Date
19-Mar-2013 to 19-Mar-2013 		Location
Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh		 Format
Sub National

There is always a concern about how to make a dominant government focus on the issues of the deprived and poor. These concerns are stronger when resilient bureaucratic structures interface with weaker communities. Civil society can take initiatives to support such interface and facilitate the government to consider the problems and issues of the marginalized to make the government work for the people.

To consolidate and strengthen the voice of civil society to ensure inclusive governance in addressing urban poverty, PRIA organized a meeting, “Working Together on Urban Poverty”, on 19 March 2013 at Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. The primary purpose of the meeting was to discuss advocacy experiences of various organizations on urban poverty issues in Madhya Pradesh and to explore the possibilities of creating a shared but effective platform for advocacy and a community of practiceto advance learnings.

The gathering highlighted the complex nature of urban issues and the lack of capacities and experience of organisations to singlehandedly tackle these complexities. While the government and civil society over the years have largely been able to tackle development issues in rural areas, rapid and fast paced urban growth has meant less time to prepare themselves to meet the challenges of urban development.

India is witnessing a new approach towards urban development where the government has got into “project mode” and often seeks partnership with international organisationswho are not connected with grassroots issues. The government has not acknowledged the role of civil society organisations in urban development. ‘Identity’ and ‘space’ available for civil society is increasingly being contested with the emergence of volunteer groups created by the government that perform the functions of conventional NGOs but are accountable to the state.In Madhya Pradesh, the Jan AbhiyaanParishad is one such wing of the government.

Lack of ‘new knowledge’ on the issues that face the urban poor means effective solutions are not designed. For example, there is lack of knowledge on how dependent our cities are both economically and socially on the urban poor. This knowledge is important to design slum policies and urban poverty alleviation programmes. Another need of the hour is the collectivisation and mobilisation of the community to stand up for their own rights.

Presentations by each organization represented in the meetingon the objectives and strategies of their urban programmes helped the group understand each other’s work and find commonalities in the challenges faced. These include:

  1. Haphazard planning and governance in smaller towns and cities: Smaller towns and cities face far more challenges because of lack of proper planning and very little government interest in these towns because they are not economic hubs. Poor presence of NGOs to partner with in these towns and cities makes it difficult to make ground-level interventions.
  2. Lack of clarity on what constitutes a slum:There is no clarity on the definition of slums. In the absence of any parameters that help in identifying slums and differentiating them from ‘colonies’, it will be difficult to plan and implement urban poverty alleviationprogrammes.
  3. Complexities of issues faced by slum dwellers: Issues faced by slums are highly complex which affects their housing rights, rights of women and children, environmental issues, rights to basic services, and so on.
  4. Negative approach to slums: There is a general perception that slums are problematic and often seen to be the cause of the sanitation, environmental and security challenges in governing cities. This perception persists despite thefact that the people living in the slums form a very important part of the economic activity of cities.
  5. Lack of integration of city’s art, culture and history in the process of urban planning.
  6. Need to bridge the gap between the poor and non-poor citizens: There is apathy among the non-poor regarding the issues faced by the urban poor.

 

Building the Platform and Community of Practice

 

While it is important to have network meetings to discuss the larger issues faced in the urban sector, the real purpose of collaboration should be to come together to strategise on specific issues and create tangible outcomes through shared learnings. For this, it would also be helpful to make field visits to each other’s programme areas to get a deeper understanding of the work being done by various organisations.

 

Three action points on which the network could work were agreed:

 

  1. Demanding the Madhya Pradesh government create a slum policy. The platform built in this meeting can come out with an alternative urban slum policy.PRIA is in the process of compiling a report that analyses the slum policies of various state governments in India. This document can provide a starting point to help in the creation of a specific slum policy for Madhya Pradesh.
  2. Monitoring the implementation of the urban poor components of large urban development schemes, such as BUSP under JNNURM.
  3. Promote the creation of mohallasamitis.

The network will next meet again on 16 April 2013 to create working groups which will work on specific thematic sections of the slum policy.