From elkamath at yahoo.com Wed Mar 4 11:01:42 2009 From: elkamath at yahoo.com (lalitha kamath) Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 21:31:42 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Urbanstudy] (Fwd) Democratisation of water management in rural Namibia a poverty trap? Message-ID: <524304.62075.qm@web53609.mail.re2.yahoo.com> FYI WATER-NAMIBIA: 'Decentralisation': Code for Recovering Costs From the Poor By Servaas van den Bosch Poor rural water users like Sipoya Ntumbankuru pay a disproportionate share of the cost. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS KAVANGO, Namibia, Mar 3 (IPS) - What if a well-intended programme to democratise water management is really a poverty trap? This is a question a soon to be published study on Namibian rural water supply poses to decision makers. Sipoya Ntumbankuru doesn’t know yet how she will pay for the water she just tapped from the water point in Epingiro, deep in the Kavango woodlands of northern Namibia. Ever since she was chased away from a neighbouring village - accused of witchcraft - she has had to fend for herself. Ntumbankuru, well past 65, still makes the daily trip to her only source of income; a small sorghum field over an hour’s walk away. Perhaps the harvest will be good and she can pay her water bill in kind. But her strength is leaving her and already she needs help lifting the heavy water drum on her head. What will happen when she cannot work the field anymore? In theory every household in Epingiro pays the equivalent of $1.50 U.S. per month to the local Water Point Association (WPA). Those with livestock pay a dollar extra. This goes towards the diesel that the borehole pump uses and to pay the ‘pompa boys’; young men who regulate the water supply and carry out small repairs. It might not seem much, but for Ntumbankuru and many others the water bill is a recurring nightmare and she is often many months behind with her payments. In rapid Rukwangali, she complains about the politics behind the WPA. Without metering of any kind, the pompa boys control the flow of water per household on an ad hoc basis. The premise is that the pump should only run once a week. As cattle consume infinitely more water than individuals, in many WPAs, the poor are subsidising the rich. "I don’t use much water," says Ntumbankuru. "The people with livestock should really pay more." Rural water supply - affecting half of Namibia’s 2 million people - touches on a sensitive apartheid legacy. The South African Water Act of 1956 tied water rights up with land tenure, thus restricting access to boreholes. Communal farmers received water for free, a policy that was designed - successfully - to create dependency on the regime. By repairing pumps and supplying diesel, the colonial government ensured loyalty from the rural population. The main focus of the rural water supply reform programme, started in 1997, was cost-recovery of operation and maintenance of boreholes. Although ecological sustainability is mentioned in many policies, protection of resources seems secondary to the decentralisation process, say experts. "The reform is meant to empower people by giving them ownership of the infrastructure, they will manage resources more sustainably", says Timo Katumye, of the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry in Rundu. Water Point Associations (WPAs) were started all over the country and formalised by the Water Resource Management Act of 2004. Under this legislation, water is still owned by the state, but the WPAs are responsible for collection of levies and repair of infrastructure. Of the 7731 communities using a water point, 5213 have established a WPA. In Epingiro the government has invested in two, thousand-litre, plastic reservoirs to replace the open cement dam. The pump has been fixed and a wooden fence erected to keep the cattle from damaging the water point. The ‘rehabilitation’ is a sure sign that the facility will be ‘handed over’ soon. In Ministry jargon this means shifting all costs for the water supply to the WPA. Pompa boy Hausiku Joseph is not sure what to think about that. First of all he wasn’t around when the villagers elected him as one of seven Water Point Committee members, the executive that runs the WPA. And although he gets the equivalent of $7 U.S. a month for this honour, the money is gathered as the need arises. "We tell people to go cut grass for the thatching industry whenever we need money for the WPA", he says. Contributions are usually only made in the dry season. "As long as there is rain people won’t be bothered to pay." He thinks the old colonial system worked better: "The South Africans used to pay for everything, this government should also provide water for free." But the Ministry steams ahead with the decentralisation process. ‘Phase 3’ which sees the handing over of water points, commenced in 2007. By July 2008 nearly ten percent of all water points had been transferred to WPAs. This puts the government on target to hand over 26,57% of all water points by the end of 2009. But behind the figures is a grim reality. Of the 4331 water points that rely on boreholes - and not on piped water - 2207 are solely or partly dependent on diesel pumps and struggle with the same problems as Epingiro. While wind pumps (1136) require less maintenance, communities serviced by hand pumps (851) are possibly worse off, as these often break. Government still provides essential maintenance for the vast majority of the WPAs, even after they are handed over. Complete cost-recovery is, therefore, not realistic, thinks Thomas Falk of the Biodiversity Monitoring Transect Analysis (Biota) project, a German-Namibian research endeavour that studies human and climate impacts on the environment. Falk, who studied the impact of the water reform on livelihoods, stresses that in a society that is already ranked as one of the world’s most unequal - with a gini-index of 74.3 and 38.2 percent of the rural population living below the poverty line - any added expense in the form of maintenance is obviously a problem. He suggests a pause to study renewable energy alternatives like solar pumps, or an income grant system for the poor. "The reform touches on the fundamental question whether access to water is a human right that should be free for those who cannot afford it," says Falk. But, while laudable, this principle makes it hard to promote responsible ownership, in the experience of Harald Koch, director of Rural Water Supply at the Ministry in Windhoek. Nor does the current practice of rushing in to fix the pumps do anything to establish a network of private contractors. "Politicians like to say that ‘all taps must be open’. It is not politically expedient to cut people off from the water supply," he explains. "This has an adverse effect on the reform. It probably would be better to enforce a system that is based on payments per head of cattle and on subsidies for the poor." (END/2009) _______________________________________________ Cross posted from DEBATE mailing list DEBATE at debate.kabissa.org http://lists.kabissa.org/mailman/listinfo/debate -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090303/c2a062be/attachment-0001.html From rkamath.research at gmail.com Thu Mar 5 06:40:54 2009 From: rkamath.research at gmail.com (Ranjan Kamath) Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 06:40:54 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Consuvism_ Consumer Satyagraha With A Difference Message-ID: <24b9c2a0903041710j5ae21335j46a7dd2575428533@mail.gmail.com> We want change. Most Indians are concerned about social issues and want to help make the world a better place but with the daily challenges of eking a livelihood, making time for social activism is difficult, almost impossible. Traditional methods of activism like the boycott are uninspiring, stale and ineffective at solving today’s problems - it is passé activism of the 20th century. In the 21st century, CONSUVISM is a method of activism that: * Leverages consumer power to effect ‘win-win’ change through ‘conscientious consumerism’ * Makes the most socially-responsible business practices the most profitable choices * Rewards businesses committed to improving the world we live in; bringing the greatest good to the greatest number through eco-friendliness of product and/or business practice. * Fosters competition between businesses to expedite change for the better in the world we live in. The friendliest product, the friendliest store is rewarded with the largest number of consumers. CONSUVISM is a strategy patented by C+ive, responding to fellow Indians frustrated by the disruption to livelihood of traditional methods of activism like hartals, bandhs chakka jams and petitions to MP’s, letters to editors, and silly slogans falling on deaf ears. In the first micro initiative, C+ive is facilitating the distribution of food preserves, pickles and chutneys produced by Women's India Trust, based in Mumbai. Women’s India Trust since 1968 has endeavoured to provide training and employment opportunities to unskilled and underprivileged women, drawing them into mainstream economic activity. Most importantly, empowering them with knowledge, power, self-reliance and prosperity. C+ive is pleased to announce a 'beta testing' of the CONSUVISM strategy at the micro-level, before it is scaled up to more ambitious levels of consumer activism in due course, with growing mass support. Instead of distribution of WIT products through large established retail chains, C+ive is facilitating the creation of a network of senior citizens, widows and the underprivileged, to distribute WIT products in their neighbourhoods, communities etc. Through such sales, participants earn up to 15% of the M.R.P. on the sale of each food product. As a further value addition, this network would also accept orders of gift hampers of WIT products for all occasions, providing them with an additional opportunity to earn through commission. With many people from all walks of life being adversely affected by the recession which has depleted their life savings by up to to 75% of its value, it is expected that selling WIT products through such a grass root network would help the many in a small way. Moreover, the proceeds of such sale helps WIT in its endeavours of making women and children self-reliant. C+ive seeks your support in creating such a proactive consumer network in Bangalore and making it mutually beneficial for all involved. Thereafter, C+ive will facilitate the creation of similar networks in other states with the support of C+ive membership. If C+ive receives citizen support for this first exercise in Consuvism, we shall thereafter 'scale up' our attentions to the marketing and distribution of organic food, eco-friendly and renewable energy products and services to the benefit of the urban consumer in terms or affordable prices and quality and ofcourse change to our urban enviroment! C+ive wishes to create a confidence of volume in: * the farmer to invest more agricultural land in organic farming over time to meet such demand. * the manufacturers of renewable energy products * entrepreneurs who wish to invest their talents and business expertise in eco-friendly services and products For further inquiries about the C+ive_ Consuvism initiative please email: citizen.positive at gmail.com -- Posted By Ranjan Kamath to C+ive _ Civic Society On The Web -- 75, 17e main Vi Block Koramangala Bangalore 560095 Land: 9180 25631847 Cell: + 91 9341 944490 (Bangalore) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090305/d5fb0425/attachment.html From yanivbin at gmail.com Fri Mar 6 23:42:37 2009 From: yanivbin at gmail.com (Vinay Baindur) Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2009 23:42:37 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Inklings of politics in urban India :: DTE leader article Message-ID: <86b8a7050903061012q6150d3a8ndc9aa840507ecfd@mail.gmail.com> http://www.downtoearth.org.in/full6.asp?foldername=20090315&filename=led&sec_id=3&sid=1 *Headline* : * Inklings of politics in urban India* *Intro:* *The traditional non-politics of Indian cities is confronted by rapid urbanization * THERE are signs that urban India is discovering politics after a long interval. City after congested city is demanding funds for new, comfortable buses under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. Municipal managers see a clear political advantage in pushing public transport, and no merkely pandering to the car lobby (see ‘More bus rides’ Down To Earth, February 16-28, 2009). Now, Thane has announced an ambitious plan to have a cycle track. The lobbies of truckers and personal vehicles are quite clearly up in arms. Their resistance to the cycle track should be seen in the context of what has happened in the town of Fazilka in Punjab (see ‘Come without your car’, *Down To Earth*, January 1-15, 2009). The trader lobby, the interests of which are aligned with the interests of truckers, was dead against restrictions on cars in the main market of the town. They feared the inability to park cars close to the shops would dissuade their clientele. But after the ban on cars came about, shopkeepers said they registered an increase in sales. There is no mystery at work here, no surprise. When citizens have greater mobility, economic activities only increase. People of Fazilka realized mobility was not the same thing as automobility—private vehicles, when uncontrolled, cause more congestion and immobility than their adverts would have people believe. Urban planners and city managers in India have for too long mistaken automobility for mobility. This is because they have identified too closely with the interests of the minority that gains from concessions to private vehicles, because urban voters were indifferent. Urban voters did not form as big a part of the polity as they do now, given rapid urbanization. This shift is leading to new strategies among all political parties. It stands to reason that managment of cities will make or break many a political career. Consider the case of slum redevelopment in Bengaluru. The interests of the real estate sector are not aligned with those of people living in the city’s slums. Till now, city managers and urban planners have chosen to not deal with the interests of slums and the people who live there. Low-cost housing has never been taken seriously in India despite several international examples of the social and economic role it can play. It is hoped the discovery of politics in urban India will extend to land use and housing. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090306/ee7b5679/attachment.html From shveta at sarai.net Sun Mar 8 11:29:56 2009 From: shveta at sarai.net (Shveta) Date: Sun, 08 Mar 2009 11:29:56 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] The Survey Unfolds Message-ID: <49B35EDC.6020304@sarai.net> dear All, Between 26 February, when it started and 6 March, yesterday, the survey of 220 houses has been completed in LNJP (see http://kafila.org/2009/02/28/the-survey-begins/ or http://nangla.freeflux.net). There are roughly 1000 houses left to be covered. From the groundwork done end of last week by a group young women and men residents of LNJP, documents of many have been put in order, and the encounter with the survey teams this past week was much more confident. Till date there has been no notice put up in LNJP as to the precise requirement of the documents for the survey. This has produced a spectral power around the survey's intention and surveyors' abilities, cunning and compassion. The surveyors are not accepting ration cards before 1990, as they are cards issued for "Asthayi/Grih Viheen", that is the homeless. They are noting details of the latest election id's and ration cards, as they will work with the numbers on the cards to check when they were allotted and when the renewal stops. The addresses on the various documents are being noted to cross-check them. The noting is being done in landscape A4 sheets. Photocopies of relevant documents are being taken (VP Singh card, latest Election I-card, Ration card). Of the two teams, one is taking photocopies of only those documents which are ones own, the other is taking the VP Singh I-Card of even those from whom the house (malba) had been bought. In LNJP, buying of houses is accompanied by the handing over in many cases of the VP Singh I Card. Also called the Lal Card, as the colour photographs on it have a red background. As of now, not proof of ones stay in LNJP when they are simultaneously not proofs of ones identity, the well kept but time-beaten Lal cards have taken on a magical presence, specially now that one of the teams is "accepting" it. This card has always had a presence, as it was the first formal document of an anchor in the city. Other than the VP Singh token (I Card) no other non-computerised document is being accepted. In case of families where floors have been built over the ground floor, documents are being taken, but one survey number is being given to all (J-1, J-2, and so on; M-1, M-2, and so on; BS-1, BS-2 and so on, where J, M and BS stand for the initials of the surveyor representing the MCD), and if the floors belong to different families the survey numbers are suffixed with FF and SF (first floor, second floor). The person from the land owning agency (Maulana Azad Medical College) is responsible for marking each house with the survey number given to it by the surveyor. Mostly, documents are consistent, and people have linearity and consistency of name and age through the documents (VP Singh Card to 2008 election I card), but addresses vary in some cases. For instance, a typo, or a different kind of error, may result in someone's address having changed from 412 to 41, or even become something else altogether. In other cases, when there is no VP Singh card on their name, people have consistent documents from 1994 Election I-Card onwards. There are ofcourse cases where documents have been lost in fire, and there are those who have come to LNJP post 1998. But the worst hit will be a number of old women who have the VP Singh Card, but no other document to follow it up, though they have stayed in LNJP to this day. It can be conjectured that the survey will take about one more month to be completed. It is being said more teams will be available for the survey in LNJP, as ongoing surveys in other parts of the city are completed, most probably from next week (Monday). Alongside this survey, a biometric survey will also be conducted by teams of a company to which MCD has outsourced that survey. "Delhi Government is also trying to take over the functions entrusted to MCD for development [of] Slums and JJ clusters. MCD is ensuring that all the responsibilities entrusted to it are discharged in a fair manner. The system of plot allotment has been modified to ensure that only genuine persons are allotted plots and they continue to hold it for their own use. Before allotment, the representatives of land owning agency and Slum & JJ Department will carry out a joint survey. The JJ dwellers will be asked to produce documentary evidence of their residence. The concerned family members will be photographed and video film made for record. The head of the family will be required to give fingerprints through biometric method. The joint survey will be publicly displayed and objections, if any, will be invited. The allotment will be made by a Committee constituted for the purpose after obtaining affidavit from the concerned dwellers." from: FOR FAVOUR OF COMMUNICATION, Friday, December 14, 2007, MCD COMES OUT WITH COMPREHENSIVE MASTER PLAN FOR MANAGEMENT OF SOLID WASTE IN DELHI, http://203.145.172.186/mayor/admin/news/Press%20Releases%20of%20Mayor%20Ms%20Arti%20Mehra.%20December2007.pdf This is the route the survey in LNJP seems now to be taking. More can be read about the biometric survey from the following links: "On August 14, the Delhi Government will be taking a great leap forward in cutting down procedural hassles for those who have to shuttle between government departments to get the benefits they are entitled to." at http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/delhi-does-a-brazil-with-single-window-access/344694/ "[Also has been] approved issuance of e-entitlement Smart Cards to beneficiaries for availing benefits of various welfare schemes under Mission Convergence." at http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:d_goWs6DSkMJ:ar.delhigovt.nic.in/ar1/project%2520note.pdf+E-entitlement+smart+card+form+Delhi+government&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3 Whether the biometric survey here will be for the issuing of e-entitlement Smart Cards, or for resettlement is still not clear in the case of LNJP. What is clear, though, is that the biometric survey for issuing e-entitlement smart cards will ride on the presence of the ongoing survey, entering LNJP through the opening made by the survey for resettlement, and the fact that heads of families, who will be fingerprinted for it, are now present in their homes for this. Meanwhile, in 2002, in the case Okhla Factory Owner's Association vs. Government of NCT, the High Court judgement ruled: “(7) No alternative sites are to be provided in future for removal of persons who are squatting on public land. (8) Encroachers and squatters on public land should be removed expeditiously without any pre-requisite requirement of providing them alternative sites before such encroachment is removed or cleared.” The appeal to this judgement has been pending in the Supreme Court the last six years. The Supreme Court stayed this High Court judgment on 3.3.2003 and allowed for allotment of land "subject to the result of the petition". Pleadings are now complete in this case, but it seemingly hasn't been listed and heard in the last 2 years.* Alongside, LNJP is restless with rumours that there will be no resettlement. In roughly August 1983, the road that runs around LNJP colony was widened and a number of houses were broken for it, and resettlement offered. Some of the houses did take resettlement (in Sultanpuri) while others stayed on, and then ofcourse many others settled in LNJP after that. The question that is now going around in LNJP is: Does this mean LNJP colony is already marked "resettled" in the MCD files? [*Thanks to Anuj Bhuwania for sharing the HC judgement, ensuing appeal and hearings.] -------- From bhargavi_srao at yahoo.com Mon Mar 9 12:40:35 2009 From: bhargavi_srao at yahoo.com (Bhargavi S.) Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 00:10:35 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Urbanstudy] Urban Explorers - A summer workshop for children Message-ID: <749132.59768.qm@web32607.mail.mud.yahoo.com>  Environment Support Group presents Urban Explorers  A summer workshop for kids (ages 11-15) A five day action packed week of exploration of Namma Bengaluru Understand your city: Learn from outdoor sessions Learn about how old is my city? How big is my city? How many are we in the city? How do we move in the city and what are its impacts? From where does my city get its water and what happens to the water I flush?  How green is my city? How much waste does my city generate and where does it go? What is climate change and how will it affect me? And most importantly what can I do for my city? Come discover your ecological footprint on our city and on this planet. Explore Lakes, Parks, Gardens, Streets and Forests in and around our city  Learn more about urban wildlife  A never before experience of fun, excitement and learning!   APRIL 13th -17th 2009 (non-residential) Register Now! Rs.1000/-only Get a ‘Urban Explorer’ Certificate and become an active explorer in your neighbourhood Contact: Environment Support Group 105, East End ‘B’ Main, Jayanagar 9th Block, Bangalore -560069 Telephone: 26531339/22441977, Website: www.esgindia.org Email: esg at esgindia.org /bhargavi at esgindia.org www.esgindia.org www.newsrack.in -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090309/bb9c59a5/attachment-0001.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Urban Explorers.doc Type: application/msword Size: 34816 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090309/bb9c59a5/attachment-0001.doc From yanivbin at gmail.com Thu Mar 12 00:44:18 2009 From: yanivbin at gmail.com (Vinay Baindur) Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:44:18 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] An aam mission unaccomplished Message-ID: <86b8a7050903111214k5b4dba70h4a0ef15975bc214@mail.gmail.com> http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090311/images/11zzscapebig.jpg http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090311/jsp/nation/story_10656337.jsp# An *aam* mission unaccomplished ANANYA SENGUPTA *New Delhi, March 10: *Sukhbir had voted Congress in the last general election. The Delhi vendor, who earns about Rs 3,000 a month, had hoped he and his family would benefit from the UPA government’s plans for the urban *aam aadmi *— which to Sukhbir meant the slum dweller. Five years on, he says he is disappointed. So are many others like him. Sukhbir’s hopes had risen when the government came out with the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission four years ago. The mission, overseen by S. Jaipal Reddy’s urban development ministry, pledged to transform urban India not only with better roads, flyovers and transport but also by providing housing and sanitation to people like Sukhbir. The government had promised that the urban poor would be provided housing near their places of occupation before their slums could be demolished for development. Forcible evictions and demolitions would be a thing of the past. Today, Sukhbir and his family of four live by the roadside, his home having been flattened to allow a flyover to come up. Around 40 per cent of the capital assigned for the mission was to be used for the development of the urban poor. But in most cities, the money sanctioned for slum dwellers has been used to build roads, flyovers and hotels. Slums have often needed to be razed to make room for these infrastructure projects — but the promised resettlement has stayed elusive. The bulldozer has been brought in also to free up land for high-rises and private investment. The fast-track development, social activists say, has eaten up any free land where the government could have built houses for people like Sukhbir. But it’s not as if the roads, flyovers and public transport systems are off to a flyer under the mission in every Indian city. Under the mission, the Centre grants 35 per cent of the money for a project in a big city, the state 15 per cent and the civic body arranges for 50 per cent. Many cities failed to generate their own share of the funds. This means, after receiving the first instalment of the central grant, they couldn’t show implementation within the deadline and, under mission rules, the next instalment was stopped. Besides, there has been little progress on several mandatory reforms. Of the 63 cities, only seven have recorded 100 per cent water supply, and only one has enacted a public-disclosure law about spending (the mission insists on complete transparency on every penny spent). Just eight cities have introduced rent-control reforms to look after the interests of the urban middle class and poor, and only nine have rationalised stamp duties to five per cent. The thrust on e-governance has yielded little result, with only 11 cities having built the related set-up. Many have faulted the system of fund allocation too. The sums are handed out not based on the viability of the projects but according to a pre-determined pattern. Cities with over four million people get central assistance up to 35 per cent of the project cost; those with a population between 1 million and 4 million get up to 50 per cent; and cities in the Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir get up to 90 per cent. The government has taken some positive steps to improve road traffic. To boost public transport and discourage private vehicles, the urban development ministry has launched a new scheme for all 63 mission cities to introduce modern buses and the Bus Rapid Transit System. One good step has been the rule making it mandatory for states and cities to set up a Dedicated Urban Transport Fund if they want money under the urban renewal mission. However, the urbanisation boom and unplanned development have hobbled the transport scheme from the start — you cannot have great public transport on the narrow, congested, waterlogging-prone roads of overpopulated cities. Of the 87 Indian cities that have a population of 50 lakh or more, only 20 have effective public transport, the rest depending on auto-rickshaws and unregulated private bus operators. The failure to solve the problem of slum dwellers — spread across 640 towns in 26 states and Union territories, according to the 2001 census — has affected India’s overall water and sanitation targets too. For instance, NGO data show, an estimated 91,000 tonnes of human waste is left in the fields and on river banks and roads every day by Indians, a large number of them being slum dwellers. More than half of the country’s 20.3 crore households lack toilets, with some 66.5 crore Indians defecating in the open. Experts say the government needs to work out a national urbanisation policy if the condition of the urban poor is to be improved at a time the country’s urban population is growing at a breakneck speed. Unlike the urban renewal mission, a national urbanisation policy will not work on a city-to-city basis but encompass the length and breadth of the country. It will select sites from across India to build the houses for the urban poor, choosing places where there is not only free land but also livelihood opportunities. Besides, the experts say, there should be greater effort to develop the villages so their residents do not shift to the cities. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090312/a76f8114/attachment.html From kcsrkrish at gmail.com Thu Mar 12 22:28:20 2009 From: kcsrkrish at gmail.com (Sivarama Krishnan) Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:28:20 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Fwd: Megacity governance In-Reply-To: <759b94b30903120220q6dff1d2ej7ee809ab3b553356@mail.gmail.com> References: <759b94b30903120220q6dff1d2ej7ee809ab3b553356@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4c0848510903120958q5de94a34u3815c2b9875f2036@mail.gmail.com> Maybe of possible interest to the urbanstudy group. Thanks KCS ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Partha Mukhopadhyay Date: Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 2:50 PM Subject: Megacity governance To: sivarama at cprindia.org, Sivarama Krishnan Dear Sir: You could mail it to : , Best, Partha http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=351164 *K C Sivaramakrishnan:* Megacity governance The current hierarchical model is neither sacred nor eternal K C Sivaramakrishnan / New Delhi March 8, 2009, 0:14 IST The current hierarchical model is neither sacred nor eternal. Today there are 35 cities or agglomerations whose total population, according to the 2001 Census, exceeds 100 million, which is about 37 per cent of India’s total urban population of 285 million. By 2011, the number of such cities will increase at least by another ten. For the present, let us just consider a few of them such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai. None of these are a single municipality. The Mumbai Metropolitan region covers seven municipal corporations, 13 municipal councils, 17 urban centres and several hundred urbanising villages spread over four districts. Kolkata has over 60 municipal and non-municipal entities. Hyderabad, even after the recent amalgamation of 12 municipalities, is still a region of many jurisdictions. The Bangalore region covers the recently expanded city, 11 other municipalities and numerous panchayats. So it is with Chennai. Appellations like the urbs prima, cosmopolitan city or maximum city are all based on a large city’s highly diverse economic, linguistic, cultural and occupational variety. Nevertheless these different factors are linked together as a significant economic and geographical entity whose efficient performance is critical for the country’s progress. Unfortunately, the tendency has been to regard a metropolitan city as no different to an ordinary municipality in political and administrative terms. State governments dominate the scene, subordinating the city’s functional domain in every possible manner and continue to be dismissive of a city’s leadership. The textile mills land case is an instance where the Bombay city’s plea for breathing space was subordinated by the state’s incursion into the city’s planning domain. The municipal boundaries of Bangalore and Hyderabad were expanded nearly two years ago but elections to the corporations are yet to be held. Even the cardinal dictum of the Constitution regarding elected local government is thus flouted. The tenure of the Mayor in Mumbai continues to be two-and-a-half years; in Delhi the Mayor is a one-year wonder. In Chennai, after the 74th Constitution Amendment, a comprehensive local bodies Bill was discussed extensively in the Assembly and its Select Committee and duly enacted. Under its provisions, Chennai was to have a directly elected Mayor for a term of five years. Karunanidhi’s son M K Stalin successfully contested the elections and became Mayor twice in 1996 and again in 2001. But as Tamil Nadu moved from DMK to AIADMK, the state leadership thought it necessary to cut down a directly elected mayor of its capital city to size. The 1996 Comprehensive Act was set aside and an ancient 1919 Act was revived under which a mayor was not entitled to reelection. Another law stipulated that Stalin had to choose between being the Mayor and a member of the Tamil Nadu Assembly. He chose the latter. About five years ago political fortunes overturned again and DMK returned to power. Stalin is now Tamil Nadu’s minister for local government. But even he has not found it necessary to go back to the system of directly elected mayor with power and accountability. Models are not lacking from elsewhere. If large cities are sought to be put under one administrative jurisdiction, there are the city provinces of China such as Shanghai or Beijing, or the Bangkok metropolitan area. If a two-tier arrangement is desired with one level of government for the metropolitan region and another for cities or boroughs within, we have the London metropolitan area, Seoul, Greater Toronto, Istanbul or several places in Europe, as examples. The US has also lived with a combination of multiple city jurisdictions and several special functional districts. None of these entities are authoritarian and each has a participative and accountability mechanism involving the stakeholders. Multiplicity is not a problem in itself if functions and responsibilities are reasonably well demarcated and the arrangements for co-ordination endure over a period of time. Twenty years ago the Correa Commission declared that the cities of Kolkata, Bombay, Delhi and Madras are “so large and so vitally important to the country that their health, prosperity and efficient functioning are of national concern.” The Commission recommended that these cities be regarded as National Cities. When the 74th Amendment to the Constitution came into effect, it carried a provision for a Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC) with two-thirds of its membership comprising the elected members of the Municipalities and Chairpersons of the Panchayats in a metropolitan area. It has constitutionally defined terms of reference to undertake “coordinated spatial planning of the area, integrated development of infrastructure, sharing of water and other natural resources and environmental conservation”. So far only in Kolkata, the committee has been set up. Even there it was delayed for five years, and only after parts of the patchwork quilt of multiple municipalities in the area changed hands from CPI(M) to Trinamool. The Maharashtra government has given repeated assurances before the Bombay High Court over the past four years that an MPC would be set up. This is yet to happen. In Hyderabad in December 2007 an MPC was set up with composition as stipulated in the Constitution but its mandate was minimal. A few months later in June 2008, the Greater Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority was set up, with the chief minister at its head, consisting predominantly of officials. The Hyderabad MPC has legitimacy but no mandate. The Hyderabad MDA is a super body with a significant mandate but singularly lacks political participation and, therefore, legitimacy and accountability. In Bangalore the Kasturirangan Committee made a comprehensive set of recommendations for the enlarged Bangalore Municipal Corporation with a directly elected mayor at its head and a participatively structured regional development authority for the Bangalore metropolitan region. The report languishes. In the Indian context, the chief minister of a state, however skilled and competent he or she may be, cannot double up as the mayor of its principal city. This has been amply proved by S M Krishna’s tryst with Bangalore, and Chandrababu Naidu’s with Hyderabad. By definition, the metropolis is a collection of polities which cannot function at the whim and fancy of a provincial government. Sheila Dixit’s charm and charisma have ensured her electoral success. In reality she is not a chief minister as in other states, but the mayor of a metropolis — though she may not like to be called that. The structure of a metropolitan government should be strong enough to comprehend and deal with the varied tasks at the metropolitan level. At the same time it has to be sensitive to its citizens’ needs, which are more manifest at the local level. The need to balance the micro with the macro is a major challenge but well within the realm of possibilities. It is equally important that the economic destiny of a city, its social cohesion and its political mandate are not subordinated frequently to some turf battles waged elsewhere in the state, be it for Telengana, Rayalaseema, Vidharba or Dakshin Kannada. A ‘city state’ is a tempting idea but without adequate understanding of what it involves, and careful efforts to mobilise public and political consensus, it will remain a far cry. Metropolitan cities in India also desire to be world-class, whatever that means: Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad or Kolkata are all convinced that they are globally relevant. That will have to be matched with global responsibilities and performance. Mumbai cannot be a Shanghai, even a third or a fourth duplicate, if it cannot take care of its daily needs and the lives of its own people. The Union-state-municipality as a hierarchical model is neither sacred nor eternal. There is an urgent need to think “out of the box” on a very different structure of governance for India’s metro cities to what exists now. *The author is Former Secretary, Urban Development, Government of India, and Chairman, Centre for Policy Research* ** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090312/8fb337f1/attachment-0001.html From mashalngo at gmail.com Fri Mar 13 09:47:11 2009 From: mashalngo at gmail.com (Sharad Mahajan) Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:47:11 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Fwd: Megacity governance In-Reply-To: <4c0848510903120958q5de94a34u3815c2b9875f2036@mail.gmail.com> References: <759b94b30903120220q6dff1d2ej7ee809ab3b553356@mail.gmail.com> <4c0848510903120958q5de94a34u3815c2b9875f2036@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1f3dfff30903122117s5019316fy24d2bc819f2cfa55@mail.gmail.com> Dear Sir, We had met at Goa conferance long time back. I am sharad Mahajan and am an active member of Mashal- NGO from Pune. We have been working on GIS based Biometric Baseline S0cio-economic Survey of all slumdwellers of Dharavi, Mumbai for DRP for last 18 months. I request you to visit dharavi-survey.in website. Some of the results are on the same. I seek your guidance and help in analysing the data of approximately 60,000 families. Shri Gautam Chattarjee- a senior and no-nonsence IAS officer is OSD/DRP. Sharad On 3/12/09, Sivarama Krishnan wrote: > > Maybe of possible interest to the urbanstudy group. Thanks KCS > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Partha Mukhopadhyay > Date: Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 2:50 PM > Subject: Megacity governance > To: sivarama at cprindia.org, Sivarama Krishnan > > > Dear Sir: > > You could mail it to : , > > Best, > > Partha > > > > http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=351164 > > *K C Sivaramakrishnan:* Megacity governance The current hierarchical > model is neither sacred nor eternal K C Sivaramakrishnan / New Delhi March > 8, 2009, 0:14 IST > > The current hierarchical model is neither sacred nor eternal. > > Today there are 35 cities or agglomerations whose total population, > according to the 2001 Census, exceeds 100 million, which is about 37 per > cent of India’s total urban population of 285 million. By 2011, the number > of such cities will increase at least by another ten. > > For the present, let us just consider a few of them such as Mumbai, > Kolkata, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai. None of these are a single > municipality. The Mumbai Metropolitan region covers seven municipal > corporations, 13 municipal councils, 17 urban centres and several hundred > urbanising villages spread over four districts. Kolkata has over 60 > municipal and non-municipal entities. Hyderabad, even after the recent > amalgamation of 12 municipalities, is still a region of many jurisdictions. > The Bangalore region covers the recently expanded city, 11 other > municipalities and numerous panchayats. So it is with Chennai. > > Appellations like the urbs prima, cosmopolitan city or maximum city are all > based on a large city’s highly diverse economic, linguistic, cultural and > occupational variety. Nevertheless these different factors are linked > together as a significant economic and geographical entity whose efficient > performance is critical for the country’s progress. Unfortunately, the > tendency has been to regard a metropolitan city as no different to an > ordinary municipality in political and administrative terms. State > governments dominate the scene, subordinating the city’s functional domain > in every possible manner and continue to be dismissive of a city’s > leadership. The textile mills land case is an instance where the Bombay > city’s plea for breathing space was subordinated by the state’s incursion > into the city’s planning domain. The municipal boundaries of Bangalore and > Hyderabad were expanded nearly two years ago but elections to the > corporations are yet to be held. Even the cardinal dictum of the > Constitution regarding elected local government is thus flouted. The tenure > of the Mayor in Mumbai continues to be two-and-a-half years; in Delhi the > Mayor is a one-year wonder. > > In Chennai, after the 74th Constitution Amendment, a comprehensive local > bodies Bill was discussed extensively in the Assembly and its Select > Committee and duly enacted. Under its provisions, Chennai was to have a > directly elected Mayor for a term of five years. Karunanidhi’s son M K > Stalin successfully contested the elections and became Mayor twice in 1996 > and again in 2001. But as Tamil Nadu moved from DMK to AIADMK, the state > leadership thought it necessary to cut down a directly elected mayor of its > capital city to size. The 1996 Comprehensive Act was set aside and an > ancient 1919 Act was revived under which a mayor was not entitled to > reelection. Another law stipulated that Stalin had to choose between being > the Mayor and a member of the Tamil Nadu Assembly. He chose the latter. > About five years ago political fortunes overturned again and DMK returned to > power. Stalin is now Tamil Nadu’s minister for local government. But even he > has not found it necessary to go back to the system of directly elected > mayor with power and accountability. > > Models are not lacking from elsewhere. If large cities are sought to be put > under one administrative jurisdiction, there are the city provinces of China > such as Shanghai or Beijing, or the Bangkok metropolitan area. If a two-tier > arrangement is desired with one level of government for the metropolitan > region and another for cities or boroughs within, we have the London > metropolitan area, Seoul, Greater Toronto, Istanbul or several places in > Europe, as examples. The US has also lived with a combination of multiple > city jurisdictions and several special functional districts. None of these > entities are authoritarian and each has a participative and accountability > mechanism involving the stakeholders. Multiplicity is not a problem in > itself if functions and responsibilities are reasonably well demarcated and > the arrangements for co-ordination endure over a period of time. > > Twenty years ago the Correa Commission declared that the cities of Kolkata, > Bombay, Delhi and Madras are “so large and so vitally important to the > country that their health, prosperity and efficient functioning are of > national concern.” The Commission recommended that these cities be regarded > as National Cities. > > When the 74th Amendment to the Constitution came into effect, it carried a > provision for a Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC) with two-thirds of its > membership comprising the elected members of the Municipalities and > Chairpersons of the Panchayats in a metropolitan area. It has > constitutionally defined terms of reference to undertake “coordinated > spatial planning of the area, integrated development of infrastructure, > sharing of water and other natural resources and environmental > conservation”. So far only in Kolkata, the committee has been set up. Even > there it was delayed for five years, and only after parts of the patchwork > quilt of multiple municipalities in the area changed hands from CPI(M) to > Trinamool. > > The Maharashtra government has given repeated assurances before the Bombay > High Court over the past four years that an MPC would be set up. This is yet > to happen. In Hyderabad in December 2007 an MPC was set up with composition > as stipulated in the Constitution but its mandate was minimal. A few months > later in June 2008, the Greater Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority > was set up, with the chief minister at its head, consisting predominantly of > officials. The Hyderabad MPC has legitimacy but no mandate. The Hyderabad > MDA is a super body with a significant mandate but singularly lacks > political participation and, therefore, legitimacy and accountability. In > Bangalore the Kasturirangan Committee made a comprehensive set of > recommendations for the enlarged Bangalore Municipal Corporation with a > directly elected mayor at its head and a participatively structured regional > development authority for the Bangalore metropolitan region. The report > languishes. > > In the Indian context, the chief minister of a state, however skilled and > competent he or she may be, cannot double up as the mayor of its principal > city. This has been amply proved by S M Krishna’s tryst with Bangalore, and > Chandrababu Naidu’s with Hyderabad. By definition, the metropolis is a > collection of polities which cannot function at the whim and fancy of a > provincial government. Sheila Dixit’s charm and charisma have ensured her > electoral success. In reality she is not a chief minister as in other > states, but the mayor of a metropolis — though she may not like to be called > that. > > The structure of a metropolitan government should be strong enough to > comprehend and deal with the varied tasks at the metropolitan level. At the > same time it has to be sensitive to its citizens’ needs, which are more > manifest at the local level. The need to balance the micro with the macro is > a major challenge but well within the realm of possibilities. > > It is equally important that the economic destiny of a city, its social > cohesion and its political mandate are not subordinated frequently to some > turf battles waged elsewhere in the state, be it for Telengana, Rayalaseema, > Vidharba or Dakshin Kannada. > > A ‘city state’ is a tempting idea but without adequate understanding of > what it involves, and careful efforts to mobilise public and political > consensus, it will remain a far cry. Metropolitan cities in India also > desire to be world-class, whatever that means: Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad > or Kolkata are all convinced that they are globally relevant. That will have > to be matched with global responsibilities and performance. Mumbai cannot be > a Shanghai, even a third or a fourth duplicate, if it cannot take care of > its daily needs and the lives of its own people. > > The Union-state-municipality as a hierarchical model is neither sacred nor > eternal. There is an urgent need to think “out of the box” on a very > different structure of governance for India’s metro cities to what exists > now. > > *The author is Former Secretary, Urban Development, Government of India, > and Chairman, Centre for Policy Research* > > ** > > > _______________________________________________ > Urbanstudygroup mailing list > Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City > > To subscribe or browse the Urban Study Group archives, please visit > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/urbanstudygroup > > -- Sharad Mahajan - Architect-Planner Maharashtra Social Housing & Action Leaque, Office no 007,1st floor,MAHADA Commercial Complex, Gokhale Nagar, Pune - 411016 Phone- 020-25653566 Fax- 020-25656340 Mobil- 9766695601 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090313/4b35c8fd/attachment.html From sollybenj at yahoo.co.in Fri Mar 13 16:16:04 2009 From: sollybenj at yahoo.co.in (solomon benjamin) Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:16:04 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Urbanstudy] Surveying Dharavi Anthropologist in the New War Message-ID: <157428.28656.qm@web8902.mail.in.yahoo.com> This is a fascinating and morbid account of anthropologists in the new war! Not surprisingly, the language of 'rights' mobilized on the ground. The website http://dharavi-survey.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=15&Itemid=39 is worth a visit! Solly Some extracts: "....Survey team of over 100 surveyors worked tirelessly for over a year to complete survey of approximately 50,000 families/ establishment of Dharavi. Balance survey is going on without much resistance from the people. Whenever there was tension amongst the community, the police department stationed at Dharavi Police station played positive and constructive role that helped survey. Progress of survey work by MASHAL The survey was opposed by many activists from political parties and also by Dharavi Bachao Andolan (DBA) in the initial stage. People of Dharavi had misunderstanding about survey and wanted some clarification from DRP. They also had certain demands and concerns. DBA organized of major morcha attended by over 30,000 Dharavi residents at DRP office at Graha Nirman Bhawan, Bandra. After series of meetings with all stakeholders, representative of political parties and NGOs, the survey could be started. Staff of the DRP was involved in explaining official position to the slum dwellers. OSD/ DRP gave patient hearing to representatives of political parties/ NGOs/ DBA and agreed to look in to their demands. When anti-social elements disrupted the survey, Senior Police Inspector, Dharavi played important role in supporting survey team. When Mashal’s survey team numbered the slum structures, opposing parties started ‘Chuna Lagao Andolan’ and white-washed the numbers. Format for socio-economic survey was finalized by DRP and was printed in English for survey work. After some political parties raised objection to the survey in English, over 40,000 forms were reprinted in Marathi. ... Survey could not have gone ahead without active support of Mr. Jockin and Mr. Shekhar of National Slum dwellers Federation which have been active in Dharavi for decades. Resistance from various political parties, Dharavi Bachao Andolan (DBA) and few NGO’s to Mashal’s survey in Dharavi slowly died down and people get motivated to participate in the process. ..." --- On Fri, 13/3/09, Sharad Mahajan wrote: > From: Sharad Mahajan > Subject: Re: [Urbanstudy] Fwd: Megacity governance > To: "Sivarama Krishnan" > Cc: urbanstudygroup at sarai.net > Date: Friday, 13 March, 2009, 9:47 AM > Dear Sir, > We had met at Goa conferance long time back. >  I am sharad Mahajan and am an active member of > Mashal- NGO  from Pune. > We have been working on GIS based Biometric Baseline > S0cio-economic Survey of all slumdwellers of Dharavi, Mumbai >  for DRP for last 18 months. > I request you to visit dharavi-survey.in > website. Some of the results are on the same. I seek your > guidance and help in analysing the data of approximately > 60,000 families. Shri Gautam Chattarjee- a senior and > no-nonsence IAS officer is OSD/DRP. > > Sharad > >   > On 3/12/09, Sivarama Krishnan > wrote: > Maybe of possible > interest to the urbanstudy group. Thanks   KCS  > > > ---------- Forwarded message > ---------- > From: Partha Mukhopadhyay > > > Date: Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 2:50 PM > Subject: Megacity governance > To: sivarama at cprindia.org, > Sivarama Krishnan > > > > > Dear Sir: >   > You could mail it to : , > >   > Best, >   > Partha >   >   >   > http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=351164 > >   > > > > > K > C Sivaramakrishnan: Megacity governance > > > The > current hierarchical model is neither sacred nor > eternal > > K > C Sivaramakrishnan / New Delhi March 8, 2009, 0:14 > IST > > > The current hierarchical model is neither sacred nor > eternal. > Today there are 35 cities or agglomerations whose total > population, according to the 2001 Census, exceeds 100 > million, which is about 37 per cent of India’s total urban > population of 285 million. By 2011, the number of such > cities will increase at least by another ten. > > For the present, let us just consider a few of them such > as Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai. > None of these are a single municipality. The Mumbai > Metropolitan region covers seven municipal corporations, 13 > municipal councils, 17 urban centres and several hundred > urbanising villages spread over four districts. Kolkata has > over 60 municipal and non-municipal entities. Hyderabad, > even after the recent amalgamation of 12 municipalities, is > still a region of many jurisdictions. The Bangalore region > covers the recently expanded city, 11 other municipalities > and numerous panchayats. So it is with Chennai. > > Appellations like the urbs prima, cosmopolitan city or > maximum city are all based on a large city’s highly > diverse economic, linguistic, cultural and occupational > variety. Nevertheless these different factors are linked > together as a significant economic and geographical entity > whose efficient performance is critical for the country’s > progress. Unfortunately, the tendency has been to regard a > metropolitan city as no different to an ordinary > municipality in political and administrative terms. State > governments dominate the scene, subordinating the city’s > functional domain in every possible manner and continue to > be dismissive of a city’s leadership. The textile mills > land case is an instance where the Bombay city’s plea for > breathing space was subordinated by the state’s incursion > into the city’s planning domain. The municipal boundaries > of Bangalore and Hyderabad were expanded nearly two years > ago but elections to the corporations are yet to be held. > Even the cardinal dictum of the Constitution regarding > elected local government is thus flouted. The tenure of the > Mayor in Mumbai continues to be two-and-a-half years; in > Delhi the Mayor is a one-year wonder. > > In Chennai, after the 74th Constitution Amendment, a > comprehensive local bodies Bill was discussed extensively in > the Assembly and its Select Committee and duly enacted. > Under its provisions, Chennai was to have a directly elected > Mayor for a term of five years. Karunanidhi’s son M K > Stalin successfully contested the elections and became Mayor > twice in 1996 and again in 2001. But as Tamil Nadu moved > from DMK to AIADMK, the state leadership thought it > necessary to cut down a directly elected mayor of its > capital city to size. The 1996 Comprehensive Act was set > aside and an ancient 1919 Act was revived under which a > mayor was not entitled to reelection. Another law stipulated > that Stalin had to choose between being the Mayor and a > member of the Tamil Nadu Assembly. He chose the latter. > About five years ago political fortunes overturned again and > DMK returned to power. Stalin is now Tamil Nadu’s minister > for local government. But even he has not found it necessary > to go back to the system of directly elected mayor with > power and accountability. > > Models are not lacking from elsewhere. If large cities > are sought to be put under one administrative jurisdiction, > there are the city provinces of China such as Shanghai or > Beijing, or the Bangkok metropolitan area. If a two-tier > arrangement is desired with one level of government for the > metropolitan region and another for cities or boroughs > within, we have the London metropolitan area, Seoul, Greater > Toronto, Istanbul or several places in Europe, as examples. > The US has also lived with a combination of multiple city > jurisdictions and several special functional districts. None > of these entities are authoritarian and each has a > participative and accountability mechanism involving the > stakeholders. Multiplicity is not a problem in itself if > functions and responsibilities are reasonably well > demarcated and the arrangements for co-ordination endure > over a period of time. > > Twenty years ago the Correa Commission declared that the > cities of Kolkata, Bombay, Delhi and Madras are “so large > and so vitally important to the country that their health, > prosperity and efficient functioning are of national > concern.” The Commission recommended that these cities be > regarded as National Cities. > > When the 74th Amendment to the Constitution came into > effect, it carried a provision for a Metropolitan Planning > Committee (MPC) with two-thirds of its membership comprising > the elected members of the Municipalities and Chairpersons > of the Panchayats in a metropolitan area. It has > constitutionally defined terms of reference to undertake > “coordinated spatial planning of the area, integrated > development of infrastructure, sharing of water and other > natural resources and environmental conservation”. So far > only in Kolkata, the committee has been set up. Even there > it was delayed for five years, and only after parts of the > patchwork quilt of multiple municipalities in the area > changed hands from CPI(M) to Trinamool. > > The Maharashtra government has given repeated assurances > before the Bombay High Court over the past four years that > an MPC would be set up. This is yet to happen. In Hyderabad > in December 2007 an MPC was set up with composition as > stipulated in the Constitution but its mandate was minimal. > A few months later in June 2008, the Greater Hyderabad > Metropolitan Development Authority was set up, with the > chief minister at its head, consisting predominantly of > officials. The Hyderabad MPC has legitimacy but no mandate. > The Hyderabad MDA is a super body with a significant mandate > but singularly lacks political participation and, therefore, > legitimacy and accountability. In Bangalore the > Kasturirangan Committee made a comprehensive set of > recommendations for the enlarged Bangalore Municipal > Corporation with a directly elected mayor at its head and a > participatively structured regional development authority > for the Bangalore metropolitan region. The report > languishes. > > In the Indian context, the chief minister of a state, > however skilled and competent he or she may be, cannot > double up as the mayor of its principal city. This has been > amply proved by S M Krishna’s tryst with Bangalore, and > Chandrababu Naidu’s with Hyderabad. By definition, the > metropolis is a collection of polities which cannot function > at the whim and fancy of a provincial government. Sheila > Dixit’s charm and charisma have ensured her electoral > success. In reality she is not a chief minister as in other > states, but the mayor of a metropolis — though she may not > like to be called that. > > The structure of a metropolitan government should be > strong enough to comprehend and deal with the varied tasks > at the metropolitan level. At the same time it has to be > sensitive to its citizens’ needs, which are more manifest > at the local level. The need to balance the micro with the > macro is a major challenge but well within the realm of > possibilities. > > It is equally important that the economic destiny of a > city, its social cohesion and its political mandate are not > subordinated frequently to some turf battles waged elsewhere > in the state, be it for Telengana, Rayalaseema, Vidharba or > Dakshin Kannada. > > A ‘city state’ is a tempting idea but without > adequate understanding of what it involves, and careful > efforts to mobilise public and political consensus, it will > remain a far cry. Metropolitan cities in India also desire > to be world-class, whatever that means: Mumbai, Bangalore, > Hyderabad or Kolkata are all convinced that they are > globally relevant. That will have to be matched with global > responsibilities and performance. Mumbai cannot be a > Shanghai, even a third or a fourth duplicate, if it cannot > take care of its daily needs and the lives of its own > people. > > The Union-state-municipality as a hierarchical model is > neither sacred nor eternal. There is an urgent need to think > “out of the box” on a very different structure of > governance for India’s metro cities to what exists > now. > > The author is Former Secretary, Urban Development, > Government of India, and Chairman, Centre for Policy > Research >   > > _______________________________________________ > Urbanstudygroup mailing list > Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City > > To subscribe or browse the Urban Study Group archives, > please visit https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/urbanstudygroup > > > > > > -- > Sharad Mahajan - Architect-Planner > Maharashtra Social Housing & Action Leaque, > Office no 007,1st floor,MAHADA Commercial Complex, Gokhale > Nagar, Pune - 411016 > > Phone- 020-25653566 > Fax- 020-25656340 > Mobil- 9766695601 > > -----Inline Attachment Follows----- > > _______________________________________________ > Urbanstudygroup mailing list > Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City > > To subscribe or browse the Urban Study Group archives, > please visit https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/urbanstudygroup > Get perfect Email ID for your Resume. Grab now http://in.promos.yahoo.com/address From jeebesh at sarai.net Fri Mar 13 21:03:03 2009 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh) Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:03:03 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Surveying Dharavi Anthropologist in the New War In-Reply-To: <157428.28656.qm@web8902.mail.in.yahoo.com> References: <157428.28656.qm@web8902.mail.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20884903-AB94-4584-9A1D-7F74E6AAE5F0@sarai.net> Dear Solly, the survey details that is available says: "a) Cadestrial survey – showing each structure to the scale indicating use and number of stories. b) Socio-economic survey – collecting detailed information of family of the occupier/ establishment in the format approved by DRP. c) Biometric survey – capturing photo of the head of household and his/ her left hand thumb impression. d) Photo verification – digitally capturing the structure with unique ID no. displayed on the same e) Collection of photocopies of documents regarding proof of residence from all slum dwellers/ establishments. f) Preparation of individual files for submission to MCGM. g) Data entry, GIS integration and analysis." This looks like a complicated one, with biometric i-cards plunged into it. This is being followed by most MCD surveys in Delhi. According to rough calculation, most people falls away in this survey. I guess about 20% can play into it. Rest do not get a way to enter it. Either through lack of documents, or inconsistent documents or documents linked to specific houses. My experience with surveys are that they are extremely spectral. In this case, i guess if rehabilitation etc comes up there will be a chaos. Most people will not show up in the lists. But given the present downturn, i will guess that not many will have the will to push Dharavi into a real estate site. love jeebesh On 13-Mar-09, at 4:16 PM, solomon benjamin wrote: > This is a fascinating and morbid account of anthropologists in the > new war! Not surprisingly, the language of 'rights' mobilized on the > ground. > The website http://dharavi-survey.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=15&Itemid=39 > is worth a visit! > Solly > Some extracts: > "....Survey team of over 100 surveyors worked tirelessly for over a > year to complete survey of approximately 50,000 families/ > establishment of Dharavi. Balance survey is going on without much > resistance from the people. Whenever there was tension amongst the > community, the police department stationed at Dharavi Police station > played positive and constructive role that helped survey. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090313/15882e36/attachment.html From yanivbin at gmail.com Fri Mar 13 21:17:17 2009 From: yanivbin at gmail.com (Vinay Baindur) Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:17:17 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Encourage clustered economic growth, World Bank tells India In-Reply-To: <86b8a7050903130845q4929a792i9c86b43f6e339c96@mail.gmail.com> References: <86b8a7050903130845q4929a792i9c86b43f6e339c96@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <86b8a7050903130847i698993fcx8e11c6385efb9d84@mail.gmail.com> http://epaper.livemint.com/Articletext.aspx?article=13_03_2009_010_003&mode=1 GREATER CONCENTRATION -* Encourage clustered economic growth, World Bank tells India* B Y S ANJIV S HANKARAN sanjiv.s at livemint.com ························· NEW DELHI T he World Bank has in a new report questioned one of the most fondly held beliefs of Indian economic poli- cy—promoting balanced re- gional development. India’s policy of providing incentives such as tax breaks to the private sector to start in- dustries in economically back- ward regions is flawed, and the money would be better spent providing uniform basic needs, it said in a report. “Relying mainly on targeted incentives for industry—as In- dia did for decades—will not help the lagging states improve living standards to levels in leading states,” said the World Development Report 2009: Re- shaping Economic Geography. According to the report, eco- nomic activity tends to be con- centrated in a few regions, and state intervention to spread it geographically is not the best way to fight poverty. Instead, it is “far better for markets to pick the place (and) far better for government to push the pace,” Indermit S. Gill, direc- tor, World Development Re- port 2009, said at a media briefing on the report. The broad premise of the World Bank’s suggestion found support among some econo- mists. “The way they (govern- , ment) have been intervening is not optimal. It hasn’t paid div- idends in the past,” D.K. Joshi, principal economist and direc- tor, Crisil Ltd, said. Both the World Develop- ment Report and Joshi also pointed out that governments continue to have an important role to play in guiding an econ- omy towards prosperity. The report said governments should provide basic and so- cial services everywhere, and lay the foundation of a sound land development market. The challenge for the gov- ernment is to encourage “un- balanced” economic growth, while ensuring inclusive devel- opment, the report said. The underlying logic of the report’s conclusion is that a generation of economic re- search has showed as coun- tries develop, economic activi- ty becomes more concentrat- ed. This, in turn, leads to tight- er concentration of people around clusters of high eco- nomic activity. “Concentration is a natural tendency,” Somik V. Lall, se- nior economist at World Bank who worked on the report, said. Incidentally, Paul Krugman of Princeton University won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Eco- nomics for his explanation of why economic activity gets concentrated in certain parts of a country. When governments try to stem the move towards con- centration, and provide incen- tives to companies to spread geographically, it does not make economic sense, the World Bank report said. India’s economic policies have long tried to design fiscal and other economic incentives to evenly spread industrial ac- tivity in all regions of the coun- try. According to the Union government’s Receipts Budget 2008-09, about 2.25% of the gross tax revenue of Rs5.93 tril- lion in 2007-08 was “foregone” to encourage the private sector to start industries in Jammu and Kashmir, the north-east- ern states, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Guja- rat’s Kutch district. The new World Develop- ment Report said it would make more economic sense to replace this kind of incentivi- zation with policies to create social and physical infrastruc- ture to facilitate migration. Targeted incentives for India should be designed to work in tandem with institutional re- form and investments in infra- structure, it added. According to the report, in the second half of the 1990s, about three million people moved from economically lag- gard states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to states such as Maharashtra and Punjab, where the level of economic activity was higher. Migration within India has led to social tensions, particu- larly in Mumbai, in the recent past. Gill pointed out that as education was an aspiration which cut across all regions, migration towards centres of economic concentration would follow. “You can’t be for more education and against more migration,” he said in re- sponse to a question on the so- cial fallout of large-scale inter- nal migration. T he World Bank has in a new report questioned one of the most fondly held beliefs of Indian economic policy—promoting balanced regional development. India’s policy of providing incentives such as tax breaks to the private sector to start industries in economically backward regions is flawed, and the money would be better spent providing uniform basic needs, it said in a report. “Relying mainly on targeted incentives for industry—as India did for decades—will not help the lagging states improve living standards to levels in leading states,” said the World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography. According to the report, eco nomic activity tends to be con centrated in a few regions, and state intervention to spread it geographically is not the best way to fight poverty. Instead, it is “far better for markets to pick the place (and) far better for government to push the pace,” Indermit S. Gill, direc tor, World Development Re port 2009, said at a media briefing on the report. The broad premise of the World Bank’s suggestion found support among some econo mists. “The way they (govern, ment) have been intervening is not optimal. It hasn’t paid div idends in the past,” D.K. Joshi, principal economist and direc tor, Crisil Ltd, said. Both the World Develop ment Report and Joshi also pointed out that governments continue to have an important role to play in guiding an econ omy towards prosperity. The report said governments should provide basic and social services everywhere, and lay the foundation of a sound land development market. The challenge for the government is to encourage “unbalanced” economic growth, while ensuring inclusive development, the report said. The underlying logic of the report’s conclusion is that a generation of economic research has showed as countries develop, economic activity becomes more concentrated. This, in turn, leads to tighter concentration of people around clusters of high economic activity. “Concentration is a natural tendency,” Somik V. Lall, senior economist at World Bank who worked on the report, said. Incidentally, Paul Krugman of Princeton University won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics for his explanation of why economic activity gets concentrated in certain parts of a country. When governments try to stem the move towards concentration, and provide incentives to companies to spread geographically, it does not make economic sense, the World Bank report said. India’s economic policies have long tried to design fiscal and other economic incentives to evenly spread industrial activity in all regions of the country. According to the Union government’s Receipts Budget 2008-09, about 2.25% of the gross tax revenue of Rs5.93 trillion in 2007-08 was “foregone” to encourage the private sector to start industries in Jammu and Kashmir, the north-eastern states, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat’s Kutch district. The new World Development Report said it would make more economic sense to replace this kind of incentivization with policies to create social and physical infrastructure to facilitate migration. Targeted incentives for India should be designed to work in tandem with institutional reform and investments in infrastructure, it added. According to the report, in the second half of the 1990s, about three million people moved from economically laggard states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to states such as Maharashtra and Punjab, where the level of economic activity was higher. Migration within India has led to social tensions, particularly in Mumbai, in the recent past. Gill pointed out that as education was an aspiration which cut across all regions, migration towards centres of economic concentration would follow. “You can’t be for more education and against more migration,” he said in response to a question on the social fallout of large-scale internal migration. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090313/0787963d/attachment.html From pmukhopadhyay at gmail.com Fri Mar 13 21:44:58 2009 From: pmukhopadhyay at gmail.com (Partha Mukhopadhyay) Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:44:58 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Encourage clustered economic growth, World Bank tells India In-Reply-To: <86b8a7050903130847i698993fcx8e11c6385efb9d84@mail.gmail.com> References: <86b8a7050903130845q4929a792i9c86b43f6e339c96@mail.gmail.com> <86b8a7050903130847i698993fcx8e11c6385efb9d84@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <759b94b30903130914u45125bafka08ec3fa65e7e796@mail.gmail.com> In its "Report at a Glance", though, it says: *In a third group of countries, such as India, lagging areas are densely populated— almost 60 percent of India’s poor live in these poor places—and people can find it difficult to migrate to places doing well, such as the capital area and the south. Language and cultural differences within some areas can be considerable.* [emphasis mine] *In such cases, institutions and infrastructure could be complemented by incentives to producers to locate in these lagging states. But these incentives should be carefully designed to avoid offsetting the unifying effects of common institutions and connective infrastructure. A promising possibility is providing incentives to agriculture and allied activities that are appropriate for states that are still mostly rural.* This could be interpreted to mean that the barriers to migration for people from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are "*language and cultural differences" . *Make of that what you will. The full report can be downloaded from http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTWDRS/EXTWDR2009/0,,menuPK:4231145~pagePK:64167702~piPK:64167676~theSitePK:4231059,00.html On 3/13/09, Vinay Baindur wrote: > > > > > http://epaper.livemint.com/Articletext.aspx?article=13_03_2009_010_003&mode=1 > > GREATER CONCENTRATION -* Encourage clustered economic growth, World Bank > tells India* > B Y S ANJIV S HANKARAN sanjiv.s at livemint.com ························· > NEW DELHI > > T he World Bank has in a new report questioned one of the most fondly held > beliefs of Indian economic poli- cy—promoting balanced re- gional > development. India’s policy of providing incentives such as tax breaks to > the private sector to start in- dustries in economically back- ward regions > is flawed, and the money would be better spent providing uniform basic > needs, it said in a report. “Relying mainly on targeted incentives for > industry—as In- dia did for decades—will not help the lagging states improve > living standards to levels in leading states,” said the World Development > Report 2009: Re- shaping Economic Geography. According to the report, eco- > nomic activity tends to be con- centrated in a few regions, and state > intervention to spread it geographically is not the best way to fight > poverty. Instead, it is “far better for markets to pick the place (and) far > better for government to push the pace,” Indermit S. Gill, direc- tor, World > Development Re- port 2009, said at a media briefing on the report. The broad > premise of the World Bank’s suggestion found support among some econo- > mists. “The way they (govern- , ment) have been intervening is not optimal. > It hasn’t paid div- idends in the past,” D.K. Joshi, principal economist and > direc- tor, Crisil Ltd, said. Both the World Develop- ment Report and Joshi > also pointed out that governments continue to have an important role to play > in guiding an econ- omy towards prosperity. The report said governments > should provide basic and so- cial services everywhere, and lay the > foundation of a sound land development market. The challenge for the gov- > ernment is to encourage “un- balanced” economic growth, while ensuring > inclusive devel- opment, the report said. The underlying logic of the > report’s conclusion is that a generation of economic re- search has showed > as coun- tries develop, economic activi- ty becomes more concentrat- ed. > This, in turn, leads to tight- er concentration of people around clusters of > high eco- nomic activity. “Concentration is a natural tendency,” Somik V. > Lall, se- nior economist at World Bank who worked on the report, said. > Incidentally, Paul Krugman of Princeton University won the 2008 Nobel Prize > in Eco- nomics for his explanation of why economic activity gets > concentrated in certain parts of a country. When governments try to stem the > move towards con- centration, and provide incen- tives to companies to > spread geographically, it does not make economic sense, the World Bank > report said. India’s economic policies have long tried to design fiscal and > other economic incentives to evenly spread industrial ac- tivity in all > regions of the coun- try. According to the Union government’s Receipts > Budget 2008-09, about 2.25% of the gross tax revenue of Rs5.93 tril- lion in > 2007-08 was “foregone” to encourage the private sector to start industries > in Jammu and Kashmir, the north-east- ern states, Uttarakhand, Himachal > Pradesh and Guja- rat’s Kutch district. The new World Develop- ment Report > said it would make more economic sense to replace this kind of incentivi- > zation with policies to create social and physical infrastruc- ture to > facilitate migration. Targeted incentives for India should be designed to > work in tandem with institutional re- form and investments in infra- > structure, it added. According to the report, in the second half of the > 1990s, about three million people moved from economically lag- gard states > of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to states such as Maharashtra and Punjab, where > the level of economic activity was higher. Migration within India has led to > social tensions, particu- larly in Mumbai, in the recent past. Gill pointed > out that as education was an aspiration which cut across all regions, > migration towards centres of economic concentration would follow. “You can’t > be for more education and against more migration,” he said in re- sponse to > a question on the so- cial fallout of large-scale inter- nal migration. > T he World Bank has in a new report questioned one of the most fondly held > beliefs of Indian economic policy—promoting balanced regional development. > > India’s policy of providing incentives such as tax breaks to the private > sector to start industries in economically backward regions is flawed, and > the money would be better spent providing uniform basic needs, it said in a > report. > > “Relying mainly on targeted incentives for industry—as India did for > decades—will not help the lagging states improve living standards to levels > in leading states,” said the World Development Report 2009: Reshaping > Economic Geography. > > According to the report, eco nomic activity tends to be con centrated in a > few regions, and state intervention to spread it geographically is not the > best way to fight poverty. Instead, it is “far better for markets to pick > the place (and) far better for government to push the pace,” Indermit S. > Gill, direc tor, World Development Re port 2009, said at a media briefing on > the report. > > The broad premise of the World Bank’s suggestion found support among some > econo mists. “The way they (govern, ment) have been intervening is not > optimal. It hasn’t paid div idends in the past,” D.K. Joshi, principal > economist and direc tor, Crisil Ltd, said. > > Both the World Develop ment Report and Joshi also pointed out that > governments continue to have an important role to play in guiding an econ > omy towards prosperity. The report said governments should provide basic and > social services everywhere, and lay the foundation of a sound land > development market. > > The challenge for the government is to encourage “unbalanced” economic > growth, while ensuring inclusive development, the report said. > > The underlying logic of the report’s conclusion is that a generation of > economic research has showed as countries develop, economic activity becomes > more concentrated. This, in turn, leads to tighter concentration of people > around clusters of high economic activity. > > “Concentration is a natural tendency,” Somik V. Lall, senior economist at > World Bank who worked on the report, said. > > Incidentally, Paul Krugman of Princeton University won the 2008 Nobel Prize > in Economics for his explanation of why economic activity gets concentrated > in certain parts of a country. > > When governments try to stem the move towards concentration, and provide > incentives to companies to spread geographically, it does not make economic > sense, the World Bank report said. > > India’s economic policies have long tried to design fiscal and other > economic incentives to evenly spread industrial activity in all regions of > the country. According to the Union government’s Receipts Budget 2008-09, > about 2.25% of the gross tax revenue of Rs5.93 trillion in 2007-08 was > “foregone” to encourage the private sector to start industries in Jammu and > Kashmir, the north-eastern states, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and > Gujarat’s Kutch district. > > The new World Development Report said it would make more economic sense to > replace this kind of incentivization with policies to create social and > physical infrastructure to facilitate migration. > > Targeted incentives for India should be designed to work in tandem with > institutional reform and investments in infrastructure, it added. > > According to the report, in the second half of the 1990s, about three > million people moved from economically laggard states of Bihar and Uttar > Pradesh to states such as Maharashtra and Punjab, where the level of > economic activity was higher. > > Migration within India has led to social tensions, particularly in Mumbai, > in the recent past. Gill pointed out that as education was an aspiration > which cut across all regions, migration towards centres of economic > concentration would follow. “You can’t be for more education and against > more migration,” he said in response to a question on the social fallout of > large-scale internal migration. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Urbanstudygroup mailing list > Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City > > To subscribe or browse the Urban Study Group archives, please visit > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/urbanstudygroup > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090313/2347f0bc/attachment-0001.html From sollybenj at yahoo.co.in Sat Mar 14 00:43:22 2009 From: sollybenj at yahoo.co.in (solomon benjamin) Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:43:22 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Urbanstudy] spectral real estate and Surveying Dharavi Anthropologist in the New War Message-ID: <723235.14788.qm@web8907.mail.in.yahoo.com> Dear Jeebesh, Quite true! thats what my understanding is also. a look at some of the lists relating to resettlement in Bombay, many of the sub-tenancies dont fit into this. My understanding was that this went up to 40% of a squatter settlement, and in central Bangalore, areas like Shivaji Nager, this would be even higher. and there was a lot of chaos in the Bombay case. at one level, these lists fit into, and motivate the consulting NGO/ survey firm's job contract and their access to funds under the JNNURM rather than ground realities. and its' location in a 'spectral' real estate of Real estate Invest funds sort of Mega imaginary. These face fractures, with the financial crises, and then as in the Bombay int. airport land expansion case, disruption from below. I find it fascinating, in a closer read of the website, that they sought the GoM GOs to attempt to extinguish sub-tenancies claims:Annexure IV DC no. 33 (10) point 1.12'.. its a bit like Karnataka's Bhoomi un-successful attempt to 'ban' manual transfers and replace these with the digital titles! cheers Solly --- On Fri, 13/3/09, Jeebesh wrote: > From: Jeebesh > Subject: Re: [Urbanstudy] Surveying Dharavi Anthropologist in the New War > To: "solomon benjamin" > Cc: urbanstudygroup at sarai.net > Date: Friday, 13 March, 2009, 9:03 PM > Dear Solly, > the survey details that is available > says: > "a)      Cadestrial > survey – showing each structure to the scale indicating > use and number of stories. > b)      Socio-economic survey – > collecting detailed information of family of the occupier/ > establishment in the format approved by DRP. > c)      Biometric survey – > capturing photo of the head of household and his/ her left > hand thumb impression. > d)      Photo verification – > digitally capturing the structure with unique ID no. > displayed on the same > e)      Collection of photocopies > of documents regarding proof of residence from all slum > dwellers/ establishments. > f)        Preparation of > individual files for submission to MCGM. > g)      Data entry, GIS > integration and analysis." > This looks like a complicated one, with > biometric i-cards plunged into it. This is being followed by > most MCD surveys in Delhi. According to rough calculation, > most people falls away in this survey. I guess about 20% can > play into it. Rest do not get a way to enter it. Either > through lack of documents, or inconsistent documents or > documents linked to specific houses. My experience with > surveys are that they are extremely > spectral.  > In this case, i guess > if rehabilitation etc comes up there will be a > chaos. Most people will not show up in the lists. But given > the present downturn, i will guess that not many will have > the will to push Dharavi into a real estate > site. > lovejeebesh  > On 13-Mar-09, at 4:16 PM, solomon benjamin > wrote: > This is a fascinating and morbid > account of anthropologists in the new war! Not surprisingly, > the language of 'rights' mobilized on the ground. > The website http://dharavi-survey.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=15&Itemid=39 is worth a visit! >    > Solly > Some extracts: > "....Survey team of over 100 surveyors worked > tirelessly for over a year to complete survey of > approximately 50,000 families/ establishment of Dharavi. > Balance survey is going on without much resistance from the > people. Whenever there was tension amongst the community, > the police department stationed at Dharavi Police station > played positive and constructive role that helped > survey. > Add more friends to your messenger and enjoy! Go to http://messenger.yahoo.com/invite/ From anant_umn at yahoo.co.uk Sun Mar 15 07:29:59 2009 From: anant_umn at yahoo.co.uk (anant m) Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:59:59 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Urbanstudy] spectral real estate and Surveying Dharavi Anthropologist in the New War In-Reply-To: <723235.14788.qm@web8907.mail.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <700373.26907.qm@web23003.mail.ird.yahoo.com> Jeebesh, Solly, Lots of questions - more by way of loud thinking but if you have any comments - please do respond. Am I am understanding this correctly? According to jeebesh, ONLY 20 per cent of the people in the MCD slums actually have everything in order - including tenancy certificates to become eligible for rehab. That is, 80 per cent slip through the net. According to Solly, AS MUCH AS 40 per cent of the people are subtenants in Mumbai and Bangalore slums. These numbers of course vary from slums to slum. But are you also suggesting that apart from undocumented (officially) subtenancies there are other reasons why people slip through the net? What would these be ? Also, on the flipside of it, are there people who are making it into the net that should not be making in to it ? How do they justify it ? Actually, since it is this flipside question that motivates ever increasing sophistication in survey technologies -- what is your take on it ? Isnt it incumbent upon us to make normative claims on this question - Who or what should be captured in the survey? The answer of course could be that everyone who says that he or she should be in should be in because the state really has no moral authority to judge and differentiate. Or that nobody should be in at all... that is, we dont want a survey because a survey means a resettlement and we are opposed to it completely. But if we are examining the specific modalities of the survey, then we have to be a lot more specific about the actual practices. Surely these vary within each settlement - and across settlements but are there discernible patterns ? Undocumented subtenancies is one - what else ? On a different note, clearly there is a lot of local history and local negotiation at play in the DRP. From the list of advisors, consultants etc - it seems like a lot of contradictions have been resolved among the main actors in the last couple of years. The one thing that still remains a block is the tension arising from the caste/community power of the koliwada and kumharwada areas - who want a different future from the rest of Dharavi residents. How do they relate to the DBA? Incidentally, I am not quire sure what jeebesh and solly mean by 'spectral' in this context. Does it mean that there is a surplus that is not captured through the survey process - a surplus that will haunt the outcome whatever it be ? On the financial crisis and the future of Dharavi - i am tempted to agree with the speculation that new real estate investments may not come forth right away. but would that be an interregnum or a turnaround or a window of opportunity through which new directions can be charted ? anant --- On Sat, 3/14/09, solomon benjamin wrote: > From: solomon benjamin > Subject: [Urbanstudy] spectral real estate and Surveying Dharavi Anthropologist in the New War > To: "Jeebesh" > Cc: urbanstudygroup at sarai.net > Date: Saturday, March 14, 2009, 3:13 AM > Dear Jeebesh, > Quite true! thats what my understanding is also. a look at > some of the lists relating to resettlement in Bombay, many > of the sub-tenancies dont fit into this. My understanding > was that this went up to 40% of a squatter settlement, and > in central Bangalore, areas like Shivaji Nager, this would > be even higher. and there was a lot of chaos in the Bombay > case. at one level, these lists fit into, and motivate the > consulting NGO/ survey firm's job contract and their > access to funds under the JNNURM rather than ground > realities. and its' location in a 'spectral' > real estate of Real estate Invest funds sort of Mega > imaginary. These face fractures, with the financial crises, > and then as in the Bombay int. airport land expansion case, > disruption from below. I find it fascinating, in a closer > read of the website, that they sought the GoM GOs to attempt > to extinguish sub-tenancies claims:Annexure IV DC no. 33 > (10) point 1.12'.. its a bit like Karnataka's Bhoomi > un-successful attempt to 'ban' manual transfers > and replace these with the digital titles! > > cheers > Solly > > > --- On Fri, 13/3/09, Jeebesh > wrote: > > > From: Jeebesh > > Subject: Re: [Urbanstudy] Surveying Dharavi > Anthropologist in the New War > > To: "solomon benjamin" > > > Cc: urbanstudygroup at sarai.net > > Date: Friday, 13 March, 2009, 9:03 PM > > Dear Solly, > > the survey details that is available > > says: > > "a)      Cadestrial > > survey – showing each structure to the scale > indicating > > use and number of stories. > > b)      Socio-economic survey – > > collecting detailed information of family of the > occupier/ > > establishment in the format approved by DRP. > > c)      Biometric survey – > > capturing photo of the head of household and his/ her > left > > hand thumb impression. > > d)      Photo verification – > > digitally capturing the structure with unique ID no. > > displayed on the same > > e)      Collection of photocopies > > of documents regarding proof of residence from all > slum > > dwellers/ establishments. > > f)        Preparation of > > individual files for submission to MCGM. > > g)      Data entry, GIS > > integration and analysis." > > This looks like a complicated one, with > > biometric i-cards plunged into it. This is being > followed by > > most MCD surveys in Delhi. According to rough > calculation, > > most people falls away in this survey. I guess about > 20% can > > play into it. Rest do not get a way to enter it. > Either > > through lack of documents, or inconsistent documents > or > > documents linked to specific houses. My experience > with > > surveys are that they are extremely > > spectral.  > > In this case, i guess > > if rehabilitation etc comes up there will be a > > chaos. Most people will not show up in the lists. But > given > > the present downturn, i will guess that not many will > have > > the will to push Dharavi into a real estate > > site. > > lovejeebesh  > > On 13-Mar-09, at 4:16 PM, solomon benjamin > > wrote: > > This is a fascinating and morbid > > account of anthropologists in the new war! Not > surprisingly, > > the language of 'rights' mobilized on the > ground. > > tirelessly for over a year to complete survey of > > approximately 50,000 families/ establishment of > Dharavi. > > Balance survey is going on without much resistance > from the > > people. Whenever there was tension amongst the > community, > > the police department stationed at Dharavi Police > station > > played positive and constructive role that helped > > survey. > > > > > Add more friends to your messenger and enjoy! Go to > http://messenger.yahoo.com/invite/ > _______________________________________________ > Urbanstudygroup mailing list > Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City > > To subscribe or browse the Urban Study Group archives, > please visit > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/urbanstudygroup From carol.upadhya at gmail.com Mon Mar 16 09:49:23 2009 From: carol.upadhya at gmail.com (Carol Upadhya) Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:49:23 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Fwd: [silk] Urban Rhythms In-Reply-To: <49BDD13D.9030005@pobox.com> References: <49BDD13D.9030005@pobox.com> Message-ID: <4b84e4260903152119g6d836558o3b73e7897757979b@mail.gmail.com> Of interest to the urban list, especially in view of the ongoing project in Bangalore to mine cell phone data to help the traffic police predict traffic jams: http://www.mapunity.in/ Carol ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Udhay Shankar N Date: Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 9:40 AM Subject: [silk] Urban Rhythms To: silklist at lists.hserus.net This is rather cool, though there are obvious implications for privacy here. Two things come to mind: * The "mapping a city using the sound of footsteps" bit from _Cryptonomicon_ * This is "traffic analysis" in more than one sense. :-) Udhay http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/22286/?a=f Friday, March 13, 2009 Mapping a City's Rhythm A phone application highlights hot spots and will soon show where different urban "tribes" gather. By Kate Greene Over the course of any day, people congregate around different parts of a city. In the morning hours, workers commute downtown, while at lunchtime and in the evening, people disperse to eateries and bars. While this sort of behavior is common knowledge, it hasn't been visible to the average person. Sense Networks, a startup based in New York, is now trying to bring this side of a city to life. Using cell-phone and taxi GPS data, the startup's software produces a heat map that shows activity at hot spots across a city. Currently, the service, called Citysense, only works in San Francisco, but it will launch in New York in the next few months. On Wednesday, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference in San Jose, CA, Tony Jebara, chief scientist for Sense Networks and a professor at Columbia University, detailed plans of a forthcoming update to Citysense that shows not only where people are gathering in real time, but where people with similar behavioral patterns--students, tourists, or businesspeople, for instance--are congregating. A user downloads Citysense to her phone to view the map and can choose whether or not to allow the application to track her own location. The idea, says Jebara, is that a person could travel to a new city, launch Citysense on her phone, and instantly get a feel for which neighborhoods she might want to spend the evening visiting. This information could also help her filter restaurant or bar suggestions from online recommendation services like Yelp. Equally important, from the company's business perspective, advertisers would have a better idea of where and when to advertise to certain groups of people. Citysense, which has access to four million GPS sensors, currently offers simple statistics about a city, says Jebara. It shows, for instance, whether the overall activity in the city is above or below normal (Sense Networks' GPS data indicates that activity in San Francisco is down 34 percent since October) or whether a particular part of town has more or less activity than usual. But the next version of the software, due out in a couple of months, will help users dig more deeply into this data. It will reveal the movement of people with certain behavior patterns. "It's like Facebook, but without the self-reporting," Jebara says, meaning that a user doesn't need to actively update her profile. "We want an honest social network where you're connected to someone because you colocate." In other words, if you live in San Francisco and go to Starbucks at 4 P.M. a couple of times a week, you probably have some similarities with someone in New York who also visits Starbucks at around the same time. Knowing where a person in New York goes to dinner on a Friday night could help a visitor to the city make a better restaurant choice, Jebara says. As smart phones with GPS sensors become more popular, companies and researchers have clamored to make sense of all the data that this can reveal. Sense Networks is a part of a research trend known as reality mining, pioneered by Alex Pentland of MIT, who is a cofounder of Sense Networks. Another example of reality mining is a research project at Intel that uses cell phones to determine whether a person is the hub of a social network or at the periphery, based on her tone of voice and the amount of time she talks. Jebara is aware that the idea of tracking people's movements makes some people uncomfortable, but he insists that the data used is stripped of all identifying information. In addition, anyone who uses Citysense must first agree to let the system log her position. A user can also, at any time, delete her data from the Sense Networks database, Jebara says. Part of Sense Networks' business plan involves providing GPS data about city activity to advertisers, Jebara says. But again, this does not mean revealing an individual's whereabouts--just where certain types of people congregate and when. For instance, Sense Networks' data-analysis algorithms may show that a particular demographic heads to bars downtown between 6 and 9 P.M. on weekdays. Advertisers could then tailor ads on a billboard screen to that specific crowd. So far, Jebara says, Sense Networks has categorized 20 types, or "tribes," of people in cities, including "young and edgy," "business traveler," "weekend mole," and "homebody." These tribes are determined using three types of data: a person's "flow," or movements around a city; publicly available data concerning the company addresses in a city; and demographic data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. If a person spends the evening in a certain neighborhood, it's more likely that she lives in that neighborhood and shares some of its demographic traits. By analyzing these types of data, engineers at Sense Networks can determine the probability that a user will visit a certain type of location, like a coffee shop, at any time. Within a couple of weeks, says Jebara, the matrix provides a reliable probability of the type of place--not the exact place or location--that a person will be at any given hour in a week. The probability is constantly updated, but in general, says Jebara, most people's behavior does not vary dramatically from day to day. Sense Networks is exploring what GPS data can reveal about behavior, says Eric Paulos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. "It's interesting to see things like this, [something] that was just research a few years ago, coming to the market," he adds. Paulos says it will be important to make sure that people are aware of what data is being used and how, but he predicts that more and more companies are going to find ways to make use of the digital bread crumbs we leave behind. "It's going to happen," he says. -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com)) -- Dr. Carol Upadhya Fellow, School of Social Sciences National Institute of Advanced Studies Indian Institute of Science Campus Bangalore 560012 India office: +91 80 2218 5000/ 5141 (ext) cell: +91(0) 97408 50141 carol at nias.iisc.ernet.in carol.upadhya at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090316/b70cfd1e/attachment-0001.html From esg at esgindia.org Mon Mar 16 21:25:27 2009 From: esg at esgindia.org (ESGINDIA) Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:25:27 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Karnataka High Court directs BBMP to widen roads in strict accordance with Karnataka Town and Country Planning Act Message-ID: <49BE766F.4080803@esgindia.org> *PRESS RELEASE* 16 March 2009 *Karnataka High Court directs BBMP to widen roads in strict accordance with Karnataka Town and Country Planning Act* In a significant decision that will have major repercussions for democratic and planned urban infrastrcture development, Chief Justice Mr. P. D. Dinakaran and Justice Mr. V. G. Sabhahit constituting the Division Bench of the Hon'ble High Court of Karnataka ruled that the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) can undertake road widening in the city only in scrupolous compliance with all the provisions of the Karnataka Town and Country Planning Act (KTCP Act) and the Karnataka Preservation of Trees Act (KPT Act). This interim direction was issued pursuant to an application made by BBMP who argued that the orders issued by the Hon'ble Karnataka Legal Services Authority consequent to a PIL filed by Environment Support Group and ors. had stopped the road widening programme. In argument the petitioners submitted that at no time have they opposed road widening so long as it met with the wider public interest and was done in strict compliance with existing laws, in particular KTCP Act and KPT Act. The decision of the Hon'ble Court today is a significant victory to the long struggle of hundreds of affected communities across Bangalore who were living in constant fear of displacement and destruction of their homes and businesses due to the road widening programme which was being implemented in blatant violation of the procedural laws. _By virtue of the present interim order duty has been cast on the officials of the BBMP to ensure that each and every road widening project that they intend to implement will strictly follow the deliberate consultative decision making processes by involving the affected communities and the wide public_. In addition, the insistence on strict compliance with the KTP Act has sufficient safeguard to ensure that the Forest officials will not recklessly allow for massive tree felling in Bangalore. In fact, the Tree Officer is now bound to allow for tree felling as a consequence of road widening, only when the BBMP can legally prove its full compliance with KTCP Act. The direction ensures that due process of law will have to be fully adhered to when implementing projects such as road widening. This decision will have a strong bearing on all such transport and urban infrastructure development projects that have thus far been implemented without complying with the provisions KTCP Act. It may be recalled that the PIL was filed to ensure that the process of urban transport infrastructure development in Bangalore, in particular road widening, would be shaped by legally mandated planning and consultative mechanisms and various policies initiated by the Centre, in particular, the National Urban Transport Policy and the National Policy on Street Vendors. Environment Support Group and CIVIC Bangalore were represented by Mr. Sunil Dutt Yadav, Advocate, and Mr. Leo Saldanha, Coordinator of ESG appeared as party in person. Details of the PIL are accessible at www.esgindia.org Bhargavi S. Rao Nandini Chami Environment Support Group, 105, East End B Main Road, Jayanagar 9^th Block East, Bangalore 560069. Tel: 91-80-22441977/26531339 Voice/Fax: 91-80-26534364 Email: _esg at esgindia.org _ Web: _www.esgindia.org _ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090316/ae75a59e/attachment-0001.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: HC_RoadWidening_KTPActApllies_PressRel_160309.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 33188 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090316/ae75a59e/attachment-0001.pdf -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: esg.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 341 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090316/ae75a59e/attachment-0001.vcf From shveta at sarai.net Mon Mar 16 23:41:52 2009 From: shveta at sarai.net (Shveta) Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:41:52 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Dismantling of a Neighbourhood 01 Message-ID: <49BE9668.6070608@sarai.net> dear All (Solly, Anant and Jeebesh), There is a slow process by which a neighbourhood, built over decades, is dismantled. Surveys are decisive in this unmaking. Through the discourse of rehabilitation, however, the complex fabric of a neighbourhood's economic life, financial networks, social security buffers, forms of political negotiation, shared social spaces are eroded away from the perspectives by which we build a collective assesment of eviction and demolition. All that remains is individuals and their houses. The individualisation of rehabilitation of houses creates a blockage to thinking outside the grid produced by the survey. Over a series of postings I'll share my understanding of the slow dismantling of the neighbourhood as we are seeing it in LNJP. warmly shveta ----------------------- Dismantling of a Neighbourhood 01: Information Rehabilitation! Perhaps the most successful fiction of our times is the fiction of the "stable document" that feeds efficiently into information systems. It persists. A document is supposed to be immutable and immune to the experiential and perceptional universe of those who have acquired it, not acquired it, have a scarcity of documents or have produced a surplus of documents around them in their lives. The stuff of life is not germane to "information". Many can drop by the side, but the information system will keep marching on. Shamiya Bano received the house in which she lives as a gift from an old man who had made it, and with whom she and her family lived as a tenant after they came to the city. Little did she realise during the twenty five years in which she built it up with her husband and lived in it that they would be jeopardising their family's claim for resettlement when her husband got a passport made so he could go to work in the UAE. Hajiya Begum was old, but not unknown to the ways of the world. She knew that after her death, if she wanted to ensure the family does not break apart in the tussle over who would be its true claimant, she should will her house to her then young grandson. Before her death she also remembered to have her ration card with his name in it renewed. What her grandson Mohd. Sher did not realise was that in leaving his childhood name Raju behind as he stepped into adulthood with an election I-card, he would be nullifying any claim for resettlement that could be made on account of this, his grandmother's house. Buddhima was a mother of a young boy when the first official identity cards were issued to the residents of her neighbourhood. She got one made in her name; it would be a security for the future of her young son. But four years later, when many got their first election I-cards made, her son was in the hospital, and she did not fill the form to apply for it. When he died, she lived amidst her neighbours, who took care of her, and she never applied for a ration card. She's an old woman now, with a proof of having once been in the neighbourhood. But without paper proof that she has continued living there all these years, that's just half of what can make her eligible for resettlement. When their mother, Shanno, died three years ago, the father of the young children left home, never to return. The neighbourhood arranged the marriages of the two eldest daughters, and the younger children began to get by by giving the first floor of the house on rent. The eldest among these was twelve when they began life on their own, and today they can't remember if the documents that will make them eligible for resettlement were among the old things of their mother's that they gave away several months ago. Mahruni was raised by her father's brother, a man who had three sons but no daughters. He had her name included in his ration card, with her biological father's name listed in the column asking "Father's Name". The members of the adoptive family died over the years - of age, in accidents, of illness. She didn't renew the ration card after that, not realising that she would have to show it years later in order to claim resettlement. Shakeela has an election I-card and ration card issued in her name in 2008. The first official I-card was issued in the name of her first husband, the first ration card in the name of the second husband, with whom too she parted ways later. Strong-willed enough to have lived through three marriages and in the house that she had made, she knows her documents are too unstable to ensure her resettlement. Surya Bhan Raye built himself and his family a secure home in the heart of the city over thirty years. In the intensity of life, its velocity, its demands and its urgencies, he did not notice that for fifteen years two documents - the ration card and the election I card - had begun to record different addresses for his single home. What jeopardises his family's claim to resettlement is his stubborness that if fifteen of the best years of his life have been lived with these two diverging identities, then his future too must be based on an acceptance of them. Sahiba's father-in-law, long deceased, was known by two names all his life, and her husband's documents faithfully tell which of the two names he remembered his father more by at different points of time in his life. Her family's foggy claim to resettlement is now blurred a second time over by the cuts and the scratches she made on the identity documents in order to bring to bear upon them their consistency. - to be contd - next Karkhana/Godam/Dukan From sethschindler at hotmail.com Tue Mar 17 00:01:29 2009 From: sethschindler at hotmail.com (seth schindler) Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:31:29 +0000 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Dharavi discussed at Harvard Business School Message-ID: Hello all, I am a PhD student at Clark University's geography dept., and yesterday I attended a conference on business in India at Harvard Business School. One of the sessions was on infrastructure, and one of the panelists as well as the moderator were from the World Bank and the other three were from the private sector. It was relevant to the posts last week regarding Dharavi, and in fact they named Dharavi whenever talking about slums. First, the World Bank panelist said that Dharavi should be 'dealt with' because it is not the most productive use for the land (he didn't say what would be more productive, maybe finance or expensive colonies in his opinion). So he recommended that residents be bought out or moved to the periphery where they could establish tanneries or pottery workshops, or whatever they were doing in Dharavi, on less 'valuable' land. This position was uncritically accepted by everyone (audience members included), but the debate was how to do it since it can't just be leveled with bulldozers. At one point one of the private sector panelists said "One thing though, the residents have to be consulted with whatever happens. I know this is a pain in the neck, but you have to do it." Ultimately they agreed that deregulation in one form or another would help. I asked how deregulation would serve the housing needs of rural migrants who are populating the new slums in global space such as Gurgaon; their housing is much less permanent than Dharavi in terms of infrastructure and they have no legal claim to tenancy because their dwellings are rented on the informal property market. Their answers were great examples of verbal gymnastics. Seth Schindler Piper Fellow Clark University Department of Geography Worcester, MA _________________________________________________________________ Show them the way! Add maps and directions to your party invites. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowslive/products/events.aspx -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090316/28fa8043/attachment.html From anant_umn at yahoo.co.uk Tue Mar 17 08:18:29 2009 From: anant_umn at yahoo.co.uk (anant m) Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 02:48:29 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Urbanstudy] Dismantling of a Neighbourhood 01 Message-ID: <613606.49949.qm@web23004.mail.ird.yahoo.com> Dear Shveta, Thanks for these notes. I see them as helpful in picking up the threads from the discussion in the wake of the Nangla Machi petition. Lawrence raised an interesting question at that time which set me off thinking about the stability and instability of the slum in a somewhat different direction. L. pointed out that Nangla Machi's legal status has always been at best precarious. Yet, it remained stable (even thrives in some instance) for 30 or 50 years. What is it about the present moment that makes it come unstuck ? What you are suggesting is that the survey process, enabled by the discourse of rehab., produces 'individuals'. This survey has two important consequences 1) it constructs viable objects for action by agencies of government 2) it produces new desires, new interests and reorients the actions of individuals and groups of individuals. It has terrible consequences for some and not so terrible consequences for others and perhaps delightful consequences for some. I am intrigued by the way you deal with the temporal dimension in your notes. You say LNJP was built over years and the slow process of surveying is central to unraveling it. There is some tension between those two statements. Building over time is also a slow process. The myriad networks that constitute LNJP, changing ever so slight every moment, somehow gained a durability which is now coming apart. Did surveying play no role at all in that building? to my mind it played as central a role in stabilizing LNJP as it is playing in unraveling it. Government agencies found treating poverty as a particular kind of stable spatial entity - namely the slum worked well. Development and welfare action could be targeted at that entity through this project or that. Local police stations could keep detailed surveillance maps. That governmental technique individuated, created objects for developmental or welfare action and reoriented these new subjects to identify themselves through I cards, ration cards etc. to legitimately occupy their place. Of course as in any governmental technique there is always a surplus. A yawning gap, a big failure because lived life simply exceeds the grid. I think it is useful to keep these continuities in view for us to be able to come up with better approximations of answers to the question that Lawrence raised. Why is this particular survey attempting to unravel LNJP whereas earlier surveys provided those little anchors around which people wove their everyday lives. Is this really about dispersing individuals like scattershot across the city's map ? does the new logic of governing poverty really demand that individuals should not recongregate ? Or is it that they be oriented so as to congregate in more manageable patterns ? How do those patterns relate to the larger urban space? who are the winners and losers within LNJP ? Your notes clearly point to some of the losers. What is not clear however, is a) the losers' relation to the winners in LNJP and beyond, and b) how over time, some people came to be occupying that particular slot that is marked for the loser. Your notes seem to suggest that 'gender' as an identity could be the framing device that we are groping for. anant -- On Tue, 3/17/09, Shveta wrote: > From: Shveta > Subject: [Urbanstudy] Dismantlin of a Neighbourhood 01 > To: Urbanstudygroup at sarai.net > Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 2:11 AM > dear All (Solly, Anant and Jeebesh), > > There is a slow process by which a neighbourhood, built > over decades, is > dismantled. Surveys are decisive in this unmaking. Through > the discourse > of rehabilitation, however, the complex fabric of a > neighbourhood's > economic life, financial networks, social security buffers, > forms of > political negotiation, shared social spaces are eroded away > from the > perspectives by which we build a collective assesment of > eviction and > demolition. All that remains is individuals and their > houses. The > individualisation of rehabilitation of houses creates a > blockage to > thinking outside the grid produced by the survey. > > Over a series of postings I'll share my understanding > of the slow > dismantling of the neighbourhood as we are seeing it in > LNJP. > > warmly > shveta > > ----------------------- > > Dismantling of a Neighbourhood 01: Information > Rehabilitation! > > Perhaps the most successful fiction of our times is the > fiction of the > "stable document" that feeds efficiently into > information systems. It > persists. A document is supposed to be immutable and immune > to the > experiential and perceptional universe of those who have > acquired it, > not acquired it, have a scarcity of documents or have > produced a surplus > of documents around them in their lives. The stuff of life > is not > germane to "information". Many can drop by the > side, but the information > system will keep marching on. > > Shamiya Bano received the house in which she lives as a > gift from an old > man who had made it, and with whom she and her family lived > as a tenant > after they came to the city. Little did she realise during > the twenty > five years in which she built it up with her husband and > lived in it > that they would be jeopardising their family's claim > for resettlement > when her husband got a passport made so he could go to work > in the UAE. > > Hajiya Begum was old, but not unknown to the ways of the > world. She knew > that after her death, if she wanted to ensure the family > does not break > apart in the tussle over who would be its true claimant, > she should will > her house to her then young grandson. Before her death she > also > remembered to have her ration card with his name in it > renewed. What her > grandson Mohd. Sher did not realise was that in leaving his > childhood > name Raju behind as he stepped into adulthood with an > election I-card, > he would be nullifying any claim for resettlement that > could be made on > account of this, his grandmother's house. > > Buddhima was a mother of a young boy when the first > official identity > cards were issued to the residents of her neighbourhood. > She got one > made in her name; it would be a security for the future of > her young > son. But four years later, when many got their first > election I-cards > made, her son was in the hospital, and she did not fill the > form to > apply for it. When he died, she lived amidst her > neighbours, who took > care of her, and she never applied for a ration card. > She's an old woman > now, with a proof of having once been in the neighbourhood. > But without > paper proof that she has continued living there all these > years, that's > just half of what can make her eligible for resettlement. > > When their mother, Shanno, died three years ago, the father > of the young > children left home, never to return. The neighbourhood > arranged the > marriages of the two eldest daughters, and the younger > children began to > get by by giving the first floor of the house on rent. The > eldest among > these was twelve when they began life on their own, and > today they can't > remember if the documents that will make them eligible for > resettlement > were among the old things of their mother's that they > gave away several > months ago. > > Mahruni was raised by her father's brother, a man who > had three sons but > no daughters. He had her name included in his ration card, > with her > biological father's name listed in the column asking > "Father's Name". > The members of the adoptive family died over the years - of > age, in > accidents, of illness. She didn't renew the ration card > after that, not > realising that she would have to show it years later in > order to claim > resettlement. > > Shakeela has an election I-card and ration card issued in > her name in > 2008. The first official I-card was issued in the name of > her first > husband, the first ration card in the name of the second > husband, with > whom too she parted ways later. Strong-willed enough to > have lived > through three marriages and in the house that she had made, > she knows > her documents are too unstable to ensure her resettlement. > > Surya Bhan Raye built himself and his family a secure home > in the heart > of the city over thirty years. In the intensity of life, > its velocity, > its demands and its urgencies, he did not notice that for > fifteen years > two documents - the ration card and the election I card - > had begun to > record different addresses for his single home. What > jeopardises his > family's claim to resettlement is his stubborness that > if fifteen of the > best years of his life have been lived with these two > diverging > identities, then his future too must be based on an > acceptance of them. > > Sahiba's father-in-law, long deceased, was known by two > names all his > life, and her husband's documents faithfully tell which > of the two names > he remembered his father more by at different points of > time in his > life. Her family's foggy claim to resettlement is now > blurred a second > time over by the cuts and the scratches she made on the > identity > documents in order to bring to bear upon them their > consistency. > > - to be contd - > next Karkhana/Godam/Dukan > > > _______________________________________________ > Urbanstudygroup mailing list > Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City > > To subscribe or browse the Urban Study Group archives, > please visit > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/urbanstudygroup From sharan at sarai.net Tue Mar 17 11:14:08 2009 From: sharan at sarai.net (sharan at sarai.net) Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:14:08 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Dismantling of a Neighbourhood 01 In-Reply-To: <613606.49949.qm@web23004.mail.ird.yahoo.com> References: <613606.49949.qm@web23004.mail.ird.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1cbb65162fd2ae6b7f9e92e6e905ba0b@sarai.net> Dear Anant (and all), My own survey of urban surveys (a rather limited one yet) suggests a rather complex exercise that is simultaneously about individuals and communities (or populations, if you will). Anant is entirely right in suggesting that there is always a surplus, but one needs to probe this idea of a surplus a bit more. Take the issue of 'representation' - it is not simply the case that some forms of representation are officially held to be more valid than others (that of course is the case), but perhaps more significantly surveys are productive of new modes of claim making in which both the traditional structures of representations (say through a pradhan or a panchayat) and newer modes (say through community activists, NGOs) are simultaneously forced to negotiate with questions of 'evidence'as also with that of 'rights' and 'justice'. What may have transformed over time is that while many of the earlier surveys (till say the mid-70s, prior to the Emergency) were underwritten by attempts at creating new personality types who would be better suited to urban living (I have in mind slum surveys of the Ford Foundation team and of the Bharat Sevak Samaj at the time of the making of the first Master Plan of Delhi), the more recent surveys are about legality and efficiency in terms of management of urban space. In either case, what is missing is the emphasis that someone like Geddes had on civic engagement/ education as a necessary component of surveys. While on Geddes, one question that has intrigued me for long - as part of his idea of conservative surgery, there is a strong emphasis in Geddes of a detailed survey that would take into account geography, economics, culture etc., but in his own works in India one finds very rapid surveys that have always seemed to me more gestural towards a comprehensive basis for planning, than an adequate realisation of Geddes's own formulations. Would appreciate any comments that others may have on this. One other point - the technology of urban surveys is not a feature of post colonial societies alone. Indeed, the first major survey of Delhi (in the perspective discussed here)is the two volume Report on Congestion in Delhi, produced in the 1930s. What may be instructive is to mark out the distinctions between colonial and post colonial moments and also between official surveys and professional surveys. In fact, some of what Anant mentions as the stabilization of slum life through surveys may have been through the professional surveys (or non-official surveys) for specific schemes targeted towards defined groups, ranging from those related to rationing to that for education. Finally, desires - that is a complex one. Would appreciate an elaboration. The question of gender would, among other things, be tied to this too. Cheers, Dipu On 7:48 pm 03/16/09 anant m wrote: > > Dear Shveta, > > Thanks for these notes. I see them as helpful in picking up the > threads from the discussion in the wake of the Nangla Machi petition. > Lawrence raised an interesting question at that time which set me off > thinking about the stability and instability of the slum in a somewhat > different direction. L. pointed out that Nangla Machi's legal status > has always been at best precarious. Yet, it remained stable (even > thrives in some instance) for 30 or 50 years. What is it about the > present moment that makes it come unstuck ? > > What you are suggesting is that the survey process, enabled by the > discourse of rehab., produces 'individuals'. This survey has two > important consequences 1) it constructs viable objects for action by > agencies of government 2) it produces new desires, new interests and > reorients the actions of individuals and groups of individuals. It has > terrible consequences for some and not so terrible consequences for > others and perhaps delightful consequences for some. > > I am intrigued by the way you deal with the temporal dimension in > your notes. > > You say LNJP was built over years and the slow process of surveying > is central to unraveling it. There is some tension between those two > statements. Building over time is also a slow process. The myriad > networks that constitute LNJP, changing ever so slight every moment, > somehow gained a durability which is now coming apart. > > Did surveying play no role at all in that building? to my mind it > played as central a role in stabilizing LNJP as it is playing in > unraveling it. Government agencies found treating poverty as a > particular kind of stable spatial entity - namely the slum worked well. > Development and welfare action could be targeted at that entity > through this project or that. Local police stations could keep detailed > surveillance maps. That governmental technique individuated, created > objects for developmental or welfare action and reoriented these new > subjects to identify themselves through I cards, ration cards etc. to > legitimately occupy their place. Of course as in any governmental > technique there is always a surplus. A yawning gap, a big failure > because lived life simply exceeds the grid. > > I think it is useful to keep these continuities in view for us to be > able to come up with better approximations of answers to the question > that Lawrence raised. Why is this particular survey attempting to > unravel LNJP whereas earlier surveys provided those little anchors > around which people wove their everyday lives. Is this really about > dispersing individuals like scattershot across the city's map ? does > the new logic of governing poverty really demand that individuals > should not recongregate ? Or is it that they be oriented so as to > congregate in more manageable patterns ? How do those patterns relate > to the larger urban space? who are the winners and losers within LNJP ? > Your notes clearly point to some of the losers. What is not clear > however, is a) the losers' relation to the winners in LNJP and beyond, > and b) how over time, some people came to be occupying that particular > slot that is marked for the loser. Your notes seem to suggest that > 'gender' as an identity could be the framing device that we are groping > for. > > anant > > -- On Tue, 3/17/09, Shveta wrote: > > > From: Shveta > > Subject: [Urbanstudy] Dismantlin of a Neighbourhood 01 > > To: Urbanstudygroup at sarai.net > > Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 2:11 AM > > dear All (Solly, Anant and Jeebesh), > > > > There is a slow process by which a neighbourhood, built > > over decades, is > > dismantled. Surveys are decisive in this unmaking. Through > > the discourse > > of rehabilitation, however, the complex fabric of a > > neighbourhood's > > economic life, financial networks, social security buffers, > > forms of > > political negotiation, shared social spaces are eroded away > > from the > > perspectives by which we build a collective assesment of > > eviction and > > demolition. All that remains is individuals and their > > houses. The > > individualisation of rehabilitation of houses creates a > > blockage to > > thinking outside the grid produced by the survey. > > > > Over a series of postings I'll share my understanding > > of the slow > > dismantling of the neighbourhood as we are seeing it in > > LNJP. > > > > warmly > > shveta > > > > ----------------------- > > > > Dismantling of a Neighbourhood 01: Information > > Rehabilitation! > > > > Perhaps the most successful fiction of our times is the > > fiction of the > > "stable document" that feeds efficiently into > > information systems. It > > persists. A document is supposed to be immutable and immune > > to the > > experiential and perceptional universe of those who have > > acquired it, > > not acquired it, have a scarcity of documents or have > > produced a surplus > > of documents around them in their lives. The stuff of life > > is not > > germane to "information". Many can drop by the > > side, but the information > > system will keep marching on. > > > > Shamiya Bano received the house in which she lives as a > > gift from an old > > man who had made it, and with whom she and her family lived > > as a tenant > > after they came to the city. Little did she realise during > > the twenty > > five years in which she built it up with her husband and > > lived in it > > that they would be jeopardising their family's claim > > for resettlement > > when her husband got a passport made so he could go to work > > in the UAE. > > > > Hajiya Begum was old, but not unknown to the ways of the > > world. She knew > > that after her death, if she wanted to ensure the family > > does not break > > apart in the tussle over who would be its true claimant, > > she should will > > her house to her then young grandson. Before her death she > > also > > remembered to have her ration card with his name in it > > renewed. What her > > grandson Mohd. Sher did not realise was that in leaving his > > childhood > > name Raju behind as he stepped into adulthood with an > > election I-card, > > he would be nullifying any claim for resettlement that > > could be made on > > account of this, his grandmother's house. > > > > Buddhima was a mother of a young boy when the first > > official identity > > cards were issued to the residents of her neighbourhood. > > She got one > > made in her name; it would be a security for the future of > > her young > > son. But four years later, when many got their first > > election I-cards > > made, her son was in the hospital, and she did not fill the > > form to > > apply for it. When he died, she lived amidst her > > neighbours, who took > > care of her, and she never applied for a ration card. > > She's an old woman > > now, with a proof of having once been in the neighbourhood. > > But without > > paper proof that she has continued living there all these > > years, that's > > just half of what can make her eligible for resettlement. > > > > When their mother, Shanno, died three years ago, the father > > of the young > > children left home, never to return. The neighbourhood > > arranged the > > marriages of the two eldest daughters, and the younger > > children began to > > get by by giving the first floor of the house on rent. The > > eldest among > > these was twelve when they began life on their own, and > > today they can't > > remember if the documents that will make them eligible for > > resettlement > > were among the old things of their mother's that they > > gave away several > > months ago. > > > > Mahruni was raised by her father's brother, a man who > > had three sons but > > no daughters. He had her name included in his ration card, > > with her > > biological father's name listed in the column asking > > "Father's Name". > > The members of the adoptive family died over the years - of > > age, in > > accidents, of illness. She didn't renew the ration card > > after that, not > > realising that she would have to show it years later in > > order to claim > > resettlement. > > > > Shakeela has an election I-card and ration card issued in > > her name in > > 2008. The first official I-card was issued in the name of > > her first > > husband, the first ration card in the name of the second > > husband, with > > whom too she parted ways later. Strong-willed enough to > > have lived > > through three marriages and in the house that she had made, > > she knows > > her documents are too unstable to ensure her resettlement. > > > > Surya Bhan Raye built himself and his family a secure home > > in the heart > > of the city over thirty years. In the intensity of life, > > its velocity, > > its demands and its urgencies, he did not notice that for > > fifteen years > > two documents - the ration card and the election I card - > > had begun to > > record different addresses for his single home. What > > jeopardises his > > family's claim to resettlement is his stubborness that > > if fifteen of the > > best years of his life have been lived with these two > > diverging > > identities, then his future too must be based on an > > acceptance of them. > > > > Sahiba's father-in-law, long deceased, was known by two > > names all his > > life, and her husband's documents faithfully tell which > > of the two names > > he remembered his father more by at different points of > > time in his > > life. Her family's foggy claim to resettlement is now > > blurred a second > > time over by the cuts and the scratches she made on the > > identity > > documents in order to bring to bear upon them their > > consistency. > > > > - to be contd - > > next Karkhana/Godam/Dukan > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Urbanstudygroup mailing list > > Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City > > > > To subscribe or browse the Urban Study Group archives, > > please visit > > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/urbanstudygroup > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Urbanstudygroup mailing list > Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City > > To subscribe or browse the Urban Study Group archives, please visit > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/urbanstudygroup From yanivbin at gmail.com Tue Mar 17 13:49:34 2009 From: yanivbin at gmail.com (Vinay Baindur) Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:49:34 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] What polls mean to voters in Chennai city, suburbs Message-ID: <86b8a7050903170119i32eab94ex37d746befd5d0cc3@mail.gmail.com> *Date:16/03/2009* *URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2009/03/16/stories/2009031659670300.htm* *What polls mean to voters in city, suburbs * City Bureau * Delimitation of Lok Sabha and Assembly constituencies has evoked a mixed response from voters in suburbs * — Photo: K.PICHUMANI * All set: Ahead of the elections, residents are hopeful of better infrastructure. Party flags stocked up at a store on N.S.C. Bose Road in Chennai recently. * CHENNAI: With the announcement of parliamentary elections, over 31.22 lakh voters in the city and a few lakhs in the suburbs have started experiencing a delicate mix of bureaucratic restraint and political enthusiasm. The parliamentary elections are normally expected to address greater national issues of political significance and push relatively mild civic issues into oblivion. The impact of some crucial ongoing developmental projects in the city, which are initiatives of the Central government, are yet to influence the minds of the voters, according to residents. For instance, the various areas affected by the floods during monsoon are yet to have an enduring solution. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) scheme with a funding component of the Central government for improvement of drains is yet to be completed. The benefits of improved solid waste management and construction of bridges are yet to reach the people. The delimitation of both the Lok Sabha and Assembly constituencies has evoked a mixed response from voters in the southern suburbs of Chennai. Some residents are glad that they would have more representatives in the State Assembly, but they are surprised at being left out of the “city-centric” representation in the Lok Sabha they earlier had. The delimitation has also created optimism in the minds of residents of some areas such as Virugambakkam in the South Chennai Parliamentary constituency, where residents see prospects of development by being part of the South Chennai constituency. Earlier it was part of the North Chennai constituency and the various problems of the constituency, according to residents, did not permit the Member of Parliament concerned to focus on issues faced by Virugambakkam. Many residents affected by floods in Virugambakkam claimed that they did not receive enough support from authorities concerned. Southern suburbs At present, residents in the southern suburbs of Chennai — from Velachery to Sholinganallur, Kottivakkam to Uthandi and from Alandur to Perungalathur — in addition to interior pockets such as Madipakkam, Ullagaram-Puzhuthivakkam found their representation through MLAs elected from the Alandur and Tambaram constituencies, both coming under the erstwhile South Chennai Lok Sabha constituency. In addition to Tambaram and Alandur, two more Assembly segments have been carved out — Pallavaram and Sholinganallur. Sholinganallur comes under the South Chennai constituency, and the three others form part of the Sriperumbudur Lok Sabha constituency that till now covered almost all of Tiruvallur district and a good portion of Kancheepuram district. In addition to these three Assembly segments, the other three include Sriperumbudur, Ambattur and Maduravoyal segments. The Tambaram and Alandur areas have the highest percentage of voters without photo identity cards. Over the past couple of years, officials have been worried about repeated errors and omissions in the voters’ rolls. M. Balaji, Returning Officer for Chennai South, said that in order to ensure that voters have adequate facilities, special arrangements were being made at polling booths. The venues would also be disabled-friendly, he added. Some western and northern suburbs have been merged with other areas after the delimitation of constituencies. While Ambattur, which was in north Chennai constituency, has now been reorganised along with Maduravoyal into Sriperumbudur constituency, Avadi and Madhavaram have been constituted into Tiruvallur constituency. Tiruvottiyur has also been added with the Chennai North constituency. Tiruvallur Collector and district election officer G. Sundaramurthy said the Tiruvallur constituency has been newly formed comprising Ponneri, Gummidipoondi, Tiruvallur, Poonamallee, Madhavaram and Avadi. Of the total of nearly 12 lakh voters in the constituency, about 4.45 lakh are in Avadi and Madhavaram. Ambattur residents said that they had been waiting for the work to provide sewerage network in some parts of Ambattur to be completed for a decade now. The simmering problem pertaining to the NHAI’s proposal to widen the Chennai Tiruvallur High Road to 150 feet also awaits a solution. The slow progress of the long-pending project to widen the Poonamallee High Road has earned the discontent of residents of Maduravoyal. Another major complaint shared by the residents of western suburbs is lack of a full-fledged government hospital. Several consumer organisations and residents welfare associations have begun campaigning about voter rights in the suburbs. In the city, several civil society organisations have joined hands to ensure fair polling. Kris Dev, one of the co-ordinators of Tamil Nadu Election Watch, said, “We aim to create transparency and accountability in electing our representatives to Parliament.” Awareness would also be created among voters to check the candidates’ credentials, he said. A.K.Venkatasubramaniam of Catalyst Trust said that besides educating public on their rights and duties towards our democracy, the organisation would also campaign against people selling votes. DRO (Election) Chennai G. Latha said that mapping, based on increase in polling percentage, re-poll and past electoral offences at polling station, was being done to identify sensitive areas. *(With inputs from Aloysius Xavier Lopez, K. Lakshmi and K.Manikandan) * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090317/2e53e5a8/attachment.html From shveta at sarai.net Wed Mar 18 08:37:15 2009 From: shveta at sarai.net (Shveta) Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 08:37:15 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Dismantling of a Neighbourhood 01 In-Reply-To: <613606.49949.qm@web23004.mail.ird.yahoo.com> References: <613606.49949.qm@web23004.mail.ird.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <49C06563.2040905@sarai.net> dear Anant, Thanks for your comments. Hope to address them as I work on my coming postings. warmly shveta anant m wrote: > Dear Shveta, > > Thanks for these notes. I see them as helpful in picking up the threads from the discussion in the wake of the Nangla Machi petition. Lawrence raised an interesting question at that time which set me off thinking about the stability and instability of the slum in a somewhat different direction. L. pointed out that Nangla Machi's legal status has always been at best precarious. Yet, it remained stable (even thrives in some instance) for 30 or 50 years. What is it about the present moment that makes it come unstuck ? > > What you are suggesting is that the survey process, enabled by the discourse of rehab., produces 'individuals'. This survey has two important consequences 1) it constructs viable objects for action by agencies of government 2) it produces new desires, new interests and reorients the actions of individuals and groups of individuals. It has terrible consequences for some and not so terrible consequences for others and perhaps delightful consequences for some. > > I am intrigued by the way you deal with the temporal dimension in your notes. > > You say LNJP was built over years and the slow process of surveying is central to unraveling it. There is some tension between those two statements. Building over time is also a slow process. The myriad networks that constitute LNJP, changing ever so slight every moment, somehow gained a durability which is now coming apart. > > Did surveying play no role at all in that building? to my mind it played as central a role in stabilizing LNJP as it is playing in unraveling it. Government agencies found treating poverty as a particular kind of stable spatial entity - namely the slum worked well. Development and welfare action could be targeted at that entity through this project or that. Local police stations could keep detailed surveillance maps. That governmental technique individuated, created objects for developmental or welfare action and reoriented these new subjects to identify themselves through I cards, ration cards etc. to legitimately occupy their place. Of course as in any governmental technique there is always a surplus. A yawning gap, a big failure because lived life simply exceeds the grid. > > I think it is useful to keep these continuities in view for us to be able to come up with better approximations of answers to the question that Lawrence raised. Why is this particular survey attempting to unravel LNJP whereas earlier surveys provided those little anchors around which people wove their everyday lives. Is this really about dispersing individuals like scattershot across the city's map ? does the new logic of governing poverty really demand that individuals should not recongregate ? Or is it that they be oriented so as to congregate in more manageable patterns ? How do those patterns relate to the larger urban space? who are the winners and losers within LNJP ? Your notes clearly point to some of the losers. What is not clear however, is a) the losers' relation to the winners in LNJP and beyond, and b) how over time, some people came to be occupying that particular slot that is marked for the loser. Your notes seem to suggest that > 'gender' as an identity could be the framing device that we are groping for. > > anant > > -- On Tue, 3/17/09, Shveta wrote: > > >> From: Shveta >> Subject: [Urbanstudy] Dismantlin of a Neighbourhood 01 >> To: Urbanstudygroup at sarai.net >> Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 2:11 AM >> dear All (Solly, Anant and Jeebesh), >> >> There is a slow process by which a neighbourhood, built >> over decades, is >> dismantled. Surveys are decisive in this unmaking. Through >> the discourse >> of rehabilitation, however, the complex fabric of a >> neighbourhood's >> economic life, financial networks, social security buffers, >> forms of >> political negotiation, shared social spaces are eroded away >> from the >> perspectives by which we build a collective assesment of >> eviction and >> demolition. All that remains is individuals and their >> houses. The >> individualisation of rehabilitation of houses creates a >> blockage to >> thinking outside the grid produced by the survey. >> >> Over a series of postings I'll share my understanding >> of the slow >> dismantling of the neighbourhood as we are seeing it in >> LNJP. >> >> warmly >> shveta >> >> ----------------------- >> >> Dismantling of a Neighbourhood 01: Information >> Rehabilitation! >> >> Perhaps the most successful fiction of our times is the >> fiction of the >> "stable document" that feeds efficiently into >> information systems. It >> persists. A document is supposed to be immutable and immune >> to the >> experiential and perceptional universe of those who have >> acquired it, >> not acquired it, have a scarcity of documents or have >> produced a surplus >> of documents around them in their lives. The stuff of life >> is not >> germane to "information". Many can drop by the >> side, but the information >> system will keep marching on. >> >> Shamiya Bano received the house in which she lives as a >> gift from an old >> man who had made it, and with whom she and her family lived >> as a tenant >> after they came to the city. Little did she realise during >> the twenty >> five years in which she built it up with her husband and >> lived in it >> that they would be jeopardising their family's claim >> for resettlement >> when her husband got a passport made so he could go to work >> in the UAE. >> >> Hajiya Begum was old, but not unknown to the ways of the >> world. She knew >> that after her death, if she wanted to ensure the family >> does not break >> apart in the tussle over who would be its true claimant, >> she should will >> her house to her then young grandson. Before her death she >> also >> remembered to have her ration card with his name in it >> renewed. What her >> grandson Mohd. Sher did not realise was that in leaving his >> childhood >> name Raju behind as he stepped into adulthood with an >> election I-card, >> he would be nullifying any claim for resettlement that >> could be made on >> account of this, his grandmother's house. >> >> Buddhima was a mother of a young boy when the first >> official identity >> cards were issued to the residents of her neighbourhood. >> She got one >> made in her name; it would be a security for the future of >> her young >> son. But four years later, when many got their first >> election I-cards >> made, her son was in the hospital, and she did not fill the >> form to >> apply for it. When he died, she lived amidst her >> neighbours, who took >> care of her, and she never applied for a ration card. >> She's an old woman >> now, with a proof of having once been in the neighbourhood. >> But without >> paper proof that she has continued living there all these >> years, that's >> just half of what can make her eligible for resettlement. >> >> When their mother, Shanno, died three years ago, the father >> of the young >> children left home, never to return. The neighbourhood >> arranged the >> marriages of the two eldest daughters, and the younger >> children began to >> get by by giving the first floor of the house on rent. The >> eldest among >> these was twelve when they began life on their own, and >> today they can't >> remember if the documents that will make them eligible for >> resettlement >> were among the old things of their mother's that they >> gave away several >> months ago. >> >> Mahruni was raised by her father's brother, a man who >> had three sons but >> no daughters. He had her name included in his ration card, >> with her >> biological father's name listed in the column asking >> "Father's Name". >> The members of the adoptive family died over the years - of >> age, in >> accidents, of illness. She didn't renew the ration card >> after that, not >> realising that she would have to show it years later in >> order to claim >> resettlement. >> >> Shakeela has an election I-card and ration card issued in >> her name in >> 2008. The first official I-card was issued in the name of >> her first >> husband, the first ration card in the name of the second >> husband, with >> whom too she parted ways later. Strong-willed enough to >> have lived >> through three marriages and in the house that she had made, >> she knows >> her documents are too unstable to ensure her resettlement. >> >> Surya Bhan Raye built himself and his family a secure home >> in the heart >> of the city over thirty years. In the intensity of life, >> its velocity, >> its demands and its urgencies, he did not notice that for >> fifteen years >> two documents - the ration card and the election I card - >> had begun to >> record different addresses for his single home. What >> jeopardises his >> family's claim to resettlement is his stubborness that >> if fifteen of the >> best years of his life have been lived with these two >> diverging >> identities, then his future too must be based on an >> acceptance of them. >> >> Sahiba's father-in-law, long deceased, was known by two >> names all his >> life, and her husband's documents faithfully tell which >> of the two names >> he remembered his father more by at different points of >> time in his >> life. Her family's foggy claim to resettlement is now >> blurred a second >> time over by the cuts and the scratches she made on the >> identity >> documents in order to bring to bear upon them their >> consistency. >> >> - to be contd - >> next Karkhana/Godam/Dukan >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Urbanstudygroup mailing list >> Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City >> >> To subscribe or browse the Urban Study Group archives, >> please visit >> https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/urbanstudygroup >> > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Urbanstudygroup mailing list > Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City > > To subscribe or browse the Urban Study Group archives, please visit https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/urbanstudygroup > From yanivbin at gmail.com Wed Mar 18 22:29:32 2009 From: yanivbin at gmail.com (Vinay Baindur) Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:29:32 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] JUSCO tata deal : UPROAR IN JNNURM MEET in mysore Message-ID: <86b8a7050903180959rb80c5ebl61b4b883bbea083f@mail.gmail.com> http://www.starofmysore.com/main.asp?type=news&item=19983 TATA DEAL: UPROAR IN JNNURM MEET *Regional Commissioner Jayanthi holds first meeting* Mysore, Mar. 18 (KK&BRS)- Uproarious scenes were witnessed at the meeting called for review of Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) projects in city as well as to hear public views on the projects at the old Council Hall of Mysore City Corporation this morning. About 100 citizens took part in the meeting presided over by V. Jayanthi, Regional Commissioner and the newly-appointed Special Officer for JNNURM. The first issue that figured in the meeting was the controversial agreement with Tata-owned Jamshedpur Utilities and Services Company (JUSCO) for 24x7 supply of water to the city which led to heated exchanges. Even as the Executive Engineer of KUWS&DB Honnegowda began to present the details relating to the remodeling water supply scheme, the members of the public raised objection to the privatisation move itself. Venkataramana, a member of the Booth Committee from Chamundi Hill, fired the first salvo. He ridiculed the 1,500-page report prepared by KUWS&DB for the members of the Advisory Committee constituted by the Deputy Commissioner P. Manivannan. Activists of Kannada Rakshana Vedike, led by Balakrishna, also joined in the heated discussions and recalled the assurance given earlier by the authorities that water supply in Mysore would not be privatised. Venkataramana again mentioned that JUSCO had been given Rs. 108 crore for implementing the project and also the right to collect water charges. ACICM Convenor M. Lakshmana and Rakshana Vedike leader Balakrishna took former Mayor Srikantaiah to task when he tried to defend the agreement with JUSCO claiming that it was a tripartite one involving Union Government, State Govt. and the Mysore City Corporation, which was approved by the Council. He asked how it can be scrapped and if the local government has the authority to do so. He alleged that some elements were misleading the public. Litterateur Dr. P.V. Nanjaraj Urs said that the agreement with JUSCO was in bad taste and amounted to snatching away the fundamental right of people over air, water and sunlight. He also alleged that large scale financial irregularities had been committed in the deal with JUSCO. He opined that 24x7 supply of water was not necessary but six to seven hours was adequate. The participants were unanimous in suggesting Mohalla-wise public contact meetings to obtain the views of the people about the agreement with JUSCO. They warned that a massive agitation would be launched if the agreement was not scrapped. They said that they would also approach the court and mob the JUSCO office in the city. When Corporation Commissioner K.S. Raikar tried to defend the agreement, the anti-agreement participants asked whether he was holding a brief for JUSCO. They also argued that election code of Conduct prohibited implementation of the project. Raikar rejected the suggestion of holding public contact meetings on the issue. Citizens Committees would be constituted and the public may send their views to the Committees which will be sent to the government, he said. Jayanthi also contended that the Corporation had no authority to annul the agreement with JUSCO. She advised the members to give suggestions in writing which would be forwarded to the government. In the meanwhile, it is learnt that JUSCO is proceeding with the task of survey related to the project. The participants deman-ded that it should be stopped. P.C. Jayanna, Commissioner, Mysore Urban Development Authority (MUDA), Suresh Babu, Superintending Engineer, Mysore City Corporation, Dr. P. Boregowda, Commissioner, Karnataka State Slum Clearance Board and officers of various departments were present. Today's meeting is the first being chaired by Jayanthi, after she replaced Manivannan as Special Officer of JNNURM. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090318/535297e2/attachment-0001.html From cugambetta at yahoo.com Thu Mar 19 10:05:48 2009 From: cugambetta at yahoo.com (Curt Gambetta) Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:35:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Urbanstudy] Fw: H-ASIA: Inviting Panelists: Madison South Asia 2009 Message-ID: <386973.76875.qm@web57414.mail.re1.yahoo.com> thought this would be of interest. -curt ----- Forwarded Message ---- From: Ryan Dunch To: H-ASIA at H-NET.MSU.EDU Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 1:07:19 AM Subject: H-ASIA: Inviting Panelists: Madison South Asia 2009 H-ASIA March 17, 2009 Inviting Panelists: Madison South Asia 2009 panel on Transparency (by MARCH 20) ************************************************************************ From: Nusrat S Chowdhury Inviting panelists for the Madison South Asia Conference 2009: Spectacles of Transparency Abstract: This panel aims to situate the global demands, debates and dramas over 'transparency' in the context of South Asia. Transparency as an ideal, a strategic objective and a mode of legitimization for states and non-state actors alike has become synonymous with effective governance. We are curious to see how modes of being transparent, in the form of electoral democracies, e-governance, technocracies, journalistic exposés, truth commissions and war crime tribunals, to name a few, are inflected by cultural and historical exigencies that are salient in if not unique to contemporary South Asia. To do so, we ask how institutions and actors claim transparency in the face of increased demand from the international political arena as well as an overall celebration of what is more popularly known as an NGO model of accountability. At the same time we are deeply invested in tackling the question of power that forms the basis of exactly what is to be made transparent in these varied instances. Considering transparency claims as ideological formations, the individual papers on the panel will aim to show how power remains as opaque despite – or perhaps because of – the various strategies of making it visible, and thus, more accountable. Focusing on institutions who claim to strive for transparency and actors who either demand or are suspicious of such claims, this panel explores what we call the 'spectacles of transparency' that have become emblematic of South Asian political modernities today. In so doing, we ask the following: How is transparency related to power and what is meant when the operation of power is described as transparent? How is rationality asserted as the operational logic of transparency? How could self-conscious transparency initiatives be situated within a larger historical, albeit self reflexive, moment that is South Asian modernity? What are the kinds of mediations that take place in consolidating a discourse of transparency that is framed as more 'immediate' and thus less corrupt? How could one ethnographically explore these mediating strategies? What and how does transparency, despite its claims to the contrary, conceal as much as it reveals? How is this dialectic of revelation and concealment instructive of the way politics happens in South Asia today? Please write to Nusrat S Chowdhury (nusrat at uchicago.edu) or Mona Mehta (mgmehta at uchicago.edu) with a short description of your project by March 20, 2009. Nusrat S Chowdhury PhD Candidate Department of Anthropology The University of Chicago Student Coordinator, South Asia Seminar & Theory and Practice in South Asia (TAPSA), 2008-2009 ************************************************************************* To post to H-ASIA simply send your message to: For holidays or short absences send post to: with message: SET H-ASIA NOMAIL Upon return, send post with message SET H-ASIA MAIL H-ASIA WEB HOMEPAGE URL: http://h-net.msu.edu/~asia/ From cugambetta at yahoo.com Fri Mar 20 03:00:56 2009 From: cugambetta at yahoo.com (Curt Gambetta) Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:30:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Urbanstudy] road to rail discussion Message-ID: <307361.89425.qm@web57409.mail.re1.yahoo.com> there is a discussion on the H-urban list on the transition from roads to rail in cities (mostly american) that i thought might be of interest, if nothing for references to various projects. see below links to the archived thread. -curt http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Urban&month=0903&week=c&msg=nxGHH5R9tnV4rMf%2bjS/vgQ&user=&pw= http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Urban&month=0903&week=c&msg=Ob76zYl2eM3wO/rJ0I7nQw&user=&pw= http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Urban&month=0903&week=c&msg=v/8xSZ4CqRr8uc6vm8yrIA&user=&pw= http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Urban&month=0903&week=c&msg=PgDRBs9Q8jBYsnftBpiM%2bA&user=&pw= From esg at esgindia.org Fri Mar 20 15:03:05 2009 From: esg at esgindia.org (ESGINDIA) Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:03:05 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Endorse Appeal to Prime Minister of India to stop amendment to EIA Notification 2006 Message-ID: <49C362D1.7050301@esgindia.org> *Sincere apologies for Cross Postings* _REQUEST YOUR ENDORSEMENT TO AN URGENT APPEAL TO THE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA_ Dear Friends, On behalf of Campaign for Environmental Justice - India, we request you to sign on an appeal to the Prime Minister of India urging him to direct the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), of which he is incharge, to immediately stop a comprehensive retrograde amendment to the Environment Impact Assessment Notification - 2006. MoEF in a notification issued recently proposes to amend the EIA Notification in such a manner that it will negate the very purpose of the Notification, besides compromising human rights of hundreds of project affected communities and the ecological security of India. It is striking to note that amendment is proposed at the time of General Elections, and that the beneficiaries are the some of the largest corporate houses involved in mining, petrochemicals, manufacturing, construction, infrastructure development, dam building, etc. All of these sectors are highly polluting and environmentally destructive and the benefit of a weak environmental regime, including exemptions from compliance with significant provisions of environmental regulatory procedures, would help these sectors save thousands of crores in monetary terms alone. In effect therefore, the proposed amendments amount to the extension of a largesse from the State to highly profit making industrial and infrastructure sectors. It is well known that corporate houses fund political parties and have consistently demanded and lobbied for a weak environmental clearance regime, including exemptions. This is exactly what is now proposed by the move to amend the EIA Notification (which is anyway very weak). _The Election Commission of India has a Code of Conduct for political parties which requires that a Party in power should not initiate significant shifts in policies, schemes and regulatory practices that may secure benefits for some sectors and amount to the extention of largesse of the State. The timing of the proposed amendments and the proposed changes in law leave little doubt about the possibility that the UPA Government at the Centre may have initiated these reforms to secure support of benefiting corporates to its party coffers. _ The Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh is incharge of MoEF. We have enclosed an appeal to him highlighting our concerns urging him to direct MoEF to immediately announce that the proposed amendments are kept in abeyance till such time a new Government has taken charge at the Centre. This letter is enclosed and is self-explanatory. /We request you to endorse this letter, and also to circulate it amongst various networks for support. We will fax this letter with your endorsements to the Prime Minister of India, and send a copy to all political parties, the Election Commission of India and the media on Monday, 23 March 2009. *.*/ /*You are requested therefore to endorse the letter by noon on Monday. Subsequent endorsements will also be accepted and forwarded appropriately. */You may email your endorsements providing (full name, organisation and address, and optionally a brief comment) to esg at esgindia.org (Please keep the subject line above intact to help us sort email). You can also sign online and leave comments at: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/eianotification2009 We thank you for your cooperation and support as always. Yours sincerely, Leo F. Saldanha, Bhargavi S. Rao, Nandini Chami, Sruthi Subbanna, K. R. Mallesh, Divya Ravindranath Environment Support Group, Bangalore for Campaign for Environmental Justice - India ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ APPEAL TO PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA CAMPAIGN FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE -- INDIA Dr. Manmohan Singh Prime Minister of India (i/c) Union Ministry of Environment and Forests South Block, Raisina Hill, New Delhi, India-110 011. Telephone: 91-11-23012312 Fax: 91-11-23019545 / 91-11-23016857 19 March 2009 Reg.: MoEF Notification proposing an amendment to the EIA Notification -- 2006, offering various concessions to project developers, is in violation of Code of Conduct of Election Commission Respected Sir, We address you in your capacity as a Member of the Union Cabinet incharge of the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF). As you are aware, your Ministry has proposed a major amendment to the Environment Impact Assessment Notification -- 2006 (EIA Notification - 2006) by way of Notification S.O. 195 (E) issued on 19 January 2009. Following the closure of the public commenting period of 60 days, MoEF proposes to go ahead with the amendments anytime now. The EIA Notification -- 2006 requires that projects that cause pollution, displacement, destruction of natural resources, etc., be they in the nature of expansion or as greenfield ventures, must go through a series of clearance steps as per standards and with the prior consent of a variety of statutory agencies, both at the State and Central levels, as applicable. The procedures laid down require project developers to comply with various national legislations such as the Environment Protection Act, Forest Conservation Act, Wildlife Protection Act, Water and Air (Control of Pollution) Act, and a range of international treaties, in particular the Rio Declaration of 1992. In addition a variety of legal principles that are part of the rubric of Indian law, such as Polluter Pays Principle, Doctrine of Public Trust, Precautionary Principle, etc., are to be adhered to when advancing any developmental project. Failure to comply with the procedures laid down in the EIA Notification is a criminal offence punishable under the Environment Protection Act, 1986 and related criminal procedure laws. The Amendment Notification, accessible only on the website of the Ministry (in English and Hindi alone), proposes a series of amendments to the EIA Notification - 2006 which will significantly weaken, even negate, the role of the Ministry and other statutory agencies in reviewing the environmental and social impacts of a variety of high impact and polluting projects. In addition, the amendment proposes to grant a range of exemptions from mandatory statutory provisions of applicable environmental law for upto three years. There is also an extraordinary and clearly illegal concession offered to polluters who simply have to declare through a 'self certification' that they cause no additional pollution and thus escape from the need to secure environmental clearance! In a country which is known for its gross failure in enforcement of environmental regulations, and where there is no competent administrative and regulatory infrastructure to independently review compliance with law, this is certain to open the floodgates to environmental destruction and destabilisation of thousands of project affected communities across India. The frequent expose of corporate fraud, even amongst leading companies, cause great discomfort when we consider the consequences of such illegal concessions. An indicative list of the beneficiaries of the concessions proposed include shipping, dredging and port development, building and construction sector, area development projects, special economic zones, mining, petrochemical sector, modernisation of airports, expansion of all sorts of manufacturing industries, etc. Without doubt each and every one of these sectors have the potential of causing extensive damage to our environment and society, sans effective regulation. One of the reasons offered for granting such sweeping concessions is that the Ministry failed to create statutory environmental monitoring and clearances agencies, such as the State Environment Impact Assessment Authorities and State Expert Appraisal Committees, in several states since the enactment of the EIA Notification -- 2006. Astonishingly, the failure to institute appropriate regulatory infrastructure is now being offered as a reason to comprehensively weaken, even negate, India's environmental regulatory framework. Nowhere in the history of environmental regulation in the world have such sweeping concessions been accorded by any Government at any point in time. In fact, such a move is likely to be criticised globally as extending unfair advantage to Indian industry by lowering globally acceptable environmental standards for production, a factor that would weigh heavily against India's standing in the climate change negotiations. All this considered, Sir, we find the reasons cited for the amendment and the timing of the proposed amendments quite specious. Your Government was well aware that its term in office was coming to a close when this Amendment Notification was issued in January 2009, and that too by a Ministry directly under your supervision. The concessions proposed by way of this Amendment Notification, besides being illegal and destructive of democratic decision making, constitute a largesse of the State to the beneficiary industries and infrastructure project developers. The monetary value alone would run into thousands of crores for beneficiaries while severely compromising our ecological security. It is widely known now that many leading political parties are major beneficiaries of corporate grants. This proposed amendment amounts to your Government taking advantage of its position to harness much needed resources for elections by offering such astounding and clearly illegal concessions that attack the very edifice of environmental regulation in India. With this in view, we urge you to immediately direct your Ministers of State in charge of Environment and Forests, and the Secretary of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, to issue a public announcement stating that the proposed Amendment has been kept in abeyance till such time a new Government is in power and is able to take a fresh and independent decision on this matter. We make this fervent request in light of the Code of Conduct issued by the Election Commission of India, wherein it is clearly and categorically stated that no significant change in existing policy, scheme or programme of the State is allowed at the time of elections. Conformance with these guidelines are critical to ensuring a Government in power does not abuse its executive privileges to advantage its party at the time of elections. The proposed amendment to the EIA Notification, being a subordinate legislation, is clearly within the realm of the executive power of the State and thus constitutes a fit case for application of the aformentioned Code of Conduct. We do hope you will initiate action in this regard with due dispatch. Any failure to initiate such action will compel us to move the matter before the Election Commission of India for effective and appropriate action. Thank you for your cooperation and support. Yours truly, For Campaign for Environmental Justice -- India -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090320/fe1167c4/attachment-0001.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: EIA Notification Amendment_2009_PMAppeal_190309.doc Type: application/msword Size: 80896 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090320/fe1167c4/attachment-0001.doc -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: esg.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 341 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090320/fe1167c4/attachment-0001.vcf From esg at esgindia.org Fri Mar 20 15:11:17 2009 From: esg at esgindia.org (ESGINDIA) Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:11:17 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Endorse Appeal to Prime Minister of India to stop amendment to EIA Notification 2006 Message-ID: <49C364BD.5040605@esgindia.org> *Sincere apologies for Cross Postings* _REQUEST YOUR ENDORSEMENT TO AN URGENT APPEAL TO THE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA_ Dear Friends, On behalf of Campaign for Environmental Justice - India, we request you to sign on an appeal to the Prime Minister of India urging him to direct the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), of which he is incharge, to immediately stop a comprehensive retrograde amendment to the Environment Impact Assessment Notification - 2006. MoEF in a notification issued recently proposes to amend the EIA Notification in such a manner that it will negate the very purpose of the Notification, besides compromising human rights of hundreds of project affected communities and the ecological security of India. It is striking to note that amendment is proposed at the time of General Elections, and that the beneficiaries are the some of the largest corporate houses involved in mining, petrochemicals, manufacturing, construction, infrastructure development, dam building, etc. All of these sectors are highly polluting and environmentally destructive and the benefit of a weak environmental regime, including exemptions from compliance with significant provisions of environmental regulatory procedures, would help these sectors save thousands of crores in monetary terms alone. In effect therefore, the proposed amendments amount to the extension of a largesse from the State to highly profit making industrial and infrastructure sectors. It is well known that corporate houses fund political parties and have consistently demanded and lobbied for a weak environmental clearance regime, including exemptions. This is exactly what is now proposed by the move to amend the EIA Notification (which is anyway very weak). _The Election Commission of India has a Code of Conduct for political parties which requires that a Party in power should not initiate significant shifts in policies, schemes and regulatory practices that may secure benefits for some sectors and amount to the extention of largesse of the State. The timing of the proposed amendments and the proposed changes in law leave little doubt about the possibility that the UPA Government at the Centre may have initiated these reforms to secure support of benefiting corporates to its party coffers. _ The Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh is incharge of MoEF. We have enclosed an appeal to him highlighting our concerns urging him to direct MoEF to immediately announce that the proposed amendments are kept in abeyance till such time a new Government has taken charge at the Centre. This letter is enclosed and is self-explanatory. /We request you to endorse this letter, and also to circulate it amongst various networks for support. We will fax this letter with your endorsements to the Prime Minister of India, and send a copy to all political parties, the Election Commission of India and the media on Monday, 23 March 2009. *.*/ /*You are requested therefore to endorse the letter by noon on Monday. Subsequent endorsements will also be accepted and forwarded appropriately. */You may email your endorsements providing (full name, organisation and address, and optionally a brief comment) to esg at esgindia.org (Please keep the subject line above intact to help us sort email). You can also sign online and leave comments at: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/eianotification2009 We thank you for your cooperation and support as always. Yours sincerely, Leo F. Saldanha, Bhargavi S. Rao, Nandini Chami, Sruthi Subbanna, K. R. Mallesh, Divya Ravindranath Environment Support Group, Bangalore for Campaign for Environmental Justice - India ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ APPEAL TO PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA CAMPAIGN FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE -- INDIA Dr. Manmohan Singh Prime Minister of India (i/c) Union Ministry of Environment and Forests South Block, Raisina Hill, New Delhi, India-110 011. Telephone: 91-11-23012312 Fax: 91-11-23019545 / 91-11-23016857 19 March 2009 Reg.: MoEF Notification proposing an amendment to the EIA Notification -- 2006, offering various concessions to project developers, is in violation of Code of Conduct of Election Commission Respected Sir, We address you in your capacity as a Member of the Union Cabinet incharge of the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF). As you are aware, your Ministry has proposed a major amendment to the Environment Impact Assessment Notification -- 2006 (EIA Notification - 2006) by way of Notification S.O. 195 (E) issued on 19 January 2009. Following the closure of the public commenting period of 60 days, MoEF proposes to go ahead with the amendments anytime now. The EIA Notification -- 2006 requires that projects that cause pollution, displacement, destruction of natural resources, etc., be they in the nature of expansion or as greenfield ventures, must go through a series of clearance steps as per standards and with the prior consent of a variety of statutory agencies, both at the State and Central levels, as applicable. The procedures laid down require project developers to comply with various national legislations such as the Environment Protection Act, Forest Conservation Act, Wildlife Protection Act, Water and Air (Control of Pollution) Act, and a range of international treaties, in particular the Rio Declaration of 1992. In addition a variety of legal principles that are part of the rubric of Indian law, such as Polluter Pays Principle, Doctrine of Public Trust, Precautionary Principle, etc., are to be adhered to when advancing any developmental project. Failure to comply with the procedures laid down in the EIA Notification is a criminal offence punishable under the Environment Protection Act, 1986 and related criminal procedure laws. The Amendment Notification, accessible only on the website of the Ministry (in English and Hindi alone), proposes a series of amendments to the EIA Notification - 2006 which will significantly weaken, even negate, the role of the Ministry and other statutory agencies in reviewing the environmental and social impacts of a variety of high impact and polluting projects. In addition, the amendment proposes to grant a range of exemptions from mandatory statutory provisions of applicable environmental law for upto three years. There is also an extraordinary and clearly illegal concession offered to polluters who simply have to declare through a 'self certification' that they cause no additional pollution and thus escape from the need to secure environmental clearance! In a country which is known for its gross failure in enforcement of environmental regulations, and where there is no competent administrative and regulatory infrastructure to independently review compliance with law, this is certain to open the floodgates to environmental destruction and destabilisation of thousands of project affected communities across India. The frequent expose of corporate fraud, even amongst leading companies, cause great discomfort when we consider the consequences of such illegal concessions. An indicative list of the beneficiaries of the concessions proposed include shipping, dredging and port development, building and construction sector, area development projects, special economic zones, mining, petrochemical sector, modernisation of airports, expansion of all sorts of manufacturing industries, etc. Without doubt each and every one of these sectors have the potential of causing extensive damage to our environment and society, sans effective regulation. One of the reasons offered for granting such sweeping concessions is that the Ministry failed to create statutory environmental monitoring and clearances agencies, such as the State Environment Impact Assessment Authorities and State Expert Appraisal Committees, in several states since the enactment of the EIA Notification -- 2006. Astonishingly, the failure to institute appropriate regulatory infrastructure is now being offered as a reason to comprehensively weaken, even negate, India's environmental regulatory framework. Nowhere in the history of environmental regulation in the world have such sweeping concessions been accorded by any Government at any point in time. In fact, such a move is likely to be criticised globally as extending unfair advantage to Indian industry by lowering globally acceptable environmental standards for production, a factor that would weigh heavily against India's standing in the climate change negotiations. All this considered, Sir, we find the reasons cited for the amendment and the timing of the proposed amendments quite specious. Your Government was well aware that its term in office was coming to a close when this Amendment Notification was issued in January 2009, and that too by a Ministry directly under your supervision. The concessions proposed by way of this Amendment Notification, besides being illegal and destructive of democratic decision making, constitute a largesse of the State to the beneficiary industries and infrastructure project developers. The monetary value alone would run into thousands of crores for beneficiaries while severely compromising our ecological security. It is widely known now that many leading political parties are major beneficiaries of corporate grants. This proposed amendment amounts to your Government taking advantage of its position to harness much needed resources for elections by offering such astounding and clearly illegal concessions that attack the very edifice of environmental regulation in India. With this in view, we urge you to immediately direct your Ministers of State in charge of Environment and Forests, and the Secretary of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, to issue a public announcement stating that the proposed Amendment has been kept in abeyance till such time a new Government is in power and is able to take a fresh and independent decision on this matter. We make this fervent request in light of the Code of Conduct issued by the Election Commission of India, wherein it is clearly and categorically stated that no significant change in existing policy, scheme or programme of the State is allowed at the time of elections. Conformance with these guidelines are critical to ensuring a Government in power does not abuse its executive privileges to advantage its party at the time of elections. The proposed amendment to the EIA Notification, being a subordinate legislation, is clearly within the realm of the executive power of the State and thus constitutes a fit case for application of the aformentioned Code of Conduct. We do hope you will initiate action in this regard with due dispatch. Any failure to initiate such action will compel us to move the matter before the Election Commission of India for effective and appropriate action. Thank you for your cooperation and support. Yours truly, For Campaign for Environmental Justice -- India -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090320/4839f08a/attachment-0001.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: EIA Notification Amendment_2009_PMAppeal_190309.doc Type: application/msword Size: 80896 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090320/4839f08a/attachment-0001.doc -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: esg.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 341 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090320/4839f08a/attachment-0001.vcf From yanivbin at gmail.com Sat Mar 21 19:26:58 2009 From: yanivbin at gmail.com (Vinay Baindur) Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 19:26:58 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] NIUA Workshop on World Development Report 2009 Message-ID: <86b8a7050903210656g15febccg20be27b2e654459d@mail.gmail.com> http://www.niua.org/upcoming%20seminars/wdr/wdr.htm Workshop on World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography Organized by: - Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India - National Institute of Urban Affairs Date: 12 March 2009 Venue: Conference Room, NIUA, New Delhi The World Bank published the 31st World Development Report (WDR) 2009 with the theme "Reshaping Economic Geography" in November 2008. The main message of this year's report is economic growth will be unbalanced, but development can still be inclusive. It argues that promoting transformations along the three dimensions or 3D's of economic geography, namely Density, Distance, and Division, are crucial to development and should be encouraged. The Report challenges the assumption that economic activities must be spread geographically to benefit the world's most poor and vulnerable. Geography matters greatly in deciding what is needed, what is unnecessary, and what will fail. The underlying theme of the Report is that economic growth will be unbalanced but development can still be inclusive. The report provides important inputs for understanding and developing an urban development strategy, which may be pertinent to India. The Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) and the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) organized a workshop cum seminar on the World Development Report (WDR) 2009 at NIUA Seminar Room on the 12th of March 2009. Over 60 participants representing the World Bank, MoUD, Planning Commissions, Urban Finance and Planning Organizations, a host of research and academic institutes, international organizations, NGOs, etc., attended the workshop. Presentations were given by Prof. Chetan Vaidya, Director, NIUA, Mr. A.K. Mehta, Joint Secretary (Urban Development), MoUD, Mr. Justin Linn, Senior Vice-President and Chief Economist, Dr. Indermit Gill, Director of the WDR and Chief Economist, Europe and Central Asia and Mr. Somik V. Lall, World Bank. Mr. Justin Linn, brought out the need for economic concentration and economic integration. He argued that the most effective policies for promoting long-term growth are those that advocate transformations along the dimensions of economic geography and economic integration both within and across nations. Dr. Gill, emphasized that integration should be the pivotal concept in the policy discussions involving the location of production, people and poverty-in particular, the debates on urbanization, regional development, and globalization. Instead, all three overemphasize place-based interventions. Dr. Isher Judge Ahluwalia, Chairperson ICRIER and High Powered Expert Committee (HPEC), initiated the discussion on the presentations. She appreciated the analyses and the findings of the Report. She opined that it has emphasized the need for maximizing agglomeration economies calibrated according to the needs of different geographical scales. Other discussions ranged around specific suggestions for India based on WDR, reconciliation of district and metropolitan planning committee to the new 3D approach, need to lock investment in infrastructure in the context of climate change challenges. Mr. Gill thanked all the participants for appreciating the Report and also for raising various issues related to it. He said that the World Bank is planning to come up with an India-specific WDR. He pointed out that India has done a reasonably good job of political union, and now it should urgently focus on economic union. He said that no country in the world had economic development without urban development, and there cannot be urban development without the commensurate proliferation of slums. He opined that basic services should be provided to all, but economic infrastructure should be concentrated in those regions that yield the highest rate of return. He also said that incentives intended to attract industry to lagging areas should be used sparingly. Mr. Linn opined that countries should look to focus their attention to ensure better-quality migration, by learning to optimize between agglomeration benefits and congestion costs arising out of concentration citing reference of China. He also emphasized that infrastructure investment has to be linked to climate change challenges as well as technological changes. The workshop ended with a vote of thanks by Prof. Usha Raghupati, NIUA, to all the participants -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090321/8165f06d/attachment.html From shveta at sarai.net Sat Mar 21 22:47:15 2009 From: shveta at sarai.net (Shveta) Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:47:15 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Dismantling of a neighbourhood 02 Message-ID: <49C5211B.6030900@sarai.net> Dear all, This is the second posting in this series. This is a translation of a text by Babli Rai, who lives in LNJP. Babli is a writer. Her text captures many of the nuances that shaped the making of LNJP and how it stands today. Hopefully this text will deepen our discussion. warmly shveta ------------------------------------ What is in this word "evidence"? by Babli Rai "Sleep has vanished from my nights, agonising over what will happen during our survey. We have lived here so many years, made so many things, but we can be turned homeless overnight..." The word 'homeless' runs through our lives today like a shiver down the spine. He who doesn't have a plot of land to his name doesn't exist. Listening to my father I sensed, our sense of self, our entire existence is connected deeply to this place in which we have lived many years. But only to have lived here is not enough. Today the ground has suddenly hollowed out like a bottomless pit, the walls of the house are shifting away from us. And we are trying hard to keep everything together but, I think, not too successfully. "When we first came here, we saw it only as a place to shelter ourselves in. We saw possibilities here, which were first and foremost, and perhaps only about earning a living, finding a sustenance to live life. When the VP Singh cards began to be made, we saw our names inside official registers, and thought now we have been included in government ledgers. Slowly, as we continued to live here, we realised it is not enough to just build a house somewhere. When it presented itself as a possibility, we got our ration cards made. The ration card was something through which we could get sarkari benefits, that is rations at lower costs than in the market. That is, it made it possible for us to save some money from that which we were earning while living here. Over twenty five years, through different kinds of counting done by the government, we too began to get different numbers. Every corner of the house we turned into a corner for safe-keeping the various slips of paper we received in the process, so that they remain secure." How long have we lived in this place? As soon as this question knocked at me, I pulled out all the documents in the house, to look at them closely, again. We have lived here for twenty five years. How are we going to prove this? Here is a small visualisation of what will happen when the surveyors come to our house: They will ask for evidence. They will say to my father, "Babuji, what can we say about mistakes that may have been made in your documents. We are here only to see what there is." What is in this word "evidence"? Often, it was our neighbours - those who live around us - who were sufficient as "proof". What they said about someone was accepted. Today each and every one of those who can vouch for atleast the last twenty years of our life are here, near us. But when they speak, the government behaves as if it were deaf. I have understood this. And today when I look at my neighbourhood, I see the present situation has transformed it into a row of deaf and mute people. They are all waiting for their turn; and each one will speak only when it is his turn to speak. We will have to be our own witness now. And for that we need our documents, our sarkari papers. So I sat down, with all the slips and papers and documents spread out around me, my eyes fixed on them, in the lookout for the official language of evidence. Every document is as if ready to spill like the white of an egg. Every paper must be touched softly, it's edges smoothened tenderly, lest it tear and become meaningless. And when you can't find a document, the turbulence that causes is such that you become like a diver, diving into the deep oceans, in search for your lost treasure. Lest you think I am alone in thinking this... A man, anywhere between 80 and 90 years old, whom I call babaji and have seen here since I was a little girl. He has laid the foundation for and built innumerable brick and cement houses in LNJP with his own hands. I remember in my childhood, whenever he would be making a house, we used to get beaten up by him for sneaking away wet mud from what he was building. He says a lot in a few words, communicating much more through his gestures than his words. He took me by my hand to his house. His own house is still kutcha. He wanted to know what was going on. He seemed in the dark about the nature of the survey. Then he wanted to know when the survey team would reach his house. He pulled out a heavy bundle which had his documents. Where is your lal card, I asked? He brought out an old, stiff wallet and pulled out his VP Singh card from it. And along with it tumbled out innumerable receipts of materials he must have purchased when he was making different peoples' homes. I began reading out the names on those receipts, and he started telling me, "Ah this one must be from Mehtar Bhai, who used to sell cement masala at Turkhman Gate. There weren't any shops inside LNJP from which construction material could be bought in those times." Where is your old ration card, I asked him. I asked him for different documents, and he unknotted different polythene bags looking for them. It looked like all these knots were being undone in front of us, for the first time in many years. I'd put aside the document, and then then ask for a document made before that one, or one from after it. He'd nod his head and open a different bag. He remembered which document was in which polythene from the way he had knotted it, or from rags of cloth of different colours tied over them. With each document there were slips and receipts, and he'd say whose house they were from, so I sat there conjecturing whose house was made in which year. I made a set of documents and asked him to get them photocopied. I explained to him that in the survey, the survey team would only pay heed to documents issued by departments like their own, that they want to only see if you have given them adequate respect over the last twenty years, that it was very important he should get across through his documents that he was worthy of being resettled in a new place. A woman had been sitting nearby all this time, and she looked very bored by all this, as if she had grown tired of waiting for her turn for the survey. She said, "Sarkari work used to get done so quickly earlier. But now you have to keep waiting endlessly. When the lal cards had been made here, long ago, everything had got done so quietly, with so much ease. They had hung a red curtain near Nehru Hill Park to make a background. We had all gone together. As soon as we got there, we were each given a number, and then we sat down to wait for our turn. They would keep calling out the numbers, and each one would get up when his or her number was called, go stand in front of the red curtain and get his photograph clicked. Neither were too many questions asked, nor was there any fear. They only asked, your name and your father's name and jot them down. No one asked what use these would come in. All that we thought was that now we too have been counted by the sarkari counting. "But look now at how many questions are being asked, as if their questions are our truth. Then these officers used to want to earn some small money here and there, but they'd do their work. Look at them today - they don't take a step without their followers. Earlier we used to take everyone with us wherever we went, but today it is meaningless to think of doing that. It feels like thousands of people are fighting amidst each other." I sat there a while longer, listening to the old woman. She had in her the capacity to reconstruct a time that has gone by. She could recall who she had gone somewhere with, what kind of an environment she encountered there, what kinds of questions and confusions all of them grappled with. But all these stories - what do they hold today? From cugambetta at yahoo.com Sun Mar 22 03:06:45 2009 From: cugambetta at yahoo.com (Curt Gambetta) Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:36:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Urbanstudy] Fw: H-ASIA: Slumdogs, Slums and Mumbai (further comment) Message-ID: <672772.53285.qm@web57414.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Posted on H-Asia, and another blog. ----- Forwarded Message ---- From: Frank Conlon To: H-ASIA at H-NET.MSU.EDU Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2009 11:35:46 AM Subject: H-ASIA: Slumdogs, Slums and Mumbai (further comment) H-ASIA March 18, 2009 Further comment on Slumdogs, Slums and Mumbai ************************************************************************* Ed. note: This post follows on a sequence of posts from Feb. 25, 2009. Shekhar Krishnan is among the most active scholars working on modern Mumbai. I have extracted the blog text for convenience, but the URL citation remains for your reference. FFC ------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Shekhar Krishnan Dear H-Asia: I wrote this blog post in response to and critique of Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove last month: http://heptanesia.net/2009/02/26/taking-the-dogs-out-of-the-slum/ Heptanesian Archives Taking the Dogs out of the Slum Slumdog Millionaire has been running since September at the cinema across the street from my apartment in Cambridge. I enjoyed the film when I finally saw it in December, despite the cliched invocation of Bollywood in the concluding song and Danny Boyles populism the last scene of Trainspotting, where Renton chooses life by robbing his heroin addict mates from Glasgow, was more my style. But melodrama has its uses. Watching Jamal and Latika dance on the platforms of Victoria Terminus in the films finale reminded me of the protective grandeur of Indias greatest railway station, in which a few weeks before 56 people had been shot by gunmen in the 26/11 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. While its cast was mostly local, Slumdog Millionaire only opened in India in late January, many months after it had become a sleeper hit in the U.S. It is a measure of the globalisation of urban India that even before the film was released, there were already protests over the apparently disparaging name of the film, and its popularity prompted Amitabh Bacchan to complain of the Western fetish for cinematic realism, while more recently, Salman Rushdie has claimed the film is not realistic or magical plausible enough. This weekend, on the eve of the Oscars for which Slumdog Millionaire won eight awards, I was delighted to see an op-ed in the New York Times called Taking the Slum Out of Slumdog, written by an old friend and mentor. Rahul Srivastava* is a freelance novelist and ethnographer in Goa who co-wrote the piece with his collaborator, digital urbanist Matias Echanove (the original version, Taking the Slum out of Dharavi, is on their blog Airoots). In Mumbai it is a commonplace that more than 60% of the urban population live in so-called slums. While the term itself is apocryphal, it has been traced to the old Irish s lom for a bare bleak room, an impoverished place or barren life. Historically, the term slum has always referred to both to the concrete dwellings in which the urban poor live, as well as a less tangible, but no less real, moral panic about this built environment. Until the development of germ theory and public health policies, Victorian sanitary reformers believed that overcrowding, lack of sinks, sewers, and taps corrupted both the morals and health of the urban poor. Shocked at the growth of large squatter settlements in the first shock cities of the industrial revolution, early urban journalists and reformers such as Friedrich Engels and Jacob Riis brought the slang of the predominantly Irish immigrant slum dwellers into the popular imagination. Fear of the unwashed urban masses was inscribed into the descriptions of their housing, and this imaginative displacement was suddenly applicable everywhere that slums proliferated. Perceived as a disease on the body politic, the great reformers flipped the terms of contagion in the public mind and press for political change. From blaming the victims the slum dwellers themselves they identified the disease agents in the invisible hand of corrupt municipal bosses and builders who dispensed patronage to the slumlords and extorted rent from the poor. This discourse of reform travelled throughout the British Empire in the wake of industrialisation in the colonies, first as moral reform and then as material improvement. Slums were breeding grounds for the social unrest and epidemic diseases spawned by the early factory system. Danny Boyle is a product of these connections, as a working-class Irish Catholic from Manchester, the factory city whose mills were fed by the cotton from colonial India. It was from Glasgow the scene of Boyles Trainspotting that colonial sanitary reformers modelled the Bombay Improvement Trust, established in the wake of the plague epidemic in 1896 and charged with the task of demolishing slums and building sanitary housing for the slumdogs of colonial Bombay. The moral lessons of the sanitarians gave way to material improvements by reformers who sought better housing, clean water, flushing toilets and open spaces for the urban masses. Behind the moral language, the actual physical environment of urban slums represent a very wide spectrum of building practices and housing typologies, as my colleagues in CRIT have shown in this study of Housing Typologies in Mumbai published in 2007. The slum as place defies the slum as category. The hiatus between this abstract slum of morality and ideology, and the real diversity of housing practices in the real built environment, is the cognitive gap that many critics, designers and ethnographers have recently sought to address. In their article where they seek to take the slum out of Slumdog, Rahul and Matias acknowledge that the generic term slum masks a much more complex economic and ecological reality, and focus on the centuries-old settlement of Dharavi in Mumbai. Popularly known as Asias largest slum, it has been the subject of some of Mumbais best journalism in works such as Jeremy Seabrooks Life and Labour in an Indian Slum and Kalpana Sharmas Rediscovering Dharavi. Slumdog Millionaire was extensively shot in Dharavi, to reference the archetypical slum environment of crowded and unpaved lanes, jerry-built shacks and tenements, and water containers, hoses and taps next to every home. While Rahul and to take the slum out of films like Slumdog and places like Dharavi, they seem to feel it is enough to switch the moral registers while leaving the material artefact untouched. They claim, incredibly, that Dharavis extreme population density doesnt translate into oppressiveness. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries. The problem with critique is that it aestheticises slum conditions to serve up a cultural critique of urban planning and technology. The statement that No master plan, urban design, zoning ordinance, construction law or expert knowledge can claim any stake in the prosperity of Dharavi is absurd when you consider that the economy of the place is entirely based around its proximity to major transport arteries and municipal boundaries. Dharavi is a triangular settlement with hard boundaries fixed by the western and central railway lines on either side, and the Mithi River and Mahim Bay on top. From here, two causeways and railway bridges lead out of the island city of Mumbai into its immediate suburbs. Dharavis identity is tied directly to this infrastructure and geography of transportation, which produced its central position in the urban economy. While there is much to agree with in Rahul and Mathiass op-ed, the argument about the resourcefulness of the poor and the marginality of the state in Dharavi is a very serviceable critique. While both are committed activists, the logic of their argument is too easily seized upon by less committed anthropologists and development practitioners as a culturalist rationale for non-intervention in the urban environment. The role of the state in providing urban services, or its capacity to effect any positive change in the life of the poor is another matter entirely. But the idea that it has no role in Dharavi denies the poor a stake in their own political agency. Nor is this a constructive critique of the predatory ecology of urban land on which the construction industry and urban power hangs in Mumbai. Taking the state out of the slums renders invisible the entire urban regime which works to maintain the centrality of the industries and services of Dharavi, but push its people and their needs and aspirations to the peripheries. While serving as a sweatshop for multinational industries and a transport hub for Greater Mumbai, the residents of Dharavi literally live on the other side of the tracks of both Central and Western Railways and sleep next to the great sink for suburban effluvia and waste, the Mahim Creek. Is it any cause for celebration that in Dharavi people have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state including the setting up of a highly functional waste recycling industry that serves the whole city? Were the citizens of Dharavi any less resourceful, they would sink in garbage, or be eaten by dogs. * For the record, Rahul and I gave Freida Pinto one of her first breaks in show business, as she once worked with us in the organisation which we directed together in Mumbai, PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research). While Freida and I have moved on to greater things, Rahul continues to keep the show going. ------- Members may also find interesting and relevant to the questions of slums this self-published Study of Housing Typologies in Mumbai (Mumbai: CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust) and Urban Age, 2007) http://crit.org.in/2007/05/housing-typologies-in-mumbai/ http://crit.org.in/wp-content/uploads//housing_typologies.pdf Best, Shekhar Shekhar Krishnan MIT E51-185 77, Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 U.S.A. http://heptanesia.net http://web.mit.edu/shekhar ****************************************************************** To post to H-ASIA simply send your message to: For holidays or short absences send post to: with message: SET H-ASIA NOMAIL Upon return, send post with message SET H-ASIA MAIL H-ASIA WEB HOMEPAGE URL: http://h-net.msu.edu/~asia/ From yanivbin at gmail.com Sun Mar 22 12:44:29 2009 From: yanivbin at gmail.com (Vinay Baindur) Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 12:44:29 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Slumdog and Dharavi a review and another view Message-ID: <86b8a7050903220014j36741ab4s503a4293b45cf2ec@mail.gmail.com> *Vol:26 Iss:06* *URL: http://www.flonnet.com/fl2606/stories/20090327260612900.htm *Hollow message MITU SENGUPTA Slumdog Millionaire grossly minimises the capabilities and even the basic humanity of those it so piously claims to speak for. A view of Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai. DANNY BOYLE’S Slumdog Millionaire, perhaps the most celebrated film in recent times, tells the rags-to-rajah story of a love-struck Indian boy, Jamal, who, with a little help from “destiny”, triumphs over his wretched beginnings in Mumbai’s squalid slums. Riding on a wave of rave reviews, Slumdog has now won Hollywood’s highest tribute, the Academy Award for Best Picture, along with seven other Oscars, including one for Best Director. These honours will probably add some $100 million to Slumdog’s box-office takings, as Oscar wins usually do. They will also enhance the film’s fast-growing reputation as an authentic representation of the lives of India’s urban poor. So far, most of the awards collected by the film have been accepted in the name of “the children”, suggesting that its own cast and crew regard it (and have relentlessly promoted it) not as a cinematically spectacular, musically rich entertaining work of fiction, which it is, but as a powerful tool of advocacy. Nothing could be more worrying, as Slumdog, despite all the hype to the contrary, delivers a deeply disempowering narrative about the poor that thoroughly undermines, if not totally negates, its apparent message of social justice. Slumdog has angered many Indians because it tarnishes the perception of their country as a rising economic power and a beacon of democracy. India’s English-language papers, read mainly by its middle class, have carried many bristling reviews of the film that convey an acute sense of wounded national pride. While understandable, the sentiment is not defensible. Though at times embarrassingly contrived, most of the film’s heart-rending scenes are inspired by a sad, but well-documented, reality. Corruption is certainly rampant among the police, and many will gladly use torture, though none is probably dim enough to target an articulate, English-speaking man who is already a rising media phenomenon. Beggar makers do round up abandoned children and mutilate them in order to make them evoke more sympathy though it is highly improbable that any such child will ever chance upon a $100 bill, much less be capable of identifying it by touch and scent alone. Indeed, if anything, Boyle’s magical tale, with its unconvincing one-dimensional characters and absurd plot devices, greatly understates the depth of suffering among India’s poor. It is near-impossible, for instance, that Jamal would emerge from his ravaged life with a dewy complexion and an upper-class accent. But the real problem with Slumdog is neither its characterisation of India as just another Third World country nor its shallow, impressionistic portrayal of poverty. Life in Dharavi The film’s real problem is that it grossly minimises the capabilities and even the basic humanity of those it so piously claims to speak for. It is no secret that much of Slumdog is meant to reflect life in Dharavi, the 213-hectare spread of slums in the heart of Mumbai. The film’s depiction of the legendary Dharavi, which is home to some one million people, is that of a feral wasteland, with little evidence of order, community or compassion. Other than the children, the “slumdogs”, no one is even remotely well-intentioned. Hustlers, thieves and petty warlords run amok, and even Jamal’s schoolteacher, a thin, bespectacled man who introduces him to the Three Musketeers, is inexplicably callous. This is a place of evil and decay, of a raw, chaotic tribalism. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Dharavi teems with dynamism, creativity and entrepreneurship, in industries such as garment manufacturing, embroidery, pottery, leather, plastics and food processing. It is estimated that the annual turnover from Dharavi’s small businesses is between $50 and $100 million. Dharavi’s lanes are lined with cellphone retailers and cybercafes, and according to surveys by Microsoft Research India, the slum’s residents exhibit a remarkably high absorption of new technologies. Governing structures and productive social relations also flourish. The slum’s residents have nurtured strong collaborative networks, often across potentially volatile lines of caste and religion. Many cooperative societies work together with grass-roots associations to provide residents with essential services, such as basic health care, schooling and waste disposal, and tackle difficult issues such as child abuse and violence against women. In fact, they often compensate for the government’s woeful inadequacy in meeting the needs of the poor. Valuable lives Although it is true that these severely under-resourced self-help organisations have touched only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, it is important to acknowledge their efforts and agency, along with the simple fact that these communities, despite their grinding poverty, have valuable lives, warmth, generosity and a resourcefulness that stretches far beyond the haphazard and purely individualistic, Darwinian sort portrayed in the film. Indeed, the failure to recognise this fact has already led to a great deal of damage. Bureaucrats have concocted many ham-handed, top-down plans for “developing” the slums on the basis of the dangerous assumption that these are worthless spaces. The most recent is the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), which proposes to convert the slums into blocks of residential and commercial high-rises. The DRP requires private developers to provide small flats (of about 250 square feet each) to families that can prove that they settled in Dharavi before 2000. In return for rehousing residents, the developers obtain construction rights in Dharavi. The DRP is being fiercely resisted by slum residents’ organisations and human rights activists, who see it an undemocratically conceived and environmentally harmful land-grab scheme. Real estate prices in Mumbai are comparable to Manhattan’s. Though perhaps better than razing the slums with bulldozers – which is not an unpopular option among the city’s rich – the DRP is far from a people-friendly plan. It will potentially evict some 500,000 residents who cannot legally prove that they settled in Dharavi before 2000, and may destroy thousands of livelihoods by rendering unviable countless household-centred businesses. If forced to move into congested high-rises, for instance, the slum’s potters and papad-makers, large numbers of whom are women, will lose the space they need to dry their wares. For the government, however, the DRP will “rehabilitate” Dharavi by erasing the eyesore and integrating its “problem-population” into modern, middle-class Mumbai. It is ironic that Slumdog, for all its righteousness of tone, shares with many Indian political and social elites a profoundly dehumanising view of those who live and work within the country’s slums. The troubling policy implications of this perspective are unmistakeably mirrored by the film. Since there are no internal resources, and none capable of constructive voice or action, all “solutions” must arrive externally. After a harrowing life in an anarchic wilderness, salvation finally comes to Jamal, a Christ-like figure, in the form of an imported quiz show, which he succeeds in, thanks to sheer, dumb luck, or rather because “it is written”. Is it also “written”, then, that the other children depicted in the film must continue to suffer? Or must they, like the stone-faced Jamal, stoically await their own “destiny” of rescue by a foreign hand? Indeed, while this self-billed “feel-good movie of the year” may help us “feel good” that we are among the lucky ones on earth, it delivers a patronising, colonial and ultimately sham statement on social justice for those who are not. The film may have helped raise awareness among Americans that there are many in this world who have less than they. But it is unfortunate that such awareness must rest on the act of stripping the poor of their real power – their power to resist and their power to make their own change. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090322/e54d9777/attachment.html From arshadrizvi at developmentlinks.org.in Tue Mar 24 13:12:20 2009 From: arshadrizvi at developmentlinks.org.in (Arshad Rizvi) Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:12:20 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] InfoDev Newsletter (Green Collar Jobs) March 2009 Issue Message-ID: Dear Friends and well wishers Please find our newsletter "InfoDev" March 2009 issue attached with this email. We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue as it brings out information on various career oppurtunities during the time of economic recession...Career oppurtunities!!..Yes you got it right.... Green Collar Jobs. Thanking you Sincerely Arshad Rizvi Director an Vice President Development Links Foundation 20, Basement Masihgarh, sukhdev Vihar New Delhi 110025 Telefax: +91-11-41320294 M: 09868612627 Web: developmentlinks.org.in -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: InfoDev 25th march 2009.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 53165 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090324/81d6cb34/attachment-0001.pdf From nehasami at umich.edu Wed Mar 25 02:39:59 2009 From: nehasami at umich.edu (Neha Sami) Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:09:59 -0400 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Theme year on India at the University of Michigan Message-ID: The Trehan India Initiative at the University of Michigan presents State, Space, and Citizenship: Indian Cities in the Global Era: A year of thematic programming on key issues confronting Indian cities, sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan The first Trehan India Initiative Theme Year at the University of Michigan will address how urbanization is transforming contemporary India socially, economically, politically, culturally, and environmentally. It will focus on three closely related areas of investigation: 1. Transformations in urban politics and the role of the state in urban development 2. Changes in the production of urban space 3. Issues of citizenship and politics in the urban realm. For more information, downloadable recordings of the lecture series and other related resources, please visit: www.umtrehaninitiative.net The Trehan India Initiative at the University of Michigan is made possible by the principled generosity of: Drs. Ranvir and Adarsh Trehan and the Trehan Foundation Fund Neha Sami PhD Candidate University of Michigan http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nehasami -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090324/eae48af5/attachment.html From rkamath.research at gmail.com Wed Mar 25 11:53:53 2009 From: rkamath.research at gmail.com (Ranjan Kamath) Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:53:53 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] C+ive & Reva Electric Cars in Partnership Message-ID: <24b9c2a0903242323w507555b7if6239ab77a3999e6@mail.gmail.com> >From : www.c-positive.in C+ive & Reva are in discussions with Govt. of Karnataka, BMTC etc to shortly introduce the following services in the city of Bangalore in a joint initiative to REDUCE : - traffic congestion on city roads - fuel consumption - two-stroke auto rickshaws ( auto rickshaw drivers will be used for shuttle services and their vehicles will be reduced and re-cycled) - atmospheric pollution * NEIGHBOURHOOD ELECTRIC SHUTTLE SERVICE Golf Cart type buggies (solar/ electric charging hybrids) of capacity 4-12 seats will run in each ward as: - feeder service BMTC bus stops - school and office drops and pick up within the ward - senior citizens/ housewives needs within a ward during off-peak hours * RENT A REVA SERVICE @ APARTMENT COMPLEXES C+ive will arrange for REVA cars to be made available for individual use on a per hour/ per km basis for housing societies that register for this service. Starting with Bangalore, this service will be made available to all apartment blocks, gated communities, housing societies in the major cities of India. If your housing society might be interested in inquiring about/ registering for this service, please contact C+ive at citizen.postive at gmail.com Together we can transform the micro-climate of our cities! If this group has suggestions, opinions, criticism etc of the above proposals then please contact the undersigned. C+ive looks forward to your support in spreading the word if you consider this a worthwhile initiative. sincerely Ranjan Kamath -- 75, 17e main Vi Block Koramangala Bangalore 560095 Land: 9180 25631847 Cell: + 91 9341 944490 (Bangalore) Cell +91 98203 22988 ( Mumbai) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090325/f4d40d20/attachment.html From sood.ashima at gmail.com Wed Mar 25 19:27:25 2009 From: sood.ashima at gmail.com (Ashima Sood) Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:57:25 -0400 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Informal urbanism in the American West Message-ID: <627409d50903250657j698afb1s4839b14238e28dcd@mail.gmail.com> Tarp Nation: Squatter villages arise from the ashes of the West's booms and busts http://www.hcn.org/issues/41.5/tarp-nation/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C= "Fresno, which the Brookings Institution ranked in 2005 as the American city with the greatest concentration of poverty, is far from the only place where people are resorting to life in makeshift abodes. Similar encampments are proliferating throughout the West, everywhere from the industrial hub of Ontario, Calif., to the struggling casino district of Reno, Nev., and the upscale suburbs of Washington state. In any other country, these threadbare villages would be called slums, but in the U.S., the preferred term is tent city, a label that implies that they are just a temporary phenomenon.... Tent cities have much in common with the squatter camps of the Great Depression, but to simply call them Hoover-villes is to ignore their complexity. To truly understand them, one must look at current trends in the developing world, where informal urbanism .... is now the predominant mode of city-making." From rkamath.research at gmail.com Fri Mar 27 13:20:15 2009 From: rkamath.research at gmail.com (Ranjan Kamath) Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:20:15 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] View the proposed Neighbourhood EV Shuttle Service Message-ID: <24b9c2a0903270050j2fad5ee2ycf290036b3a51c3f@mail.gmail.com> Please find below the link to the vehicles that C+ive is proposing for the Neighbourhood EV Shuttle Service: http://www.mainimaterials.com/golfcarts.htm You will learn more about their specifications and other details which might be of interest. C+ive looks forward to your support for this initiative to pressure state governments into action on better public transport connectivity in order to reduce private car usage. Any further queries please write to citizen.positive at gmail.com -- www.c-positive.in -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090327/65d36684/attachment.html From dak at sarai.net Fri Mar 27 15:19:37 2009 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:19:37 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Short-term research positions: Asian cultural studies Message-ID: <49CCA131.5070208@sarai.net> *Short-Term Research Positions: Asian Cultural Studies* The Cultural and Material life of media piracy is a three-year project carried out by the Sarai programme of the CSDS, Delhi, India in collaboration with the Alternative Law Forum Bangalore, India. The project seeks open a different debates on piracy other than simply that of enforcement and criminality in Asia. We hope to generate discussions of cultural needs, community practices of sharing and circulation in societies of high inequality. We will also look at media industry approaches to piracy and enforcement strategies. In addition, there will be ethnographic and quantitative work on media use in neighborhoods. The main research node spans South Asia, with comparative work in China and South East Asia. The Sarai-ALF teams of researchers work in tandem with an international project on media piracy with fellow researchers in Brazil, South Africa and Russia coordinated by the SSRC (New York). The project is supported by the IDRC (Canada) We are looking for bright, energetic and qualified researchers who can work in collaboration with a regional and international team. Applicants must demonstrate abilities to research and write on the subject. A familiarity with the debate on piracy, intellectual Property and the creative commons is preferable. Social science and humanities applicants should have completed postgraduate degrees, law students a four-year programme. The position is ideal for researchers working on their Ph.d/M.Phil, wanting to combine it with ongoing research and interest in media, law and cultural studies. Independent researchers with a clear, demonstrable research capacity and experience may also apply. *Researcher One: Beijing* The researcher will be media and copy culture circuits in China post video/VCD and the relationship to the international legal regime. Research will be fieldwork based. Researchers must be bi-lingual in Mandarin and English. *Researcher Two: Hong Kong* The researcher will be looking at Hong Kong Media industries after video and the worlds of piracy in South China. Researchers should be fluent and bi-lingual in Cantonese and English. Remuneration will be approximately *USD 5000 for a six-month period.* A publication quality research paper is expected at the conclusion of the research period. Interested applicants may send their CV and a written research sample to *researchjobs at sarai.net* by *April 20th, 2009*. *Applications without a written research sample will not be entertained.* *Links* Sarai, CSDS: *www.sarai.net* Alternative Law Forum: *www.altlawforum.org* ** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090327/5566aea6/attachment.html From elkamath at yahoo.com Sat Mar 28 19:19:29 2009 From: elkamath at yahoo.com (lalitha kamath) Date: Sat, 28 Mar 2009 06:49:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Urbanstudy] Fw: Give the people what they want Message-ID: <194973.15300.qm@web53608.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Give the people what they wantNithya Raman Posted: Mar 26, 2009 at 2353 hrs IST The urban poor are not a small group: more than a quarter of India’s urban population lives below the poverty line, according to a recent UN study. The streets, the composition of the workforce, and the economy all bear the imprint of their contributions to city life. Yet they are often invisible to policymakers, who plan for them and around them, but without ever consulting them. Could asking for their input before we make policies help our broken urban planning system work better? Chennai attempted to do exactly this on February 14 when, for the first time in the city’s history, the city’s poorest workers, those in the informal sector, were officially consulted for a new plan for the city. More than 200 workers from the informal sector, including sanitation workers, domestic workers, construction workers, fisherpeople, street vendors, auto drivers and others, came together to discuss the City Development Plan, a plan that Chennai is writing in order to access funds under the central government’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). The new plan is supposed to outline a vision for Chennai and identify a series of infrastructure projects that will help the city to achieve its vision. A significant portion of JNNURM funding is designated to provide for the needs of the urban poor. The consultation revealed that poor workers’ needs and vision for the city require policy changes well beyond our current infrastructure-driven model of urban development. Indeed, their participation in the planning process teaches planners an important lesson: that urban development should aim higher than merely improving infrastructure. It should improve the quality of our lives. The workers offered many valuable inputs that could easily be translated into infrastructure projects for the City Development Plan. Workers asked that evictions of slum-dwellers immediately cease, and that funds allocated for the urban poor be used to provide infrastructure, services and tenure in existing slum settlements rather than to construct alternative housing on the outskirts of the city. They asked for the Government to prioritise the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, and users of public transport over the needs of automobile and motorcycle owners. They also asked that the government designate spaces for them to work within the city, such as spaces in markets and on roadsides for street-vendors, and to provide them services like drinking water, toilets, and crèches in these work spaces. If such projects are included in the new city development plan, it will already mark a significant departure from the city’s traditional planning priorities. However, a number of the things that they suggested had absolutely nothing to do with infrastructure or city development as conceived by the JNNURM, and yet, were central to workers’ vision of a better city.Workers asked for access to finance and social security benefits and better quality, better-paid jobs. They wanted medical insurance, well functioning welfare boards, and provisions for retirement benefits. They wanted access to low-interest loans, so that they could avoid usurious moneylenders. They wanted the police to stop harassing them at their workplaces. They also wanted the push towards privatising municipal services to end, because privatisation meant a decrease in the availability of formal sector, decently paid work. Workers also demanded changes in the government’s urban development policies that would give more power to citizens. They asked that the government provide complete information to city residents about all urban infrastructure projects. They also demanded that projects be approved through a genuinely consultative process, and that the final approvals for urban infrastructure projects should rest with local ward sabhas or gram sabhas. Why was this so central to their demands? Because urban infrastructure projects inevitably require government land, and result in the displacement of poor slum dwellers who squat on that land. Broadly speaking, when asked to think about city development, informal sector workers responded with measures that would improve their own quality of life. And maybe this is exactly the lesson that urban planners and the architects of the JNNURM should be taking from Chennai’s informal sector workers. The JNNURM focuses narrowly on the provision of infrastructure in cities, but it does not make any clear links between the provision of this infrastructure and improvements in the quality of life of residents. Nor is it clear how the JNNURM will measure its effectiveness. So far, the only proof of the JNNURM’s efficacy the government has offered residents is the amount of money spent, but it is unclear what good this money has done for residents, especially the city’s poorest. Instead, a consultative planning process could be used to identify what kinds of improvements are needed for city residents, to create transparent benchmarks by which this improvement can be measured, and ways to monitor this improvement. The persistence of significant levels of urban poverty even after rapid economic growth in the country is shameful. How we go about effectively addressing the needs of the urban poor can provide us valuable lessons for India’s cities as a whole. The writer is an urban planner at the Centre for Development Finance, Chennai http://www.indianexpress.com/news/give-the-people-what-they-want/439058/0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090328/1c491e1a/attachment-0001.html From yanivbin at gmail.com Mon Mar 30 13:49:11 2009 From: yanivbin at gmail.com (Vinay Baindur) Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:49:11 +0530 Subject: [Urbanstudy] A City Ends Hunger Through Democracy, BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL Message-ID: <86b8a7050903300119x34aba5a1rf562fc3da3ffcf73@mail.gmail.com> http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=3330 *The City that Ended Hunger* *by Frances Moore Lappé* A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger. “To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.” CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL [image: More than 10 years ago, Brazil’s fourth-largest city, Belo Horizonte, declared that food was a right of citizenship and started working to make good food available to all. One of its programs puts local farm produce into school meals. This and other projects cost the city less than 2 percent of its budget. Photo shows fresh passion fruit juice and salad as part of a school lunch. Photo by Leah Rimkus]More than 10 years ago, Brazil’s fourth-largest city, Belo Horizonte, declared that food was a right of citizenship and started working to make good food available to all. One of its programs puts local farm produce into school meals. This and other projects cost the city less than 2 percent of its budget. Above, fresh passion fruit juice and salad as part of a school lunch. Photo by Leah RimkusIn writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps—these questions take on new urgency. To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you. The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources—the “participatory budgeting” that started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000. [image: The city of Belo Horizonte puts]The city of Belo Horizonte puts “Direct From the Country” farmer produce stands throughout busy downtown areas. Photo by Leah RimkusThe city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food. When my daughter Anna and I visited Belo Horizonte to write Hope’s Edge we approached one of these stands. A farmer in a cheerful green smock, emblazoned with “Direct from the Countryside,” grinned as she told us, “I am able to support three children from my five acres now. Since I got this contract with the city, I’ve even been able to buy a truck.” The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering that, as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as a whole saw their incomes drop by almost half. In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price—about two-thirds of the market price—of about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners. Everything else they can sell at the market price. [image: ABC bulk produce markets stock the items that the city determines will be sold at a fixed price, about 13 cents per pound. Photo by Leah Rimkus]ABC bulk produce markets stock the items that the city determines will be sold at a fixed price, about 13 cents per pound. Photo by Leah Rimkus“For ABC sellers with the best spots, there’s another obligation attached to being able to use the city land,” a former manager within this city agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. “Every weekend they have to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so everyone can get good produce.” Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in one, we saw hundreds of diners—grandparents and newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street clothes, others in uniform, still others in business suits. “I’ve been coming here every day for five years and have gained six kilos,” beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis. “It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married,” he said with a smile. [image: The line for one of three “People’s Restaurants” a half hour before opening time. Meals cost about 50 cents; diners come from all socio-economic groups. Photo by Leah Rimkus]The line for one of three “People’s Restaurants” a half hour before opening time. Meals cost about 50 cents; diners come from all socio-economic groups. Photo by Leah RimkusNo one has to prove they’re poor to eat in a People’s Restaurant, although about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma and allows “food with dignity,” say those involved. Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers. “We’re fighting the concept that the state is a terrible, incompetent administrator,” Adriana explained. “We’re showing that the state doesn’t have to provide everything, it can facilitate. It can create channels for people to find solutions themselves.” For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is working to “keep the market honest in part simply by providing information,” Adriana told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens of supermarkets, then post the results at bus stops, online, on television and radio, and in newspapers so people know where the cheapest prices are. The shift in frame to food as a right also led the Belo hunger-fighters to look for novel solutions. In one successful experiment, egg shells, manioc leaves, and other material normally thrown away were ground and mixed into flour for school kids’ daily bread. This enriched food also goes to nursery school children, who receive three meals a day courtesy of the city. “I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.” The result of these and other related innovations? In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate—widely used as evidence of hunger—by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up. The cost of these efforts? Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident. Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social mentality”—the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so—like health care or education—quality food for all is a public good.” The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government partnerships driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect. And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in human nature is required! Through most of human evolution—except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, “especially among unrelated individuals,” humans are unique, writes Michael Gurven, an authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat. Before leaving Belo, Anna and I had time to reflect a bit with Adriana. We wondered whether she realized that her city may be one of the few in the world taking this approach—food as a right of membership in the human family. So I asked, “When you began, did you realize how important what you are doing was? How much difference it might make? How rare it is in the entire world?” Listening to her long response in Portuguese without understanding, I tried to be patient. But when her eyes moistened, I nudged our interpreter. I wanted to know what had touched her emotions. “I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana said. “But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.” Adriana’s words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps Belo’s greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes—if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us. ------------------------------ Frances Moore Lappé wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone, the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Frances is the author of many books including Diet for a Small Planet and Get a Grip, co-founder of Food First and the Small Planet Institute , and a YES! contributing editor. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090330/64cd26fb/attachment-0001.html From jjinisha at hotmail.com Mon Mar 30 23:17:23 2009 From: jjinisha at hotmail.com (jinisha jain) Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:47:23 +0000 Subject: [Urbanstudy] Call For Papers: HERITAGE SPECIAL- Indian Architect & Builder/I-Structure In-Reply-To: <939994.1891.qm@web95213.mail.in2.yahoo.com> References: <939994.1891.qm@web95213.mail.in2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Dear All, Commemorating the World Heritage Day, Indian Architect & Builder (IA&B), India's leading architectural publication for over 22 years, is pleased to give out a call for papers and projects for publication in its twin special issues on Indian Heritage. Indian Heritage:Theory and Practice for IA&B and Conservation Engineering for I-Structure (IA&B's sister publication for construction and engineering industry). Please Find attached the Concept Notes for the same. Professionals, academicians, students, all are welcome to contribute at the discretion of the editorial team. An early response is appreciated. Deadlines : 1. Submission of an approx. 500-word abstract, clearly mentioning the section it is responding to (this would allow the editorial to inform the contributors of any overlaps of subjects and titles): 6th April, 2009 2. Submission of final paper(1000-2000 words) with supporting visual : 13th April, 2009 3. Date of Publication : April/May 2009 Note: In case of any queries or discussions of subjects and alterations that you may suggest please feel free to get back to the editorial team for your essays/articles/ photo features. The IA&B Editorial welcomes alternate thought for contributions at our discretion. Contact: Jinisha Jain: jinisha_jain@ jasubhai. com Tel: 011-2623 5332. Fax: 011-2642 7404 INDIAN, ARCHITECT AND BUILDER JASU BHAI MEDIA 803, CHIRANJEEV TOWER, 43, NEHRU PLACE. NEW DELHI-10019 India. www.iabforum. com (Dear all, I realise it is an urbanstudy forum. However, some of you will surely be interested. :)) . __,_._,___ Add more friends to your messenger and enjoy! Invite them now. _________________________________________________________________ Quick access to Windows Live and your favorite MSN content with Internet Explorer 8. http://ie8.msn.com/microsoft/internet-explorer-8/en-us/ie8.aspx?ocid=B037MSN55C0701A -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20090330/ebb76780/attachment-0001.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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