts to acquire landed property. Other findings – including the contradictions and complications posed by slum upgradation activities for various groups of women (very notably, landladies and female-headed renting households) – reveal emerging issues of relevance as well as new avenues of inquiry. Informal renting in slums presents a double-edged sword for women; my findings suggest that more research on informal landlords or landladies and tenants is needed to identify tools, mechanisms, and policy recommendations to benefit both groups of individuals. Overall, I establish in this book the critical importance of women asserting their rights to landed property in the face of the twin stumbling blocks of economic transformations that erode customary rights and entitlements, and the persistence of cultural traditions of patriarchy that deny them any real control over landed resources and power. Like several other researchers (Agarwal 1994a; S. Basu 1999; Parasher 1992), my research reveals that even though the formal realm of law can and does play a significant role in optimizing women’s entitlements to landed resources, legislation cannot be the sole vehicle for social change, since pro-women social legislation is largely symbolic when it comes to altering roles and entitlement hierarchies within the family. My research indicates that women’s well-documented aversion to staking claims to natal property is less a consequence of their ignorance of the law or their inability to appreciate the economic benefits of landed property ownership and more an outcome of a profound desire

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Conclusions 209

to stay connected with and feel loved by their natal families. Declining shares of parental property in favour of brothers similarly represents less a mindless subscription to traditional gender ideologies and more an intricate negotiation of kinship that alienates women from natal property but also ensures economic and emotional support from brothers in times of crisis. Like the findings of several others, my research endorses the view that legal literacy and initiatives that raise awareness among both women and men about the benefits of greater equity and address fears about undoing customary male privileges are as crucial as policy reforms and state actions that protect women’s interests and facilitate their agency. Consequently, scaling up consciousness-raising efforts to educate men and women about their equal entitlements to landed property is one of the other major recommendations emerging from this research. In their study of women’s perceptions of land ownership in the district of Kutch in Gujarat, Rajgor and Rajgor (2008) found an apparent contradiction between participants’ agreement that no other asset but land could bring them the same sense of self-worth, security, and respect within the village and the women’s reluctance to give land to their daughters. In part, this was because of pragmatic concerns about whether daughters who had moved away to marry could farm land they are given. However, it was also because of concerns that in transferring land to their daughters, mothers could place them at risk of reprisals from in-laws who do not share a commitment to transferring land to women. As in my study, women who hesitated to endow daughters with land may just be taking the practical step of working with patriarchy in some ways, while subverting it in other, perhaps less-visible ways. Engaging with such choices will require us to be guided by a less narrowly defined sense of logic and idealism. In general, the other major findings from this research demonstrate that gender equity goals can be only partially accomplished through legal measures and economic interventions, regardless of how well intentioned and progressive they may be. For example, in response to recommendations from this study, SEWA Bank can make housing microfinance more affordable and accessible for urban low-income women by introducing more flexible guarantor requirements and raising the ceiling on maximum loan amounts to facilitate both home improvement and purchase. Indeed, SEWA Bank has very sincerely and promptly already implemented these policy changes. However, the broader findings from my research complicate matters by suggesting that making microfinance more affordable and accessible for women may not automatically promote more egalitarian relationships between men and women or increase women’s control over landed property. Given the almost universally assumed causal link between women’s income or employment and higher social status, it is understandable why organizations such as SEWA believe that improving women’s economic condition will lead to

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210 Conclusions

an improvement in their position within the family and within society at large. Some of my findings somewhat inconveniently contradicts this assumed trajectory and suggests instead that conflating poverty alleviation or economic development goals with gender equality objectives is problematic and may actually be counterproductive. Interventions such as microcredit may reduce poverty in the economic sense at the household level while entrenching rather than subverting familial gender hierarchies – by exacerbating women’s work burdens and putting pressure on them to borrow large sums of money for purposes that may at best maintain the status quo and at worst actively defeat any gender equality agenda. Research participants who reported borrowing large sums of money to fund bigger dowries for their daughters or, even more disturbingly, those who suggested that women may actually take microcredit loans to perform sex-selective abortions of female fetuses reveal how deeply problematic it can be to collapse economic empowerment goals with gender equality objectives. In a similar vein, SEWA Bank may be able to tweak to perfection the financial and legal tools to ensure that its borrowers are able to acquire titles to land and homes in their names, but there is very little it can do if the same women actively choose to bequeath their property only to male heirs. These findings also provide a firmer basis for the possibility that providing women with better access to economic resources in the face of deeply entrenched male-biased prejudices and preferences may exacerbate inequalities between men and women. In a very thoughtful critique of the microfinance movement, Dichter and Harper (2007, 257) note that the most frequent criticism of microcredit is not really a criticism of microfinance itself at all. They go on to use this analogy: Nobody could or should criticize an obstetrician for not being able to perform open heart surgery. However, if she or her friends claimed to be able to do such a thing, we might be justified in expressing some doubt. Although my research is critical of some minor practical and philosophical aspects of SEWA’s work, I have no criticism whatsoever of the overarching integrity and intelligence with which the organization pursues its objective of economic self-sufficiency for its members. At the same time, if SEWA wants to hold itself accountable to gender equality objectives, it must be prepared to engage in a much more direct way with the unavoidably political and messy project of addressing gender relations within and outside the household. SEWA has, for the most part, avoided such an approach, preferring instead to tinker with the tools and mechanisms for reducing material poverty in women’s lives while assuming that gender equality would take care of itself as women acquired more economic power. My findings question the inevitability of such an outcome. Alarmed by the tendency of development organizations to collapse all forms of disadvantage into poverty, Jackson (1996, 501) emphasized that “gender justice is not a poverty issue and cannot be approached with poverty

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Conclusions 211

reduction policies.” My findings attest that interventions for economic development or poverty alleviation cannot serve as proxies for addressing unequal gender relations. Money appears to be an inadequate currency for altering gender relations, and gender must, as Jackson insists, be “rescued from the poverty trap” (489). In the end, there is no substitute for an engagement with gender analysis that transcends material definitions of poverty. Policy “misbehaviour” is not always attributable to institutional incompetence or inertia. There is no doubt that women’s individual and collective agency and priorities are capable of advancing gender equity objectives, but it is important to remain open to the possibility that they are also capable of confounding the outcomes of well-intentioned policies and projects. In addition to assuming a causal link between women’s higher economic performance and greater gender equality, most women’s organizations tend to assume that what is good for one group of women will necessarily be good for all groups of women. Among other findings from my research, the conundrum posed by slum upgradation activities that benefit certain groups of women by improving access to water and sanitation while rendering other women potentially homeless because of rent hikes contradicts and complicates this assumption. It represents yet another way in which innovative pro-women solutions can sometimes be confounded in practice. That women have been implicated in female feticide and infanticide, in food and health biases against daughters, in exploitative relationships with other women, and in dowry deaths speaks rather poignantly and painfully to the unpredictability and subjectivity of women’s agencies, priorities, and constraints. To engage meaningfully with these issues, organizations such as SEWA must not only be cognizant, as they already are, of the fact that what is good for men need not also be good for women; they must also be open to the possibility that what may serve one group of women well may not benefit, or may actively disadvantage, other women. SEWA’s work cannot benefit all women at all times. Efforts to unionize workers in different trades and to implement occupation-specific minimum wage legislation were noteworthy accomplishments in raising incomes and protecting livelihoods, but their benefits rarely accrued to large numbers of urban low-income women engaged in an array of small marginalized and frequently subcontracted economic activities revealed by this research. SEWA uses the analogy of a banyan tree to describe how the organization supports its members through its many and various branches (Chen 2008). Thirty-seven years after the first seeds were sown in 1972, and now with a membership of over 1 million across India, SEWA has grown into a movement of solidarity among self-employed women workers around the world. It has steadily transformed the conditions of work and livelihoods of millions of women who work in an otherwise unprotected, yet extremely significant, sector of the Indian economy. Along the way, SEWA’s numerous

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212 Conclusions

accomplishments have justifiably been well documented and widely celebrated. At this point in its history, SEWA is mature and secure enough in its stature as an organization to be able to take a step back to reflect upon not just its many successes but also the limitations of its activities and knowledge of critical social dynamics and variables that may lie beyond its control but not necessarily beyond its ability to influence. Such reflection and planning must involve eschewing both the naïveté of the self-deceiving organization – that consistently denies error and presents the world with a polished briefing, fully believing that its programs and activities have worked just as intended and produced results that meet or exceed expected targets – and the skepticism of the defeated organization – that speaks openly of its errors but primarily as a means of pointing out the perversity of its environment or the impossibility of its task. Acknowledging fallibility and remaining open to constructive criticism and feedback does not diminish an organization’s stature. Rather, it demonstrates intellectual curiosity and moral integrity – the hallmarks of a learning organization (Korten 1980) that is committed to social justice. As well as commenting on the broader implications of my findings, I would like to reflect briefly on the theoretical and conceptual anchors that provided the most appropriate frameworks for conducting exploratory interdisciplinary research on gender and landed property in the context of urban India. Because of their primary focus on welfare and efficiency, women in development (WID) and women and development (WAD) approaches are able to encompass landed property only as an economic good and not as a social relation. Consequently, they do not provide an appropriate or adequate framework for appreciating the complexity and significance of non-economic issues involved in women’s attempts to secure access to and control over landed resources. With its focus on women’s strategic needs, the gender and development (GAD) approach attempts to address women’s marginalization in the ownership of landed property by espousing the removal of institutional forms of discrimination to facilitate the development of equal rights to land ownership and access to credit. My findings suggest that although such changes are indeed crucial for promoting gender equality in land ownership, they still fail to engage adequately with the social, emotional, and cultural significance of landed property in women’s lives. For the same reasons, the human capabilities approach, with its focus on the role of the law and of legal justice in achieving gender equality, fails to provide an adequate framework for understanding women’s needs and entitlements to landed property. By conceptualizing culture as lived experience rather than as a static set of relationships, the women, culture, and development (WCD) approach highlights how production and reproduction are interconnected in women’s lives, and how women’s agency can simultaneously perpetuate inequalities and challenge them. It provides a more appropriate framework than other

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Conclusions 213

approaches for accommodating the findings of my research, which highlight how strongly non-economic opportunities and constraints influence women’s ability to acquire landed property, as well as the compromises and negotiations women make to optimize the choices and resources available to them to build securer lives. Similarly, the concepts of cooperative conflict and intra-household bargaining, identified as potential theoretical anchors for my research in Chapter 2, serve as appropriate frameworks to assess the significance of landed property in women’s lives because they support my contention that women’s ability to plan secure futures are influenced as much by legal, social, economic, and political factors as they are by the multiple intersectional vulnerabilities resulting from women’s day-to-day struggles for survival. Looking Ahead Gender inequality has traditionally been measured in terms of gaps in men’s and women’s opportunities and outcomes. Much of the research on gender has focused on inequalities between men and women of wages, educational opportunities, schooling outcomes, mortality, and morbidity, and more recently political participation and representation. Governments, NGOs, international financial institutions, as well as development agencies such as the United Nations, use these indicators to track progress toward global goals of development, social justice, and gender equality. The UN Millennium Development Goals, for example, identify eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2015 as the key target for gender equality (Goal 3). My conclusions support those of others (see, for example, Doss, Grown, and Deere 2008) in emphasizing that the asset gender gap may provide a much firmer basis for understanding persistent gender inequalities than just a focus on education and income. Because property ownership demonstrates the connections and contradictions between public and private spheres of women’s lives in more complex ways than other areas of disadvantage, I would argue that women’s ability to own and control assets may be a more powerful indicator of progress toward gender equality than their ability to educate themselves or to earn wages at par with men. Unfortunately, few studies have examined the gender dimensions of property ownership either at the macro or micro levels. Very few efforts have been made to understand asset ownership from a gender perspective. Doss, Grown, and Deere (2008) suggest that one reason gender is not a prominent part of the literature on property ownership is the lack of gender-disaggregated empirical information on the distribution of wealth and property. Few surveys actually collect information on individual ownership of land, housing, livestock, and other productive assets. Most data on assets are collected at the household level, which gives a misleading or partial picture of individual-level ownership patterns. Consequently, researchers and policy makers

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214 Conclusions

have an incomplete understanding of the assets that women own, how they acquire them, and how they use them to influence decisions affecting their own and others’ well-being. There have been some recent efforts by a consortium of international NGOs and bilateral aid organizations to discuss the effects of land allocation, reform, and tenure on the urban poor (UN-Habitat 2003). A greater emphasis on gender analysis is also emerging. After grassroots consultations across the globe, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, for example, made the issue of women’s rights to adequate housing and land the focus of its global mobilization, including governments, NGOs, and civil society (Benschop 2003; UN High Commissioner for Refugees 2003). Monitoring gendered allocation of land titles and intra-household decision making with regard to land use, allocation of labour, and access to capital and other services along gender lines are also areas of possible future research that will shed light on the ways in which women are negotiating access to and control over landed assets, and the benefits derived from such control.

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APPENDIX 1

Case Study Slums and Slum Networking Project (SNP) Status in 2003

Name of slum

SNP status

Zone

No. of Approximate homes population NGO

Private sector partner

Upgradation complete by 2003 Babalavlavinagar

Complete

South

100

900

MHT

SBI Employee Union

Jaishaktinagar

Complete

North

145

1,000

MHT

___

Revabanagar

Complete

South

70

595

MHT

__

Sharif Khan Pathan Ni Chali

Complete

North

98

525

MHT

Lions Club

Sinheshwarinagar

Complete

North

43

225

MHT

Lions Club

Upgradation incomplete in 2003

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Andamukhi No Vas

Incomplete

North

300

1,500

MHT

None

Barotvas

Incomplete

South

170

1,700

MHT

None

Kailashnagar

Incomplete

South

162

1,500

MHT

None

Keshavnagar

Incomplete

South

130

1,300

MHT

None

Nat Na Chhapra

Incomplete

North

200

1,200

MHT

None

Ramesh Dutt Colony

Incomplete

South

800

5,600

MHT

None

Santoshinagar

Incomplete

South

1,000

5,000

MHT

None

Talavadi Na Chappra

Incomplete

South

675

6,075

MHT

None

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Making clay idols, petty shops, tea stands Embroidery, origami work

Construction workers, embroidery, livestock raising Toy vendors

Andamukhi No Vas

Barotvas

Kailashnagar

Keshavnagar

Slum name

Women’s occupations

Hindu migrants from rural Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh

Hindu

Hindu migrants from Rajasthan

Hindu migrants from Rajasthan

Religion/ ethnic identity

Legal residents; purchased land from AMC at Rs.250 per plot

Land owned by AEC; no eviction attempts

Legal residents; 1976 photopasses available

Legal residents; Land owned by AMC; no eviction attempts

Land status

Rs.3,00030,000 Rent: Rs.300-500

Rs.3,000100,000 on homes

Rs.3,00030,000 on homes

Rs.5,00040,000 on homes

Amounts invested in and/home

Water supply, toilets, electricity, storm drains, stone paving

Water supply, toilets, sewers, storm drains, stone paving

Need for facilities

Illegal electricity, no public water taps, 3 street lights, no storm drains or sewers

Water supply, toilets, sewers, storm drains, electricity, street lights

Illegal electricity, 1 public Water supply, toilets, public water tap; no storm drains, sewers, public toilets; no street street lights lights, storm drains, or sewers

No electricity, 2 public water taps, 8 public toilets, 9 street lights

Illegal electricity, 1 water tap per 10 homes, 8 payper-use toilets, storm drains, sewers

Present infrastructure

Summary Profiles of Non-upgraded Slum Communities

APPENDIX 2

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Fruit vendors, petty shops

Government cleaners, domestics, candy wrapping, manual labour Domestics, candy wrapping, petty shops, small vendors

Vegetable vendors, incense making, embroidery

Nat Na Chhapra

Ramesh Dutt Colony

Santoshinagar

Talavadi Na Chappra

Hindu, Jain

Hindu; Muslims left after 2002 riots

Hindu, Christian, Jain

Hindu

Land owned by AMC; few eviction attempts

Squatters

Legal residents; 1976 photopasses available

Rs.3,000120,000 for land and home

Rs.1500+ for land; Rs.5,00040,000 on homes Rent: Rs.300

Rs.8,00025,000 on homes Rent: Rs.250-400

Land owned by Rs.3,000AMC; several 4,000 eviction attempts; no photo-passes

Illegal electricity, 4 public water taps, pay-per-use toilets, 3 streetlights

Illegal electricity; 3 public water taps; no public toilets, street lights, storm drains, or sewers

Illegal electricity, 3 public water taps, no public toilets, a few functioning storm drains and street lights, no sewers or garbage collection

Stone paving, illegal electricity, 5 public water taps, 16 public toilets, no street lights or storm drains

Street lights, water supply, toilets, storm drains, sewers, electricity

Water supply, storm drains, sewers, toilets, street lights, low-cost legal electricity

Low-cost legal electricity, durable indoor toilets, sewers, water supply, storm drains

Water, toilets, storm drains, electricity

APPENDIX 3

Housing Microfinance

Table 1 SEWA Bank summary profile Particulars No. of members

1998-99

1999-2000

2000-01

24,045

25,011

25,464

Share capital (US$)

205,620

217,440

220,380

No. of accounts

112,750

139,611

113,583

Total deposits (US$)

3,528,740

4,219,420

5,362,440

Working capital (US$)

5,184,520

6,150,600

7,799,580

30,936

33,709

39,284

1,800,720

1,811,480

1,794,520

45,180

48,440

36,440

No. of loan accounts (cumulative) Loans and advances (US$) Profit (US$)

Table 2 Housing and infrastructure loans made by SEWA Bank Year

No. of women

Loan amount (US$)

1981

5

90

1991

795

142,386

1992

900

155,266

1993

636

125,752

1994

550

134,973

1995

1,583

494,230

1996

1,449

483,054

1997

1,712

613,936

1998

2,271

736,226

1999

2,192

660,364

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Appendix 3 219

Table 3 Purpose of housing loans made by SEWA Bank Purpose New building

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

504

404

526

766

444

Building repair/infrastructure

838

793

983

1,154

1,124

Monsoon proofing

241

206

187

351

400

0

46

17

0

7

SNP (Parivartan)

Table 4 SEWA Bank loan terms and conditions (2003) Loan term

3 to 5 years

Interest rate

14.5 to 17%

Interest method

Reducing balance method

Maximum loan amount

Rs.25,000 (unsecured, collateral-free loans)

Table 5 SEWA Bank clients by employment Employment type Micro entrepreneurs

Percentage of clients 41

Dependent subcontractors

36

Casual labourers

22

Salaried employment

1

Table 6 Per capita income of SEWA Bank clients (US$) Income

baruah.indd 219

Percentage of clients

< $1 per day

53

$1-2 per day

34

> $2 per day

13

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Notes

Chapter 1: Minding the Gap 1 SEWA was founded to unionize women engaged in the unorganized informal sector. Its current membership includes a small number of low-income formal sector women, such as municipal cleaners, who benefit from its banking, child care, insurance, and other such services. Although I use the terms “informal sector women” and “low-income women” interchangeably in this book, a small number of participants in my research are actually low-income formal sector women. Issues of land ownership do not differ significantly for them. In Chapter 6, I address how access to housing financial services may be different for formal sector women. For a more detailed account of the SEWA movement, see Rose (1992) and E. Bhatt (2006). Chapter 3: Place Matters 1 SEWA did not maintain statistics on the specific numbers of female-headed households in slums in Ahmedabad, but research conducted at the national level indicates that up to 30 percent of poor families are supported solely by women (National Commission on SelfEmployed Women 1988). 2 The complete segregation between Hindu and Muslim communities following the 2002 communal riots is discussed earlier in the chapter. Ahmedabad has frequently been a locus for communal violence, though my research did not indicate overt expressions of antiMuslim sentiment among slum residents or suggest that they were organizing around Hindu nationalism at the time of the fieldwork. Chapter 4: Complicated Lives 1 I use pseudonyms to protect the identities of all research participants. 2 The penetration ratio expresses the volume of premium as a percentage of GDP. 3 Differences in class, caste, ethnicity, and other social markers are possible bases of influence in local-level organizing around needs and priorities in slum communities. They did not appear to impede organizing around slum upgradation activities, perhaps because most community residents, regardless of socio-economic status, were in need of water and sanitation services. Chapter 5: Gendered Realities 1 Under the land to the tiller practice, land is titled solely in the name of the person, almost always a man, who assumes the responsibility for tilling it. Under ceiling schemes, the state typically takes away land from those owning more than a specified ceiling limit and endows the landless with the surplus land. 2 Ration cards are issued by state governments to low-income individuals and families. They entitle holders to purchase rice, flour, sugar, and other essentials at subsidized prices.

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Notes to pages x 221

3 Below-poverty-line certificates are issued to persons/households deemed to be living below the national poverty line. Chapter 6: Women and Housing Microfinance 1 For the purposes of this study, housing microfinance is defined as loans to low-income people for renovation or expansion of an existing home, construction or purchase of a new home, land acquisition, and acquisition of basic infrastructure such as water supply, toilets, electricity, storm drainage, and connection to city sewage lines (Daphnis 2004). 2 SEWA Bank charges interest on loans on a reducing rate balance. In other words, the amount of interest a borrower pays goes down over time as she pays off the loan because the principal amount she owes goes down over time. Moneylenders almost always charge interest on a non-reducing rate basis. Although moneylenders may say that they charge only 10 to 12 percent interest on a loan, a borrower will inevitably pay more than she would if she borrowed from SEWA Bank because the interest on a moneylender’s loan is calculated over the entire term of the loan on the amount she borrowed at the outset and not on the actual amount that remains to be repaid. 3 This maximum loan amount was subsequently raised to Rs.50,000 (US$1,250) in 2005. Clients with established savings records at SEWA Bank and legal title to their properties have been awarded loans up to Rs.200,000 (US$5,000) in the last few years. 4 Increasingly, SEWA Bank has approved self-employed individuals as guarantors of loans upon procurement of proofs such as income tax returns, business letterheads, and voter registration cards without any adverse impact on repayment rates, which remain at over 96 percent in 2007. 5 As a result of internal research and external evaluations, including my research, SEWA Bank eventually raised the maximum loan amount to Rs.50,000 (US$1,250). A study aimed at discovering if and how this has changed patterns of borrowing, purchase, construction, and upgradation of housing would be extremely useful in helping SEWA Bank to further revise and refine lending policies. 6 Chit funds are extremely popular in slums. They are based on collecting a fixed amount of money from all participants on a predetermined day of every month and giving the amount as a loan on a revolving basis to the individual whose name is drawn up by lottery. The chit manager assumes the risk associated with such ventures since he or she has to come up with everyone’s share if a participant runs away after receiving the loan. Such cases are rare but not unheard of. On a number of occasions, chit managers have also been known to abscond with the money. There are different kinds of moneylenders in slums. Some lend money only to close acquaintances and do not treat the activity as a primary occupation. There are others who double as moneylenders while working as petty contractors or grocers. There are still others for whom money lending is a major livelihood. Pawnbrokers lend money on slightly lower interest rates than moneylenders but only after objects such as jewellery are mortgaged with them. They return these objects if and when the loan and interest are returned within the time frame agreed upon. Pawnbrokers have a reputation for being unscrupulous, and most slum residents approach governmentapproved pawnbrokers to avoid being cheated. Chapter 7: Partnership Projects for Urban Basic Services 1 This chapter is not intended as an endorsement of partnerships as the sites within which questions related to urban women’s land rights should emerge. Research designed to answer such questions would be extremely valuable to the study of gender and landed property. 2 There is a burgeoning body of literature on the meanings of the term “participation.” In this book I do not attempt to incorporate this literature, except to emphasize that different stakeholders in the partnership project, within the context of which my research was conducted, seem to operate from significantly different understandings of what “participation” implies.

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