Carlin Carr, Bangalore Community Manager
Housing tenure can have a transformative impact on the lives of the poor. The security of ownership rights opens pathways for slum dwellers themselves to upgrade their living environments without fear of relocation or demolition. Beyond improved structural environments, tenure security also leads to improved health conditions, education levels and income levels. In this sense, housing tenure’s ripple effects make it one of the single most important aspects of improving the lives of slum dwellers.
Yet housing tenure is a complicated issue. India’s most recent policy to tackle urban poverty and create “slum-free cities,” Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY), recognizes the importance of tenure in creating inclusive cities, but has run into obstacles. RAY’s main tenet is “the security of tenure through entitlement.” In order to enforce this, the policy states that no Central Government support will be given to states which do not give legal entitlement to slum dwellers. The progressive mandate, however, has been less than well received from local governments, leaving RAY in a state of stagnation. “Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) has failed to take off, with states expressing reluctance to comply with mandatory provisions for availing central funds under the scheme such as according property rights to slum dwellers and earmarking 25% of the municipal budget for spending in colonies and slums where the urban poor live,” says a 2012 article in the Hindustan Times. Policymakers have had to revisit the strict mandates to encourage movement with the scheme.
At meeting of over 100 policymakers, academics and practitioners at the Center for Environmental Planning and Technology in Ahmedabad, the participants broke down into working groups and devised strategies and recommendations for providing land tenure in RAY’s policy on slum-free cities. Here are a few key recommendations:
- Review land ownership patterns: It’s essential to start from a point of identification in the land tenure process. Many tenure issues arise from slums being on private lands or on public lands designated for other uses. It’s important to advocate for bringing all parties — owners and residents — together to negotiate the process and devise mechanisms and strategies for residents to gain rights to tenure.
- Provide tenure at the slum level: Giving land tenure at the slum level rather than the individual level reduces the likelihood that the tenure will be misused.
- Ensure basic services are available: Whether the slum has tenure rights or not, basic services should be extended to all the slums. There was a consensus by the group that there should be universal coverage of basic services in all the slums.
- Involve the community in the process: While “community participation” has become a great buzzword around urban poverty policies and interventions, there are few, if any, institutional mechanisms in place to ensure the participatory process. The CEPT working group suggests that the community must be involved from data collection to the design of the scheme — be it tenure rights or otherwise — to monitoring of the intervention once it’s in place.
RAY is set to launch now and will be in the implementation phase from 2013-2022. The coming decade will be one to watch in India. RAY’s success, in the end, can only be measured by whether India’s cities have become more inclusive and equitable — not simply if they are slum-free.
Photo credit: University of Salford Press Office