Making human rights real

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.