Begging for Attention

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The Twelfth Five-Year Plan has called for a holistic national policy on beggars.

When 286 inmates of the Beggars’ Rehabilitation Centre in Karnataka died over a period of eight months in 2010, for a brief moment the issue of beggars – who are visible and yet invisible in our cities – came into focus. Now the Twelfth Five-Year Plan has called for a national policy on beggars and a model central law on begging that could be adopted by the states. Social activists working with the very poor and beggars have long been advocating a holistic policy on the issue of beggary, rehabilitation of beggars and repeal of laws that are used to victimise not only beggars but all those who do not fit into the “respectable” category.

However, before the first steps are taken to formulate any rehabilitation programme or even a policy, it is essential to have reliable data about beggars and what they need. In 2010, the government admitted in the Lok Sabha that it had no authentic data on the number of beggars in the country. Making an estimate of the number of people involved in beggary will not be easy. Those who end up begging on the streets do so because of desperation. But they are not a fixed population; many drift in and out of begging.

In many ways, beggars are the most “rights-less” persons in India. They are unwanted and stigmatised and in the eyes of the middle class they beg because they are “lazy”. There is little understanding of the desperate circumstances that force the very poor to beg. Beggars end up being victimised and hounded on three accounts – in terms of the provisions of the law applicable, the so-called rehabilitation that is more like punitive incarceration and the ineffectiveness of the programmes aimed at ameliorating their conditions.

First, the existing laws meant to deal with beggars that end up punishing them and criminalising their activities rather than rehabilitating them need to be changed. The Bombay Prevention of Begging Act (BPBA) 1959, which inspired a number of similar laws in at least 18 states, has come under fire from many quarters for its regressive, brutally punitive and “custodial” features. It penalises itinerant street entertainers, homeless workers, the disabled poor and sexual minorities and migrants who may have come to the cities to escape from poor living conditions in the villages. Although an expert committee appointed by the Bombay High Court following a public interest litigation (PIL) in 1990 looked at the actual implementation of the law on the streets by the police and thereafter called for its abolition, the 1959 Act remains on the statute books.

Second is the inadequacy of the rehabilitation policy. Of late the media has focused on how inmates – mostly young women and children – have been “escaping” from remand and shelter homes where they are detained pending court trials. The conditions in these so-called homes are so demeaning that the inmates prefer to run away rather than stay there. The conditions in the beggars’ homes across the country would be much worse given their complete helplessness. Media and research reports have detailed the entire legal process from the time beggars are picked up from the streets to when they are fined or herded into beggars’ homes. By all accounts, most of the beggars’ homes extract free coerced labour and vocational rehabilitation remains only on paper. The landmark Ram Lakhan vs Statejudgment by the Delhi High Court in 2006 categorised the motives for begging and said those who beg to survive reflect the failure of the state. More memorably, it said that to subject such people to “further ignominy and deprivation by ordering their detention in a certified institution is nothing short of dehumanising them”.

Third, while there are no central schemes specifically aimed at beggars, there are a number of poverty-eradication and employment schemes targeting the very poor that could accommodate them. However, almost all of them demand documents and identification papers that a majority of the beggars do not have. Beggars are obviously not a monolithic section and the various strands within these communities have different vulnerabilities and needs. Child beggars are particularly vulnerable to exploitation of all kinds (especially by “professional” begging gangs), as are the sexual minorities, particularly the transgender.

In a society where it is accepted that transforming a city into a “world class” one means herding the unwanted sections like beggars and the marginalised either into custody or sending them to live on the outskirts, there is unlikely to be much sympathy for beggars. Also, the existing insensitive police and criminal justice system is going to take a long time to acknowledge that beggars too are citizens with rights. Against this background, the Twelfth Five-Year Plan’s call for an integrated scheme for their rehabilitation is welcome. As a first step, the government should initiate a nationwide survey to collect reliable data on the number of individuals forced into beggary.

Eviction drive clears road for Bypass expansion, work picks up speed

[Trees have been felled, people have been evicted but TT and its loyal readership doesn't care: as long as we have more cars which can ply unfettered through filled in wetlands with passengers looking at beautified green zones, all is well with the world]

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SUBHAJOY ROY

It takes Priyanshi Durbha almost 40 minutes to reach the Ruby rotary from Udita Housing Complex in Ajaynagar, where she stays, during the morning rush hour. But there is relief in sight for the Presidency University student with the stretch between Ajaynagar and Patuli cleared of encroachments and the EM Bypass widening project getting a boost. “If this project actually succeeds in decongesting the Bypass, it will be of great help to commuters,” Durbha said. “It takes me almost 40 minutes to reach Ruby on way to the university. I hope that vehicles move faster once the project is complete.” The plan is to build dedicated lanes for buses and other vehicles on the Bypass. The Bus Rapid Transport System (BRTS) is already operational in cities such as Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Jaipur. “The idea is to decongest the entire 15.5km Bypass. Private vehicles will no longer need to wait as a bus picks up passengers. Buses too will be able to ply faster as they will have dedicated lanes,” said Vivek Bharadwaj, the chief executive officer of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA). Besides pavements for pedestrians, a green zone and a cycle track are also on the anvil. Bharadwaj admitted that last month’s eviction drive between Ajaynagar and Patuli had helped step up work. “It’s a step ahead for us. We will finish the landfilling for building the new roads before monsoon. That will allow the earth to settle during the rains,” he said. A team of CMDA officials and police bulldozed about 1,500 shops and stalls along the Bypass near Patuli on March 23, thus clearing the way for landfilling. Landfilling started from the Metropolitan area last year but progress had been slow. “There are several stretches between Metropolitan and Dhalai bridge where we could not work because of encroachments,” a CMDA official said. Shops lining both flanks of the road between Ajaynagar and Patuli stalled work and the landfilling could not proceed further south. Work has resume after the recent eviction. “It will need another 18 months for the BRTS to get running. After landfilling, several layers will be added before the bituminous covering is done,” said a senior CMDA official. The BRTS was supposed to be functional from December 2011 but work was delayed because of several hurdles. The first speedbreaker came in the form of a disagreement between agencies regarding the location of the bus track. “It had been planned that the bus lanes would be on the two sides but the proposal was scrapped later. The bus lanes will now be built next to the median,” Bharadwaj said. A corridor will be built from the bus stops to the traffic light. Passengers getting off a bus will walk through the corridor to reach the signal. “Passengers will get off the bus and cross the road at the zebra crossing. Those trying to board a bus will reach the bus lane through the zebra crossing and then walk through the corridor to the bus stop,” Bharadwaj said. Despite work picking up pace, there are apprehensions that the 18-month deadline will be missed. “Very little work has been completed between Metropolitan and the entry to Salt Lake. There are some encroachments on this stretch too,” said the official. Bharadwaj admitted that there has been little progress on the northern end of Bypass but assured things would start moving soon. “We will remove the encroachments and work will continue at a steady pace. Widening the EM Bypass is a necessity to maintain a smooth flow of vehicles,” he said. Residents, though happy about the widening of the Bypass, point out the project has its flipside too. “Many large trees have already been felled and I fear many more will be cut. The Bypass is no more the green stretch it used to be. It has become barren. I want the authorities to plant enough trees so that Bypass regains its greenery,” Durbha said.

Invisible Cities: Part Three: The ABC of Slum Demolition

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By Javed Iqbal
November 23, 2010

“‘These people want five star treatment or what?’ is what one of the developer’s lackies had said about us,’ Says Devansandhan Nair, of Ganesh Krupa Society, of Golibar in Santa Cruz, Mumbai. He is just one of 184 families who have refused to empty their homes for developers under the Slum Rehabilitation Act.

‘There is something fundamentally wrong with how the elite sees slums in Mumbai.’ Continues Devansandan, in perfect english.

On the 9^th of November, 2010, over 300 policemen descended into Ganesh Krupa Society, of Golibar in Santa Cruz, Mumbai.

They would break down two homes of a slum that already looks ravaged by an earthquake – every second home has been broken down, debris lies in every corner of a landscape of broken brick and stone .

One home belonged to Dadabhai Pandre, and the other to Ansari Abdul Hasan who lived at the edge of the slum. Ansari Abdul Hasan didn’t want to leave his home. Neither did his wife or his daughter. Yet behind everyone’s back, his son had accepted rent-compensation – Rs.7000 for 22 months – a total of 1,54,000.

‘I had asked for two days to empty my home, and the MHADA fellow said he won’t give me even two hours.’ Said Mr.Hasan. When Mr.Hasan was asked to why his son accepted compensation, he said, ‘My son said there’s no point fighting or resisting when everyone’s house is going to break.’

Out of 370 homes, 184 homes of Ganesh Krupa Society remain. In neighbouring Sambaji Seva Nagar Society, one home remains. In Shivaji Nagar Society, 4 homes remain.

There are around 69 societies in Golibar that have to make way to a ‘project that has the vision to develop mixed use integrated development of Residential Skyscrapers, State of art Commercial buildings, High-end Retail and Hospitality ventures.’ – or ‘Santa City’, according to Unitech’s website, ‘the flagship project of Unitech in Mumbai in partnership with Shivalik Ventures. Spread over 140 acres, this is one of the single largest slum rehabilitation projects in Mumbai.’

Unitech Group’s name has already featured extensively in numerous reports in the 1.7 Lakh Crore 2G scam, and almost every other resident remaining in Golibar, from those who have had their homes broken down, to those who are resisting ‘rehabilitation’ and demolition, think that their ‘slum rehabilitation project’ is a scam as well. Not only have Unitech/Shivalik started to build on 62 acres of Air force Land without getting an NOC from the Ministry, but almost no one since 2008 has gotten a flat under the SRA scheme yet, even though homes are broken down at a regular rate, often illegally and under duress and intimidation.

When the first buildings were built for the residents of Pragati Society of Golibar, people felt at ease with the developers. But eventually people believed that that was nothing but a ruse, especially as news started to spread that the current developers Shivalik had managed to acquire the project without competitive bidding, or the knowledge of the majority of slum dwellers. A little known clause in the Slum Rehabilitation Act had helped Shivalik/Unitech to become the only developer of Golibar.

This was discovered when the slum-dwellers used the Right To Information Act. And yet that was not the only thing that they discovered.

Aba Tandel, around 65 years old, grew up in Golibar right before the fences of the Airforce land, and when he saw Shivalik/Unitech building on their land, he along with other residents, were quick to file RTIs, and eventually alert the authorities at the Airforce. The Airforce now wants those buildings demolished and the matter is yet to be settled in the Courts.

A Commitment Is A Commitment

Navnant Murulidhar Shinde has the last home standing in Sambaji Nagar Society. He was fired from his job with Shivalik Ventures when he refused to empty his home. And when he was given a key to a home in the transit camp, the lock was changed.

‘They (the dalaals) offered me Rs.50,000 for my house.’ He says, ‘But I offered them Rs.1,00,000 to keep my home. They said it didn’t work like that.’

Dinker Dhuri lived with his wife and daughter in Ganesh Krupa Society. He was first deemed a legal tenant, but when he was threatened that he would be classified as an illegal tenant, he, along with his brother, took 12 lakhs and left their slum. Before leaving, the officials told them to break down their own homes.

Pravin Balkrishna Gupta was one of the landlords of Ganesh Krupa Society who had four rooms demolished in Ganesh Krupa Society. He had filed a case against Subangi Shinde, the once member of the committee of the society and ‘broker’ of the developers, who had ensured that three of his four rooms were deemed illegal as she ensured there was no survey done there. His ration-card holding, electricity-bill holding brothers were thrown out with nothing but one key to one room in the resettlement colony.

‘All these ‘dalaals’ were told to make 25 out of 100 rooms illegal tenants,’ says Vithal Ganpath Sawant, whose own tenancy was deemed illegal even though he has all the papers to show he has been living as a legal tenant.

Their stories are symbolic to the others in Golibar who don’t want anything to do with the developers – a trust deficit that gets worse by the day. Shivalik developer’s banners around the slums has the slogan, ‘A commitment is a commitment’ which the educated class of Golibar can read with brutal irony.

‘Shivalik have been involved in controversies from the beginning,’ Says Devanandhan Nair of Ganesh Krupa, ‘Under the SRA we have the right to choose our developer, why have we been denied this right?’

More so, those in the resettlement colony don’t want to be there. The colony itself is a dark, dingy four-storied steel frame with cement ply for walls where the water is often bad – a few days ago, there were insects in the water, as claimed by the residents.

The colony is humid in summer, during the rains it leaks from the top, and it is crowded with people who have no other place to go. All of them waiting for a flat, that they don’t know when they shall receive. The flats too might never be theirs, as they are being built on disputed property that the Airforce claims, belongs to them.

An embryonic resistance movement has now grown into a formidable movement ever since the residents across societies began to share information about how their homes were being broken down. On the 13^th of November, hundreds of people of Golibar, Ganesh Krupa Society, supported by other societies hit the streets, carrying placards accusing the government of being hand-in-gloves with the builders.

The Bombay High Court had given the remaining 181 families of Ganesh Krupa society, the 30^th of October to vacate their homes – either accept compensation, or go to the resettlement colonies. The residents then wrote a letter to the builder saying they will leave their homes, if the court order is followed by exact word – as the Court mentions that the resettlement colony needs to be within 300 metres of the slum, which it is not.

The residents are still there now. Withholding. Aware that they can’t be held for contempt of court as the builder has not built the resettlement colony within 300 metres.

Administration’s Response

The slum dwellers of Golibar have been supported by Medha Patkar and the National Alliance For People’s Movement’s, which, along with Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan have spoken up for the rights of the poor on housing issues for a couple of years now. And how have the authorities reacted to the insecurities of the slum dwellers in the rest of Mumbai?

On the 25^th of March, 2009, the slum dwellers of Mumbai had marched to the Slum Rehabilitation and MHADA office to talk to the officials about the irregularities, the numerous frauds in the SRA project and that a majority of the people are still languishing in Transit camps, or resettlement colonies.

Simpreet Singh of Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan was a part of the meeting.

‘We spoke politely to the officials, and the officials heard everything about what we said. But when we came out of the meeting, the police had lathi-charged all of us,’ Said Simpreet Singh, ‘Around two hundred people were taken to jail and released the next day. A warrant for that incident just came out on the 19^th of November now.’

To the residents of Golibar, all they have gotten so far is apathy from the administration. To nobody’s surprise.

The ABC of land acquisition

The people of Ganesh Krupa Society, Golibar.

‘They are breaking people apart, not just our homes.’

Sawant S, from Hanuman Society in the resettlement colony is afraid that he might never get a flat. The ‘dalaals’ or brokers had come to him and told him to go and convince the people of Ganesh Krupa Society to empty their homes.

‘You have links there, they said, you know them, why don’t you convince them to leave their homes? Why don’t you go break their resistance?’ He says, ‘They’re always coming, and I know that as long as I am here, I have fewer options. And please don’t write my name in your report, I might get into trouble.’

The manner of acquisition of land had been a methodically slow and tedious process even though both the developers had a lot of help from the Bombay High Court. The 181 families of Hanuman Society for instance had gone to the High Court and lost. An order was then passed on a Friday, to empty their homes in two days. The timing itself was precise. It ensured that the order wouldn’t be challenged on the weekend when the Court is closed, and on Monday, the society was demolished. Around 30 residents who had hope in the courts were given nothing but keys to a home in the transit camp. The rest took what they could get and left.

The initial committees of every society were the first to go. In every plan for acquisition, the developers first target the committee of the slum – and once the slum-dwellers realize their appointed representatives have been working in close affinity to the builders, there are often confrontations. The committee once exposed, leaves with everything they were bribed with. In Ganesh Krupa Society, every member of the original committee managed to wean out a flat or two for themselves along with money. What did the builder want from the committees? Get people surveyed, get them to leave, convince them to take money rather than a flat, and scuttle every effort of the people to build up resistance.

The ‘dalaals’ or brokers in Golibar are still actively trying to convince people that there is no reason to resist – first by breaking individuals with influence in the slum, by ensuring promises of a flat under special circumstances, then by finding weaker links in each family. If the father says no, they’d go and give the cheque to the son, then break the house down. In this manner, ‘development’ is breaking up communities, and neighbours, and families.

This too, in a society that was a once-loyal Shiv Sena voting base where Muslims and Hindus live in close affinity to each other. In Golibar, in 1992, according to the Srikrishna report, there were 12 incidents of stabbing. Today, Dutta Mane, a once loyal Shiv Sena party worker, has even lost faith in his own party.

‘In 1995, Mathoshri (Bal Thackeray) had sold us a dream about our right to our home. He’s old now, he may have forgotten. But maybe he has to remind his children about this.’

No member of any party is yet to offer solidarity to the people of Golibar. Mangesh Ghai of Golibar had close links with the corporator of Shiv Sena in Golibar until the troubles started. ‘After I spoke to him, he backed off completely. They’re all working with the builders.’

He, himself is too scared to work with the people of Ganesh Krupa society who’re resisting slum demolition for fear that his ‘legal’ settlement would be deemed into an ‘illegal settlement.’ Some people are too scared, they’ll take whatever they can get and leave, such as those from Shivaji Nagar Society who took a paltry Rs.50,000 and left, even when other’s were fighting.

Cynicism is the currency to break resistance.

Everyone who doesn’t believe that anything can change, has taken whatever they’ve gotten and left. Mumbai, a hopeless city built over their thousand scams and corrupt deals. ‘Nothing ever changes, how does it matter?’ – is literally stamped into the city like phosphorescent streetlamps. Yet nothing is hopeless to the desperate who stand before bulldozers.

Slums as self-confrontation

http://www.sacw.net/article1389.html

By Ashish Nandy

The attempt to free cities of slums will only make them invisible

Many see slums as failed parts of cities. They are regarded as parts of a city that do not conform to ruling ideas of an ideal city held by people in other parts of the city.

There have been some changes in the way people have looked at slums ever since colonial cities emerged. At one time, slums were seen as a kind of an invisible city: a place where servants and the poor blue collar workers stayed and one did not have to care for them. The architect-activist Jai Sen had a term for this attitude: in an essay in the journal Seminar he called a slum an Unintended City. There was little or no genuine attempt to accept the poor and disadvantaged as part of the city’s future—to accept them as equal and integral citizens or to re-plan the city according to their needs—Sen wrote.

I think things have changed in the three decades since Sen said this.

Slums are not just the unintended city. They are now regarded parts of the city that should not be visible. City authorities in Delhi and Mumbai are planning to cover up slums for the Commonwealth Games. They are an embarrassment, which foreign visitors to the city must not see. A slum is a part of the city that has no business to be there

Then there is the political-economic perspective on slums: people with low earnings prefer to stay in slums because they are close to their places of work. So the rich and middle classes get their cheap labour—drivers, vegetable vendors, domestic helps—from the slums. This approach has a built-in contradiction. The upper and middle classes do not want to pay their domestic helps at First World rates, but they want slums eliminated as in some First World cities, or in Asian cities pretending to be First-World cities like Singapore and Hong Kong. They will not do what citizens of Singapore and Hong Kong have done to eliminate slums. In Singapore and Hong Kong, too, you have to pay through your nose to get a domestic help or a chauffeur.

There is another way of looking at slums, which is not only more creative but also more compassionate and humanitarian. Slums are parts of the city that constantly reminds us of our moral and social obligations. They are reminders that another India exists. People loathe slums not just because of the poverty they display, not just because the slums embarrass them in front of foreign visitors, but also because the slums look to them like indicators of their backwardness and do not allow them to forget or deny the poverty and the exploitation on which their prosperity is built. They blow up Rs 40,000 for a dinner for four persons at a five-star hotel while people scavenge for food outside the hotel. The slums are reminders of the open wounds of a city. That reminder is painful. Many do not want such reminders to be there.

Slums are not regarded as political issues in many countries. But that is not so in India. Here, elections still reflect some of our real issues. You are always afraid when you see slums: it reminds the middle class they are sitting on a volcano. The fact that our political system has not forgotten the slums makes the wealthy and the middle class nervous.

Such anxieties have cultural consequences. In fact, I would go to the extent of saying that in the West, the more interesting cities have slums. New York has slums; Houston does not, not at least visibly. Los Angeles does not have conspicuous slums, Washington has and it’s a more interesting city because of that. The contradictions of the city are in full display. A society’s creativity depends on the oscillation and dialogue between slums and the rest of the city.

New York is an intellectually rich city because it has many things that are going out of fashion in mainstream America, such as street life and street food, street graffiti, street-side artists and musicians. It also has crime, sleaze and drugs. The latter have an effect somewhat similar to that of the activities of the Naxalites or the Maoists: they remind the middle classes and rich sections of a large number of disposable people living at the margins of desperation. In New York, the capital of global capitalism, more than 40,000 homeless adults live in streets, subways, and under bridges and train tunnels of the city; and 25 per cent of all children live in families with incomes below the official poverty line. New York is New York because it has, to some extent, learnt to live with slums. Many other cities in the West have dismantled slums but not homelessness.

Slums highlight such contradictions. If you have disowned parts of yourself and built up an elaborate system of psychological defenses, the contradictions do not vanish. They remain and you feel you are always being held accountable, being accused—by yourself. Such contradictions sharpen creativity. They impinge on the writers, artists and thinkers. The finest Dalit poetry in India, for example, has come not from writers in rural India where the situation may be more oppressive for the Dalits or from Dalits who have made it, but from writers living at the margins of society. They have lived either in a slum or close to it

This is not an attempt to romanticize slums but to emphasize that the slums are often the only connection the urban middle class has with some of the grim realities of society. The well-known Bangladeshi economist Mohammad Yunus once said that the only time the country’s rich and the wealthy faced what the poor in the country’s villages had lived with for centuries was when floods came to Dhaka. Likewise, the slums create a certain awareness, which we can afford to ignore at great risk. If we remove slums, the only people in touch with that reality may well be the Naxals, the Gandhians and some of the much-maligned, politically-aware ngos.

Town planners in many countries think slums can be replaced with low-cost housing. Low-cost housing has relevance but it is neither foolproof nor offers a long-term solution. Once you give people such houses some of them might sell them to developers for gentrification and, ultimately, the other city encroaches on such projects. People who had some protection in slums, at least had a roof on their heads, lose that protection. Low-cost housing might lead to American-style gentrification in our political economy, too.

Even by conservative estimates, one-fourth of India is poor. They cannot be ignored. In our political system, electoral pressures and vote banks matter. And empowerment can be a solution. It is working in the case of the Dalits. It can bring small reliefs such as better sanitation, cleaner water, minimal healthcare and more toilets. Even now, without such facilities, lots of people prefer to stay in slums; they try to make something beautiful out of whatever little they have. Human beings are a resilient species and many prefer to live in a place where such resilience is in full display. The well-known Hindi film director Manmohan Desai used to stay in a locality that could be classified as a glorified slum. So did Vinod Kambli, the famous cricketer. Harlem has even become fashionable; former President Clinton has an office there now. Slums are not infra-human.

Planning cannot eliminate slums. As long as there is large-scale deprivation, as long as our rulers, our media and our urban middle class believe that proletarianization is better than being a farmer, artisan or a tribal, there will be sizeable number of people who will be made available for blue-collar work in our cities. Such people will like to stay close to their places of work. If you upgrade or destroy one slum, others will come up in its place a few hundred feet away.

The recent attempts to free Indian cities of slums will merely make the slums less visible. This is not a new project. Sanjay Gandhi tried it. Jagmohan tried it. I don’t blame them any more in retrospect. The urge to make slums invisible is there in almost every unthinking Indian—not just in the powerful, the foolish and the heartless.

The desire to secure services from slums and yet not see them is one of the diseases of our times that is taking an epidemic form.

A sociologist and a clinical psychologist, Ashis Nandy is with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi