Renana Jhabvala and Bijal Brahmbhatt on how women are building a sustainable future for urban India

Meeta Rajivlochan

Here is a wonderful book that reiterates a very commonsensical point that most Indians, especially policymakers, have forgotten: that a home of your own is perhaps the most important asset for any family and especially for women.

We know that the Aadhaar ID revolutionised the lives of millions of citizens by providing them an identity; Jhabvala and Brahmbhatt say that owning a home too has the potential to revolutionise lives. The book shares with us a series of vignettes of life in urban and peri-urban slums. The authors point out that a home is far more than a roof over your head. A house provides the women in the family with a place from where they can run their business; it provides access to a private toilet and freedom from trudging in the dark to unsafe open toilets; it provides access to secure drinking water. Thereby, it saves both time and cost for the inmates. Most importantly, the authors say, a house means a future for the children — it means that they can study and go to school in all-weather conditions.

Providing a future for the millions of people who live in India’s slums today should be an important goal for any government. By underlining the benefits of such an effort, the authors provide a strong material incentive for the government to move forward to help the poor. Till recently, low-income housing had not been a priority for any government. Since Independence, governments mostly shed tears for the poor but did little to help them except allow illegal squatters to occupy huge swathes of private and public land. Being illegal had its own downside, which no one seemed to notice. The reality is that it is only the Modi government that has made any concrete efforts to provide ownership of a house to the poor.

The authors pick up stories from Ahmedabad, Jodhpur, Ranchi and Delhi to help us understand the complexities involved in housing the poor. They explain that the city of Ahmedabad provides some pointers for how city governments can provide basic services to the urban poor.

The main issue here, the authors say, is about winning the trust of poor communities that have faced neglect for decades. The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation realised that serious outreach efforts were needed to win that trust. They tried to build partnerships with community-based organisations like the Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) as part of that outreach effort. The authors point out that one of the great successes of the Swachh Bharat Mission has been to focus the attention of city governments through the country on the importance of providing services to slum communities if cities are to be made and kept clean.

Renana Jhabvala, chairperson of SEWA Bharat, a federation of women-led institutions providing economic and social support to women in the informal sector, and Bijal Brahmbhatt, director of the Mahila Housing SEWA Trust, have both had a ringside view of the daily struggle in women’s lives in urban slums. The Trust has played a seminal role in transforming lives and offering hope to women for a better future in the city of Ahmedabad. The stories narrated in this slim volume show the huge difference that ownership of an independent house, supply of reliable drinking water and gutters that function, can make to the lives of ordinary people. A recent independent research about the Swachh Bharat Mission further supports the insights that Jhabvala and Brahmbhatt provide. It says that having access to a swachh life has meant a saving of as much as Rs. 47,000 per year per family in terms of medical costs on illnesses caused by poor quality drinking water and insanitary conditions of living.

An important assertion the authors make is about the importance of a community-based process of data collection. This data, they say, can be both robust and granular. It can provide a voice to the urban poor in the planning process that plays such a critical role in their lives. This is something that is often neglected by city governments. Lack of good data can render any planning process ineffective.