A roof for the homeless
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COMMENTS 
Karnataka has come up with a draft housing policy which, while recognising housing as a need, does not recognise it as a ‘right’. Moreover, only 10% of the housing is for the socially and economically weaker sections, and the government has positioned itself as a ‘facilitator’ rather than as a ‘provider’, with the stated objective of involving the private sector
The 112 families of soothsayers who had been living for more than 30 years in the Deshyanagar slum in the north of Bangalore were to be moved out to free new housing in a multi-storey building under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. But the Slum Board refused to provide them transit housing during the 18 months it would take to build their new homes, saying it was not a requirement under the JNNURM guidelines. “Aren’t you happy we are going to give you a free house? Just adjust somehow for one-and-a-half years,” they were told.
A community of 40 skilled cane-weaving families which had lived for generations in the Medarahatti slum near KR Road in Bangalore was rendered homeless when their slum was razed to make way for the Metro project. Since their slum was unrecognised, they received no compensation from the Metro officials. More than 200 policemen provided protection to the Metro officials during the demolition. Most of the male slum-dwellers were beaten up and some women who protested were detained by the police. The families now sleep in the open, exposed to the vagaries of the weather. A Metro official told them that the corporation would be able to provide compensation if the slum-dwellers provided some documents.
Some 253 families living in Veerabhadra slum in the south of Bangalore for 14 years were rudely woken up one morning by bulldozers belonging to NICE (Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise) which is building the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC). Without giving any notice to the slum-dwellers, the bulldozers and hundreds of policemen brought down their meagre homes. Even their frugal vessels were loaded into a lorry and taken away.
The above examples show the merciless way the homeless are shunted out by alleged infrastructure and development projects in big cities.
You see the homeless everywhere: by the roadside, on pavements, huddled under plastic sheets or cooking in the open, while their children run around semi-naked, urinating and defecating everywhere. Or they may be at construction sites, inside dark tin sheds that lack windows, doors, toilets and drinking water. They may be in slums, with their labyrinthine alleys next to a drain or on ‘unauthorised’ land, which gets flooded when it rains.
Though housing is recognised as a fundamental right under several international conventions and our own Supreme Court rulings, the homeless and slum-dwellers live in constant fear and are the first to be evicted under mega infrastructure or city beautification projects.
Karnataka has come out with a Draft Housing Policy which hopefully will ensure all of them a roof over their heads. But, “the policy calls housing a mere ‘need’ and not a ‘right’ and that makes all the difference,” says Clifton D’Rosario of the Alternative Law Forum.
One expects a policy to set out the means to overcome the housing shortage within a time-frame and estimate the cost involved and suggest how it can be funded. Ninety-eight per cent of the housing shortage -- more than 24 million units -- in the country concerns the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) and Low Income Groups (LIG) as per the 10th Plan. But Karnataka’s draft housing policy talks of reserving merely 10% of the residential zone in all Master Plans and “10 to 15% of land in every new public/private housing project for EWS/LIG housing”. This means that 85% to 90% will go to those who are not EWS/LIG. This is even less than the required earmarking of 25% for EWS/LIG in all housing projects mandated under JNNURM.
One does not also see why public sector bodies such as the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) and the Karnataka Housing Board (KHB) provide subsidised sites and housing to high income groups, who could be expected to get these from the open market. Unless 98% of housing in all public sector housing projects is earmarked for the EWS and LIG over a period of time, the backlog will only keep mounting. In addition to this, 20-25% in all private housing layouts could also be earmarked for the poor.
Confusing and conflicting figures have been given for the housing shortage in Karnataka: that there are 14.35 lakh houseless families in the state but that the shortage is only of 6.62 lakh units and that the core housing shortage is only 1.63 lakh. However, what is clearly stated is that the housing deprivation among SC/ST accounts for more than 51% of the overall housing shortage.
The policy states that since 2003-04, around 11.80 lakh houses have been constructed by the government. If 11.80 lakh houses could be built over a period of six years, meeting the present shortage of 6.62 lakh units should be a very achievable target in the next few years. Yet the policy abdicates the government’s responsibility to provide the fundamental right to housing by claiming that “due to magnitude of the shortage and budgetary constraints the public sector efforts will not be sufficient”; that “there is an urgent need to involve the private sector”; and that the role of the government needs to change from that of “builder and provider” to “facilitator”. However, one needs to point out that in Singapore -- a city which all policymakers would love to emulate – 80% of its residents are housed in public housing. Isaac Arul Selva of Slum Jagatthu points out that “there is a shift in the Draft Policy from ‘subsidy’ to ‘cost sharing’ or ‘cost recovery’ and the aim of the government is to provide houses only to those who are ‘willing’ and can ‘afford’ to pay for houses, which could very well exclude all the genuinely poor.”
One hears often of state-level authorities and Industrial Areas Development Boards acquiring land under the Land Acquisition Act using the principle of ‘eminent domain’ and creating land banks for the purpose of setting up industries or special economic zones (SEZs), which are often for ‘private’ purpose. But when it comes to acquiring land and creating land banks for providing housing, especially to slum-dwellers and the urban poor, the refrain is always that there is no land available or that the process of acquiring such land is tortuous and long-winded. It is not very well known that Section 3 (v) and 3(vi) of the Land Acquisition Act expressly state that “public purpose” includes acquiring land for the purpose of housing the homeless and the poor and rehabilitating slums. Why not invoke the principle of ‘eminent domain’ for this obviously ‘public purpose’?
“Actually, the alleged scarcity of urban land itself is a myth,” says Clifton D’Rosario. In Bangalore, for instance, the recent AT Ramaswamy Report has disclosed that more than 20,000 acres of urban land has been encroached upon, often by influential persons. The government, instead of using this land to house the poor and make Bangalore slum-free -- as it often proclaims it wants to do -- was instead auctioning the recovered lands to fill the coffers of the government. Selva points out that the slums presently occupy very little land and this could be used for in situ housing without any need to shift slum-dwellers elsewhere.
It is often not recognised that slums are a result of the failure of employers who employ casual and contract workers to provide housing for them, as foreseen under various laws, such as the Inter-State Migrant Workmen’s Act, the Building and Other Construction Workers’ Act, etc. This failure could be made good by constructing workers’ colonies in each ward, which the companies could be asked to rent to provide housing for their casual workers.
The 138th report of the Law Commission also stresses that either the state should ensure payment of optimum wages, due perks and allowances for housing for the unorganised sector or make sure that employers fulfill the responsibility of providing housing to their permanent and temporary employees, especially the contract workers. The Alternative Law Forum in its recommendations to a civil society manifesto for Bangalore’s Municipal Corporation elections has demanded that no sanction to construct buildings etc, should be given unless the builder submits and gets approved a detailed 'Construction Workers’ Residential Quarters and Living Conditions Plan', providing housing, latrines, water supply, electricity, creches, etc, to the workers.
When employers fail to provide housing to their workers and force them to set up squatter settlements, the burden of providing housing to them falls on the government. It will have to do this using tax-payers’ money, which amounts to a subsidy paid to the employers in this regard. The International Labour Organisation Recommendation No 115 concerning Worker's Housing makes it mandatory for national housing policies to take up workers’ housing programmes and allot these on the basis of priority, undertake slum re-housing, maintain minimum housing standards for decency, hygiene and comfort and give special attention to the particular problem of housing migrant workers.
Not everybody needs to own their home, especially not those who come to the city as migrant workers, who stay for a short duration of two or three months and go back to their native places. The need of this section is for affordable rental housing. A certain percentage of land needs to be earmarked in the Master Plan, and the government needs to create a pool of social rental housing (with water and sewerage and other amenities) in every ward and provide subsidy on the rent to the poor. In some countries, the government fixes a rent-geared-to-income, that is, the rent is fixed at 30% of total household income for social housing. Availability of social rental housing is often three times that of ownership housing in many countries. Only such a measure can prevent squatter settlements from coming up. Night shelters also need to be provided in each ward for those who cannot afford even the social rental housing.
“Currently a standard 225 to 265 sq ft is the norm for housing for the poor, but this does not appear to be based on any minimum requirements for healthy living for a standard family,” says social activist Rajendran Prabhakar. In some countries, every house is supposed to have at least 150 sq ft of habitable floor area for the first occupant and another 100 sq ft for each of the next three occupants. Kitchens are supposed to be at least 50 sq ft; bedrooms are to have a minimum width of 7 ft and at least 50 sq ft per person and 35 sq ft for each child under 12. This makes the absolute minimum area for a single-family house about 650 sq ft. No such norms are being followed here currently. Government needs to subsidise the cost appropriately if this size of house works out to be unaffordable for the poor. A house less than this standard minimum would lead automatically to unhealthy living.
The Draft Housing Policy appears to gloss over the squalid living conditions of the homeless and slum-dwellers. It appears to turn a blind eye to the gross human rights violations happening through the forced evictions of slums as it makes no reference to it and makes no commitment to abjure it in future. Its sanitised language fails to reflect or provide comfort to the constant turmoil that the homeless undergo every day.
(Kathyayini Chamaraj is a freelance journalist based in Bangalore who has been writing for over 20 years on development issues, especially on unorganised, women and child labour, primary education and urban development for Deccan Herald, The Hindu, India Together, etc. She is also Executive Trustee of CIVIC, Bangalore)
Infochange News & Features, April 2010