Within the urbanization process in developing countries, shelter access plays a major role in consolidating the position of the low income population in the urban areas. Shelter security means, legal security of land tenure, including legal protection against forced evictions; availability of services, materials, facilities and infrastructure; affordability; habitability; accessibility for disadvantaged groups; location, and cultural adequacy. Of all these dimensions, security of land tenure is the most basic of all, next only to food and water as per the various UN resolutions and national policy documents. This is important because of the current denial of land access to the urban poor in many Asian cities because land has alternative, ‘high-end’ use. In this context, land tenure to the urban poor would mean land reforms in the urban areas. The connection between the land tenure and Social Protection is not yet explored and the efforts to universalize Social Protection are being undertaken skirting the shelter security aspect.

Shelter security, broadly defines as we have, means access to all urban facilities and infrastructure. This means access to all urban facilities and infrastructure that would enhance the urban poor’s capabilities to access available choices within the city. Further, shelter security makes them the legal residents of the city, something that is under attack today in most metropolitan cities in India. By the legal identity, they can negotiate the ‘clientalist’ political space in the Indian cities. Increased capabilities would bring work productivity and livelihood security. Legal entity would also mean that the poor do not have to bear various ‘protection costs’ in the city, making money available to save, and access microfinance institutions’ services. A consolidated settlement means that the city plans for a public transport system that would increase the poors’ accessibility in the city, which would certainly enhance productivity of the workers and more so of the women workers. Shelter security is extremely important for home based workers, self-employed (who use shelter for keeping their work tools) and also for wage labour who would be freed of worrying everyday about collecting water, etc. and impending threat of demolitions and go to look out for wage labour in time. Hence, there are multiple linkages of shelter security with access to services, social security measures, livelihood security and political empowerment.

Studies in countries with private land ownership have shown that the informal housing where the urban poor live, have different degrees of tenure security; from none at all, to de facto tenure a outcome of land ownership regimes, legislation and local politics and legal tenure. In the former socialist countries such as China and Vietnam, where the urban land is owned by the State, the question of access to housing is a problem more of the low income migrant population, also called floating population, than urban poor in general. The legality of the informal settlement in these countries is more and institutional issue – related to the rights conferred by the state – than the multiple processes in non-socialist countries. But, in both set of countries, the informal settlements are prone to evictions causing disruptions in life and livelihoods of this vulnerable urban population. This formulation of relationship between the shelter security and Social protection,is relevant for both the contexts, but more so in the context of non-socialist economies where land rights in the cities confer citizenship rights, whereas in the socialist economies there are other institutional means through which citizenship rights are conferred.

The discussions in the workshop were around four theme areas:
i)          security of land tenure and housing access
ii)         housing security and social protection
iii)         housing security of the migrants
iv)        migrants and social protection, focused on the issue of what mobility means for Social protection

Workshop Proceedings

The inaugural session was presided by Prof. Amitabh Kundu, eminent urban scholar in India and the key note address was by Elabhen Bhatt, Ramon Magsasay award winner for the social service and the founder of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Ahmedabad. Dr. R.N. Vakil, Hon. Director of CEPT welcomed the participants, Prof. Sarah Cook, the manager of the Social Protection in Asia (SPA) programme introduced the programme and drew the linkages between social protection and shelter security, Prof. Alakh Narayan Sharma, Director of the Institute of Human Development explained the functioning of the SPA network in Asia, Darshini Mahadevia laid out the purpose of workshop, and Upendranadh thanked the workshop participants.

The workshop had four technical sessions, two panel discussions, an inaugural session and the concluding session. The workshop schedule is available at http://www.socialprotectionasia.org/spaworkshop.asp. The concluding session was chaired by Prof. Yoginder K. Alagh, former Minister of Planning and Programme Implementation, Government of India, former Vice Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The workshop participants were from India (number of Indian cities were represented in the workshop), China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, South Africa and Brazil.

In the inaugural session, Prof. Cook said that the issue of shelter security was not mainstream in the social protection research but that kept coming up for the urban population, in particular the urban poor. Hence this workshop has been organized. Prof. Sharma, the Director of Institute of Human Development (IHD) said that there has been an increase in inequality between the Bharat and India in last many years. Shelter is not an issue in urban India but also in rural India. He also said that the IHD has been active in SPA network. Jayshree Vyas, Managing Director SEWA Bank and Chairperson MHT, introduced the CEPT-MHT collaborative research project titled Inclusive Urbanization – Social Protection for the Slum and Pavement Dwellers in India. She said that the work of MHT and SEWA Bank in many cities show that the poor people invest in housing when they know that their houses and their lives are not going to be demolished. We have faced situations where the households have ability but do not invest in housing. If they have invested then the investments have gone waste over time because of lack of security resulting in demolitions.

The Macro Context
Elabhen Bhatt’s key note speech started the workshop on the right note. She started with a popular slogan used in India, Roti, Kapada, and Makan meaning food, clothes and shelter and said that the nation had to graduate from roti to makan, although for the poor, as the experience of SEWA goes, is their number one priority in life. A roof over their heads makes their family complete, gives them physical and psychological protection against the wrath of nature and violent forces of the society. Since home is another name for peace, it is a matter of concern that during conflict resolutions the issue of home is hardly discussed. Home is also a workplace for the poor and particularly for the women. In city slums, people work under their roof and earn their livelihood stitching garments, making kites, producing food items, assembling machinery parts, running shop, holding tuition classes or using a corner as storage. For them their houses are their assets, their own wealth. House is where the next generation is raised and reared. She raised a very pertinent question: do we need more official studies and policy documents to find that the safer the living conditions the better is the future citizenry?!

She also said that above all, secure shelter gives citizenship rights to urban residents. The house you live in is illegal so you can not have power nor water connection, nor ration card. If residence is illegal, how does one establish one’s legal citizenship? Because the home which is one’s workplace is nonexistent or “illegal”, one can’t improve his/her living conditions nor increase the productivity or increase income by working for longer hours.

Lastly, she said that the current world economy has brought a situation that the Asian cities today, are busy preparing City Vision Plans – tall buildings, glass buildings, exhaling more emissions and throwing more waste! Asian cities today are in competition of building tall towers, Dubai, Shanghai, and Mumbai, copying each other. Is this the concept of World Class cities? She raised another pertinent question: Why there is no competition among cities to make cities slum free. A world Class city is one where each one is a citizen and each citizen has a roof and a toilet. A slum free city does not mean that the slum dwellers are ousted from or not allowed to enter from the city.

• Why there is no competition among the cities to be slum free? • Why can’t we define A World Class City as one where every resident is considered a citizen and each citizen has a roof over head and a toilet? • A slum free city does not mean ousting the slum dwellers from the city or not allowing the poor to enter the city • Why does a government that can get land for the SEZ in 3 months time takes years to get the land to house the poor or can never get land to house the poor? • In cities, the labour is welcome but not the labourer • If urbanization is welcomed then the urban poor also have to be welcomed. • Cities are built through the labour of the labourer Elabhen Bhatt (founder SEWA)

From the chair’s position, Prof. Kundu questioned the top-down process of implementation of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNRUM) and said that it was bypassing the poor inspite of the fact that it has a component of Basic Services for the Urban Poor (BSUP). He said that if the poor, the bottom two quintiles had to be served, then the land had to be made available freely and there had to be lower subsidies than the current BSUP projects entail. Higher the subsidy, higher was the chance that the subsidies are cornered by the higher income groups. Instead of constructing high rise buildings for the poor, as the Affordable Housing Committee in India had recommended, a housing option, where the poor pay about Rs. 600-Rs. 700 per month, the amount that they can afford now, would be more viable. Slum upgradation through giving tenure was the most realistic approach. Lastly, he said that the BSUP is being used for sanitizing the cities, that it is used for removing the slums from the prime locations in the city (prime for the real estate and mega projects) and relocate them outside the cities. In a way, it was more realistic to provide rehabilitation to those who need to be displaced for mega projects or infrastructure projects – since they were coming in the way – then loose time in evictions, which might cause resistance and litigations. The poor were being then re-housed on the city periphery; the cities were getting rid of the slums and the poor were getting housing. This was in fact a way to create segmented cities he said. Miloon Kothari, the former special Rapporteur on housing for the UN Housing Rights Commission, used the term Apartheid Cities, to depict segmentation.

A good example of pro-active public policies in Asia was the case of public housing in Hong Kong and Singapore, presented by Prof. Yue-man Yueng. In these small countries, during the 1960s to 1980s period, the State was able to ensure access of all city dwellers to affordable public housing. These small countries then shifted to the State enabling housing provision in the decade of 1990s, when the private sector stepped in. But, the earlier years of the nation formation, public housing played a significant role. So was the case in cities in China upto beginning of 1990s. In contrast, the South-east Asian countries, where slum formation had taken roots due to rapid urbanization, shifted from no role of the State to enabling role of the State – the State assisted slum upgradation programmes initiated by the poor communities by themselves or through the enabling role of the state. Successful examples of such an approach were illustrated for the Thailand and Indonesia later in the workshop.

In contrast to the achievements of some Asian countries in ensuring Housing Rights to all, Miloon Kothari narrated the situation of violation of Housing Rights in most Asian countries as of now. He said that very large number of people, given the sheer size of Asian population, were living in insecure housing conditions today than before, with poor quality housing and prone to evictions. This was the situation, cutting across the different political regimes in Asia.

The examples he cited were: During 2003-06, over 3 million people were forcefully evicted from their homes and lands in Asia during 2003-06. From 2006 onwards, estimated 600,000 more have been evicted from their homes. Given the sensitivity, these data are not accurate and one may be correct to presume that the real numbers may be on the higher side. It is therefore important to have adequate data on this aspect. If one looks at country-wise estimates: In 2003 in Jakarta 20,000 were evicted. In Manila, the metro project caused eviction of about 200,000, probably the largest eviction ever in metro Manila. In China, 3-5 million people have been evicted in the past decade. In India, the largest one time eviction has taken place in Mumbai during December 2004 to March 2005, when 350,000 people were evicted. What is striking across all these cases is that people were neither informed nor consulted before the evictions. In Delhi 60 per cent of those evicted in the last decade have not been resettled.

Miloon also referred to kind of developments that are taking place in Indian cities. He said that on one hand there was land grabbing going on by the land mafia, developers and the public agencies, independently and in cahoots with each other, there were no land available to house the poor. Large-scale projects were displacing the poor to marginal lands causing Apartheid Cities. In fact the government authorities have been in forefront of grabbing lands from the poor in the name of development or for speculation purposes. Miloon gave call for a Rights Based Approach to Shelter Security.

To this, Prof. Ashwani Saith, the chair of the first technical session, put forward a key question: How to make these rights happen? He said that it was agreed that the matter of Rights was not just Constitutionalism – matter of Constitution conferring rights – but make the rights happen was key. Hence, the advocacy should not be only on that there should be rights-based approach but to lay down the parameters of rights. In the context of this workshop it would mean defining, shelter security, security of housing, type of housing, its costs, technology, and so on. Thus, to make rights happen there has to be a macro policy, which is now the Keynesianism, and also micro strategies answering the detailed questions in particular context. He said, that it was an irony that in the macro policy today, there is a consensus around Keynesianism. When the same philosophy was proposed for the poor it was called a profligacy but when the same philosophy is coming to the rescue of the rich, the policy is in the benefit of all. Thus, when the policy came to rescue the rich, the rights of the poor have been discovered! In short, there is a need to Construct the rights of the urban poor in details.

Harsh Mander placed before the workshop the issue of homelessness and problems of the homeless of Delhi. In his presentation, “Living Rough, Homelessness and State Hostility” he said that the state tends to be at constant war with the urban poor. With regards to the rural poor, there is some engagement of the State, but, with the urban poor it seems that the State only has duties against them, being pushed out, as they struggle to organize their livelihoods, organize their shelter. He said that while the urban poverty, even though more starkly visible to the makers of policy, has engaged the governments in India far less than rural poverty, both in terms of the range of interventions and the scale of financial outlays. He also said that in the cities, there was a hierarchy of legitimate citizenship. There is a sense of illegitimate citizenship for poor who migrate to cities for work. This emanates from the middle class prejudices. The self-help efforts of the urban poor to develop their own livelihoods can be strengthened and nurtured only in an alternate policy and legal regime which is favourable to the urban poor. The economic contribution of people living in poverty in urban areas to the urban economy needs to be acknowledged by decriminalizing their livelihoods, and positively earmarking significant locations in the city centres for their livelihoods at accessible prices, and with transparent and speedy procedures, for petty urban producers. At the same time, the unorganized labour force needs to be extended effective protection of the law, to protect their wages, health, and their safety and security.

All the speakers addressing the macro context raised the following issues:

Housing Options, Resettlement vs Upgradation, and Land Tenure Complexities in India
Number of cases from the Indian cities were presented in the workshop. Renu Khosla presented the study titled ‘Economics of Resettlement’, which is a comparative study of resettled slum households in Delhi vis-à-vis the upgraded slums in Mumbai. The study highlighted the path not to be taken to give shelter security to the poor. The current housing projects for the poor including those undertaken through JNNURM funds, are far out of the city. It is generally believed that resettlement was better than evictions without resettlement. This study by Renu Khosla showed that even resettlement, if far out of the city harmed the poor. Her findings were:

Raju Bhise, of Youth for Voluntary Action (YUVA) presented the case of what was the current situation of those evicted in Mumbai in 2004-05. He stated that this massive forced eviction in Mumbai displaced over more than 48 communities and more than 90,000 families. The communities struggled and got back land for resettlement in their original place. But not all could be resettled as the system is aggressive and the people were not empowered enough to counter the powerful force of the state and the market. Those who had some support could continue to struggle and got their claims back on the original lands, others could not. Of those evicted, nearly half have either gone back to their native places due to loss of livelihoods or are still homeless. Because of lack of shelter, every monsoon they suffer with water borne disease like diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid, etc. Cases of malnourishment are now found in these communities. Also, the Municipal Corporation denies them access to basic services like drinking water, sanitation, healthcare, education etc. The children lost one year in school. They are therefore forced to pay more for the basic services. An example is access to water: the evicted dwellers pay Rs. 4/- per litre of water in the open illegal market but citizens with tenure rights and living in legal housing pay just Rs. 2.50 for 1000 litres. Hence, without tenure they tend to live a life full of exploitation by the local economic mafias and the political class. Raju finally questioned the development model that created a class of exploited and marginalized population in the cities. He said that legal tenure is the first demand of the people’s movement along with the welfare state playing the role of a provider of basic services.

The presentation by Mr. I.P. Gautam, the Municipal Commissioner of Ahmedabad City was on the BSUP projects planned and implemented in the City. Of particular interest was the fact that these projects, contrary to the expectation, were to a great extent dispersed all over the city and not concentrated in the segments outside the city. The lands of the closed textile mills – Ahmedabad was a textile centre for long and was known as the Manchester of India – have also been recycled for BSUP project. The workshop participants visited one such BSUP site on the 13th of February, with the facilitation of the AMC. But, he also said that the BSUP projects are rehabilitating the slum dwellers to be evicted due to the development projects, namely the Sabarmati Riverfront project, road widening projects and so on.

The discussant of the second technical session, Prof. JH Ansari warned about the impacts of increasing inequalities and marginalization in Indian cities. He said that this was to be a sure recipe of violence and disaster.

The presentation by Bijal Bhatt, in the panel discussion on Indian cities on day two, explained the need to understand the complexities of land tenure granting process, based on the MHT’s projects in Ahmedabad City. She said that 75 per cent of the slums in Ahmedabad were on private lands where it was not possible to confer legal titles, given that legalization of land tenure is by the local governments. She said that the slum dwellers pay a fee (charges) to the private landowners and stay on the lands without any legal land title but with other rights conferred on them such as property tax bill in their name, electricity bill in their name, electoral card in their name and so on. In contrast, when the State comes in the picture and if the slum dwellers are on the State lands, they are evicted immediately. In other words, the slum dwellers tend to loose their rights when the State comes into picture! She also said that the slum dwellers are even willing to invest for sanitation and water, and some private owners allow and some do not. In case the private land owners do not allow to get basic services then the question of legal land right arises. When the MHT begun the process to get the slum dwellers legal right to land, it was realised that nine documents were required for the purpose. Hence, the process of getting legal land tenure is very complex and also very expensive for the slum dwellers. At the moment there is no other way to do so except this.

Amita Bhide, based on her vast experience of working on slums in Mumbai said that the struggles of the poor for housing rights are largely invisible. The Mandala (the slum demolished in Mumbai in 2004-05) experience in Mumbai is interesting because the struggles have been brought to a public domain over the last four-five years through the intervention of Ghar Banao Andolan, an affiliate of National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM). Indira Nagar, Janata Nagar are two slum communities that have grown around the peripheries of the low income colony of Shivajinagar in the eastern suburb of Mumbai. The name ‘Mandala’ is the popular name of the settlement. 4000 families from all over India stay here. Mandala is located on a ‘No development Zone’ land, under the jurisdiction of the collector. The initial period, people here remember eviction as a monthly affair. People resiliently stuck on; they also started making some improvements to settlement and to their houses. By 2004, Mandala was a hustling community that did not have any legal status or civic amenities such as water, electricity, toilets but was a home to 4000 plus households. In 2004-05, there was an intense demolition drive in Mumbai that razed almost 85,000 hutments all over the city. The Mandala community was one of the 18 communities that were totally demolished in this drive. This was the first time that the hitherto ‘private’ and individual struggles of citizens entered the public domain. They joined hands with other evictees in the city and became part of demands to extend the cut-off date from 01-01-95 to 01-01-2001 as per electoral promise, to have a rational, a long term policy.

It is extremely critical to note that the issue of tenure is very different for the people and for Government institutions. While the ‘State’ and other dominant approaches link tenure to land; tenure is important for the poor as part of a right to be in the city. For the urban poor, tenure is a part of an overall right to live in the city that includes access to education, health, food, water, toilets, work, being part of voter lists and shelter.

If the objective of tenure  is to facilitate a secure existence for the poor and pave the way for consolidation of assets; there is a need to make carefully balanced decisions between individual and settlement security; households level security, occupiers and ‘owners’ convergence and coexistence of diverse systems.

C. Ramachandraiah gave the gloomy picture of land scams in and around Hyderabad City, known for Information Technology firms. In the recent years three broad trends have dominated the land sector in public policy in and around Hyderabad city. (i) Regularization of government lands occupied by the rich and upper middle classes either for building houses or for commercial establishments. (ii) Removal of the poor from their places of living, even if they have been living there for a long time, to make way for construction of commercial or office buildings. (ii) Large scale allocation of lands by the government to private companies for establishment of special economic zones, information technology parks, real estate ventures etc. and facilitate corporate land grabbing in a big way. This has also resulted in forcible takeover of lands from farmers around the city by the government as well as corporate real estate players.

About 15,000 acres of land is estimated to have been given to the private companies around the city in the last few years. Simultaneously, land holding rights (pattas) of about 17,000 people have been cancelled. The poor were relocated to the social housing units constructed by the government, 3 km away, but the new units did not have basic amenities in place and they were away from the work place. Effectively, livelihoods of hundreds were adversely affected. The government lands must be kept in public domain for future needs and slum redevelopment in-situ should be preferred to slum relocation. The trend in Hyderabad indicates the opposite and is harmful to the public interest.

P.S.N. Rao spoke on the process of increased land allocation for the SEZs on one hand and marginalization of the urban poor on the other.

Lastly, there was one presentation on shelter security for the domestic women workers, presented by Divya Sharma and Sharanya Bhattacharya, based on a study carried out by the Institute of Social Studies Trust, New Delhi. They said that there are two types of domestic workers, live-out and live-in, those living with the household. The live-in workers are mainly single without immediate family in the city. These are very young and only know similar live-in workers. There are cases of harassment, including sexual harassment. “Where else can girls like us find such proper work? We get food and a roof over our heads. If your employer is good, you get a good family too. My madam loves me. No other job allows all this.” In times of harassment or facing poor working conditions, housing is the key variable that can allow women to exit jobs and look for more preferred options. Men appear to be in a stronger position to find alternative shelter on their own, as they can approach the low end rental markets.—hostels, shared flats. Shelter plays a strong role in defining the terms of labour and bargaining between agencies, employers and lives in domestic workers. Some of these workers work for 12-18 hours. Few girls stay in the city forever. This only happens if they get a god like employer or a god like husband!!

Approaches to Shelter Security in Asia and Latin America
The content in this section is based on the presentations in the panel discussion and also detailed paper presentations made at the workshop. The first panel discussion included cases from China, Thailand, Malaysia and Latin American countries. The papers were presented on Migrant Housing in China, slum upgradation in Indonesia and community mobilization for land regularization in Karachi.

David Westendorff stated that the case of China was not particularly attractive for inclusive housing policies, in particularly the short term and medium term policies and not the long-term. Also, it was becoming difficult across the Asian countries to make the governments agree that if people have to be moved for some projects (because of the eminent domain notion), the costs have to be part of the project. He said that either the people have to be empowered to access those rights and make their lives better, or the State steps in to confer these rights. One that was worth noting was ‘Mutual assistance housing’ in Montevideo that has show some positive trends. This city also has a decentralized and participatory urban governance system.

Marcelo Medeiros, a visiting fellow at IHD that the metropolitanization was unavoidable. But, the 'economic development' alone as a policy was insufficient response to the problems of metropolitan areas; governments have to do what markets can not, thus taxation and public spending are major issues in urban planning. Also, institutional arrangements for taxation and spending of public money based on geographical areas that do not coincide with the city are probably inadequate; administrative institutions have to reflect the real geographical dispersion of the cities. Further, urban land reform has to be put on the political agenda. He stated that the government spending in urban utilities and services has to increase, but the distribution of the current spending also has to improve.

The issue of urban land reforms was picked up by Thipparat Noppaladarom, of Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI), Bangkok. CODI’s experience showed that the giving of land tenure to the slum dwellers was a way of carrying forward the agenda of land reform in the cities. She presented the large success of slum upgradation is Bangkok city, with part of the funds coming as grant from the government and partly from the community through housing loans given by CODI from the revolving funds. CODI has evolved institutional mechanism to do so. From January 2004 to January 2009, the achievements in slum upgradation throughout Thailand have been:

Of the total upgradation done by CODI, 66 per cent were upgraded or their housing reconstructed on site, 11 per cent were relocated in nearby sites, 22 per cent were relocated on distant sites and about half a per cent families were homeless who got a house. The land tenure solution was: long-term lease for 44 per cent, cooperative land ownership for 38 per cent, short-term lease for 9 per cent and just permission ot use land (that is de facto tenure) for another 9 per cent.

Darshini Mahadevia’s comparative study of migrants’ housing in China and India – the China part taken up in collaboration with Prof. Liu Zhiyan and Xiuming Yuan of Regional Centre for Urban Development & Economy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing, showed that inspite of entirely different institutional context in both the countries and inspite China’s economic growth strongly linked to the migrants while that in India not, the migrants in both the countries have lower housing quality as compared to the permanent residents, their housing quality is tied to the type of work, their settlements tend to be on the periphery of the city through the market and non-market forces and the migrants subvert the legal structures to access housing. The difference between the two countries is that in China, housing mobility is only through income mobility as far as migrants are concerned whereas in India, it is due to, besides income mobility through state policy such as giving of tenurial rights and community actions.

Case of community’s struggle for land tenure in Karachi in Pakistan, a paper of Collective for Social Science Research (CSSR) and presented by Pooja Shah on behalf of Haris Gazdar and his team. Researchers from CSSR could not be present because of geo-political situation prevailing in South Asia at the time of the workshop. The CSSR study illustrates that a community’s struggle towards residential land security could be a vector of social transformation. At the time of partition, in Karachi, while migrant officers were housed in vacated houses, migrants escaping communal riots and violence in India were settled in tent camps. These tent camps continued to grow and slowly took the shape of Katchi Abadis (temporary settlements). In the following years, these low cost alternative-housing attracted labourers migrating from other areas of Pakistan as well as impoverished refugees seeking settlement. Between 1947 and 1972, Government’s attempts to demolish Katchi Abadis and resettle residents which encroached the prime land in the heart of the city repeatedly failed. Residents kept rebuilding their makeshift houses after each demolition and the Abadis mushroomed. The government realized that regularization instead of resettlement would be a more cost effective option. The government started supplying electricity to these settlements in 1988 and gas in 1990.  Examples of successful struggles against demolition demonstrate a community’s ability to exercise their capacity at legal and political engagement. With residential security, residents of Katchi Abadi’s enjoy an improved standard of living as well as increased access public goods and services.

Andy Siswanto showed that the process of managing to secure the land tenure in Indonesia was a long and drawn out process as land was on the prime location and so according to the Government officials it was impossible for them to grant the tenure. In fact the government legislation had blocked the possibility of self-help housing. So a cost – benefit analysis in terms of spill-over effects that tenure can provide to the society was taken up. First the central government and the parliament were approached, then the politicians were convinced. The politicians promised to grant the tenure and the community was also involved in the upgradation process to a large extent and only a small fraction of the investment came from the Government. Banks, professionals like doctors and engineers were the main investors. But the core investor was the community. A model like this is highly replicable elsewhere, provided that the people are patient enough to involve the community.

He said that the self-help housing is still relevant for developing countries, inspite of the success of public housing in some countries of Asia. Self-help housing depends on the level of land tenure security. He also said that water is the most important facility that the people want, followed by road, electricity and gas, then drainage and then public transport. Higher the security, more the infrastructure investment and higher would be value. He illustrated different self-help projects implemented in Indonesia. The question is, how different this approach was from Kampung Improvement Programme and what are the implications on various groups in the slum after improvement. Also, a question of whether there has been gentrification post slum development.

Concluding Issues
The last session summarized the workshop and also listed the issues that were discussed and also laid forth the future activities. Rutul Joshi, Rutool Sharma and Pooja Shah prepared the workshop report and Sarah Cook summarized the issues that came up for discussion along with the agenda for future.

The questions raised were:

The link of Shelter security and social protection are:

In particular, number of issues with regards to urban land were raised. These were:

            Acceptance of this approach is not accepted either by ULBs or private land owners or developers

The questions raised with regards to land and land tenure were:

The field visit
The first shelter programme visited was Mahila Housing Trust (MHT)’s participatory shelter project in a slum named Sanjaynagar, located in the Amraiwadi, an industrial ward of Ahmedabad. The participants are the community, the MHT and the local government, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC). The second project visited is of the local government, the AMC, under the first major urban development programme named the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) funded by the national government. The youth training programme for employment purposes managed by the NGO Saath, which has now been adopted for all the cities in India was the last stop during the field work. Saath also has set up Urban Resource Centres for empowering the local communities to take up and address the issues related to local services was also visited by the group. The local government, the AMC gave lunch to the workshop participants on the day of the field visit.