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Making human rights real

By Kiran Martin - posted Wednesday, 13 October 2010


I would like to begin by transporting you to what I saw when I entered a slum colony in New Delhi in August of 1988.

Shanty huts, made of cardboard, plastic sheets and pieces of cloth, barely 50 sq feet in size, lay tightly packed together. Piles of rotting garbage were everywhere. Pigs wallowed in ponds filled with dirty water and solid waste. Little children played around the filth and excrement that lay all over. Some were rummaging among garbage, looking for bits of metal and plastic to sell. Most were severely malnourished and ill.

The public toilets at one end of the slum were piled high with rotten faeces. The urinals were broken, and the stench of urine and excreta filled the air. There were small shallow hand pumps everywhere that the residents had dug themselves. The water was brown and contaminated with faeces, and everyone used it for drinking, bathing and washing.

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Electricity was being tapped illegally from overhead cables, and hundreds of live wires that had been hooked on to these cables, found their way into people's homes.

A closer look at the shanty hut revealed that there was barely enough room for a small cot. There were no windows or doors. Pots and pans were hanging under the roof to collect the leaking rain water. A little kerosene stove and a few utensils lay in a corner. Huge rats kept running across the floor, and there were flies and mosquitoes everywhere.

The women looked pale and tired of life. There seemed to be large numbers of men lying around, doing nothing. Some lay on the ground, drunk, reeking of alcohol.

Five thousand people lived sandwiched between a large dirty drain one on side and a government office complex on the other.

Ambedkar slum represents more than 30 per cent of the total population of 14 million in India's capital city, New Delhi. The residents are disadvantaged in nearly every conceivable way, suffering from numerous health, environmental, social and political problems. The Maternal Mortality Ratio at 750 and Under Five Mortality Rate at 149 are among the highest in the world.

As the relentless rise in food prices in urban areas combines with persistently low incomes, the urban poor cannot afford to purchase adequate amounts and types of food. Serious malnutrition and stunted development is widespread in slums. Children from poor families are often born into hunger, grow up in hunger, and might die in hunger.

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Women are mostly restricted to the roles of domestic servants or child bearers, and struggle to voice their opinions. The sex ratio is about 850 girls to a 1000 boys, and female feticide and infanticide are common.

The majority of people living in slum areas work in the urban informal sector, which is characterised by job insecurity, low wages and dangerous work. The markets for land, basic services and labour are skewed in favour of private interests. These unequal opportunities create minorities in the marketplace, whose individual members are automatically excluded from a wide range of outcomes associated with economic growth and globalisation. Slum areas remain a blind spot, when it comes to policy interventions, job creation and youth support.

The urban advantage of better access to education remains a myth. For most slum families, educating their children is the last thing on their minds. As families struggle to survive, many children are forced to work to supplement the family income. Every child up to the age of 14 is entitled to free schooling, but the government schools they attend are poorly resourced and have low teaching standards. English and computing skills are barely taught, and the option of higher education remains an expensive dream.

Gross human rights violations in the form of forced evictions and sudden demolitions are common, although they are in complete violation of Delhi’s Slum Housing Policy. Slum inhabitants do not have a legal document such as a title deed, to prove tenure rights.

From my early beginnings in 1988, I went on to establish the charity “Asha” that is the Hindi word for “Hope”. Twenty-two years on, Asha works among 400,000 slum inhabitants focusing on addressing the health, environmental, gender, educational and financial rights of the urban poor.

I recognised right at the start that empowering slum communities to become partners in slum development would be the key to helping them realise their rights and attain sustainable poverty reduction. Participation is critical to enable people to achieve their full capabilities, demand better services and foster equality. I began the painstaking process of helping slum women get organised. The breakthrough came when they started to experience success through their collective action. They then became excited about the possibility of change.

Today, Asha has facilitated the organisation of large numbers of community women’s associations that work in partnership with Asha. Thousands of Asha slum women have become lead agents of transformation in their communities.

Another key element in Asha’s strategy is to build healthy, collaborative partnerships with all stakeholders involved, such as political representatives, central and state government officials, educational authorities, the police, and so on.

We began with rights based health care programs, and environmental improvement, and focused on these areas for some years. They were able to gain access to safe water and sanitation, paved roads, and electricity.

In the 90’s, Asha engaged in path-breaking work with the city’s government to provide land titles to slum women. This came to be known as Ekta Vihar, the capital’s first on-site slum housing program. Owning assets greatly enhances a woman’s ability to influence decision making at the household as well as community level.

Women were given land titles and bank loans, and became proud owners of their own homes. Planned colonies were built with proper infrastructure. A remarkable transformation in living conditions began to happen.

The program was, however, fraught with challenges. There was major opposition to providing women with ownership titles in a feudal and patriarchal society. Huge kickbacks were involved in land transactions. Well off neighbours did not want slum dwellers living next to them. Slum lords who had grabbed large areas of land within the slum, refused to vacate. The bureaucratic red tape seemed impossible to negotiate at times.

This pilot initiative paved the way for the Slum Housing Policy at both the State and the National level. The government subsequently granted land tenure to thousands of slum residents all over the city.

Despite the success of this initiative, land security has been consistently challenging. For example, the unexpected forced eviction that took place in Delhi in 2006 as part of the urban renewal process in preparation for the Commonwealth games. The government had planned to illegally demolish the homes of over 1 million slum residents without rehabilitating them.

What happened was that at midnight, on April 24, 2006, policemen from the local police station announced to the residents of this colony that they would have to vacate their slum by 6am the next day. More than 15,000 men, women and children who had been living there for the past 25 years, were in a state of shock, as were we. Five bulldozers arrived the next day, approaching the slum from all sides. The huge wheels of the giant machines crushed the bricks, the plastic, the utensils, the cots, mattresses, pillows, chairs, tables, everything. The residents lay down on the ground in front of the bulldozers, hundreds climbed all over them, but to no avail. Now, the government official in charge of the operation was barking orders and uttering profanities, when all of a sudden, a huge live electric pole that had come loose, fell on him, and he died on the spot. He had sustained a massive head injury. The police temporarily halted all operations, and went away with his dead body.

Meanwhile, we were able to gain the attention of Mrs Sonia Gandhi through hectic lobbying with a number of Members of Parliament, and she instructed the city’s authorities to rehabilitate the residents with Asha’s help. Every family was given land titles at another location called Savda.

Savda is now a well established neighbourhood where thousands of residents, who would have become homeless because of the Commonwealth Games, now have a home of their own and lead a life of dignity.

In January of 2008, the then Finance Minister of India, Mr P Chidambaram, now India’s Home Minister, accepted my invitation to visit an Asha area. He was deeply moved by the diversity and extent of the transformation that he witnessed. However, when he found out that barely anyone had bank accounts, he realised that his government’s policy of financial inclusion found no expression among urban poor communities that made up over 30 per cent of the population of every town and city in the country. He facilitated a relationship between Asha, the nine largest public sector banks of India, and with the Ministry of Finance, and requested us to design a loan scheme for the urban poor.

Mr Chidambaram formally launched the project in June of 2008. Thousands of zero balance accounts were opened, with banks competing with each other to open the most accounts.

Since the launch, millions of rupees have been given by the banks as low interest loans for businesses, home renovation, transportation, and so on. The residents are able to access the entire range of banking services. The loan repayment rate, with trust as the only collateral, is an astonishing 99 per cent, and many families have significantly enhanced their incomes, and taken second or third loans.

When banks opened their doors to the urban poor of our nation for the first time, I began to realise that higher education for slum children was no longer a distant dream. It could become a reality, as banks were willing to come forward with higher education loans.

Higher Education is viewed by slum families as a process that delays their children's ability to contribute to the family income. Most families have no money to spare for college tuition and other expenses. Children struggle with the lack of space, the noise of the slum environment, and unreliable power supplies. They have no role models, and nobody takes the time to talk to them about their career options. They end up doing the same unskilled and poorly paid jobs as their parents.

Asha's Higher Education Programme is a pioneering effort: for the first time in its history, in July 2009, India witnessed the acceptance of 106 slum children to one of the nation's most renowned centres of higher learning, Delhi University.

The opportunities for enhanced learning have been seized with great enthusiasm. Children, who would have once been working in roadside stalls, shining shoes, or picking rags, now have the confidence to attend university with much more privileged youngsters. The process of their integration into the rest of society has begun. After spending years longing for equality, they are finally experiencing it.

So what does an established Asha slum look like today?

Asha health professionals provide quality care to every one of its residents. Community Health Volunteers and midwives chosen by the community, and trained by Asha, administer simple but highly effective means of primary health care.

The Child Mortality Rate has fallen from 149 to 28. The average for India as a whole is 69. Maternal deaths are extremely rare. Almost every pregnant woman has a skilled attendant at delivery. 95 per cent of children under five have received all their vaccinations, and vaccine preventable diseases are hardly ever seen. Most couples have two or three children, and women are realising their reproductive rights. The majority of people, including children, are healthy, and an entire generation has become more aware of health issues.

There is improved access to safe water, improved sanitation facilities, drainage systems and paved streets, and safe and healthy shelter through land tenure reform and capital investment in infrastructure.

Almost every child goes to school, and many are attending university.

Each person has their own financial identity and access to the entire range of financial services. The resulting economic activity has brought about higher living standards.

Women have been empowered to take control of their own lives. They actively pursue the best interests of their families and their communities, and participate equally in economic and political affairs. They enjoy more respect and co-operation from men, who also play an exceedingly important role in community development, with positive and supportive relationships being established between the two sexes.

Children’s associations function democratically, demonstrating great enthusiasm and skilled leadership.

Slum lords have gone out of business, and strong, effective relationships with political leaders and relevant officials are in place.

The Asha model is an example of how cities can be places of inclusion and participation, rather than places of exclusion and marginalisation.

A healthy, well-educated population is a major asset for any city, and knowledge is a pre requisite for enhanced civic participation in the social, political and cultural spheres. The education of girls and young women generates powerful poverty-reducing synergies and yields enormous intergenerational gains. It is positively correlated with enhanced economic productivity, more robust labour markets, higher earnings, and improved societal health and well being.

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This article is edited from the speech given for the Chancellor’s Human Rights Lecture at the University of Melbourne by Dr Kiran Martin on October 6, 2010.



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About the Author

Dr Kiran Martin is the Founder and Director of Asha. Originally working single-handedly at a borrowed table outside a slum in Delhi, Dr Martin has created a community health and development society that has transformed the lives of over 300,000 slum dwellers.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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