TWO YEARS ON

In 1986, the small group of women who formed the original nucleus of Mahila Milan had decided they would no longer take the regular demolition of their huts lying down. They determined to organise themselves and to fight back to find land where they could build legal and permanent homes of their own. At that first publlic meeting on October 30, 1986, Medina and Samina, both illiterate Muslim women, confidently predicted that in six months they'd have achieved their goals.

I didn’t return until April 1988. I wanted to see if they’d gotten anywhere. But first, Sheela Patel told me to visit Dindoshi, right at the northern tip of the city, in the jungle.
The outlines of people’s faces have become a blur for me. But Dindoshi the place I can never forget.. Dindoshi back then then was almost the furthermost border of the city. An hour from the city centre. A group of four thousand pavement dwellers has quite literally been uprooted from the streets around Racecourse in the heart of the city, and dumped here. Rented land by the city and told to build themselves houses.

Dindoshi looks like a refugee camp plonked down on the side of a hill covered with what Indians call Jungle - brush and low trees. By now, word has spread that someone's come from the city. Everyone, including their aunt, empties out of their houses to come and gawk at me.

Their houses have walls of brick. But no mortar. They're held together with hope. The roofs are sheets of corrugated iron. Cheap and especially nasty in summer.
One man, drunk on country liquor, desperately wants to chat me up. And probably touch me up for a few Rupees.
And I, of course, smile gamely because I don't really understand what he's saying.
“Why did you decide to come here?” I ask. Silly question. They didn’t have any choice. The city - the Municipality -made the decision for them.
“Would you...if you'd had your own free will, would you have stayed living on the street?”
Moti, the spokesman for the group. Says without hesitation: “Of course, we would have stayed on there.” They had work, their homes, their friends.
There is Tardeo and Byculla, on the shaded pavements near the Bombay Racecourse. Their huts have been torn down. Sadly, nothing unusual 'bout that.
But this time they and their belongings were loaded into trucks, dumped here without further ceremony, and told: "This is your land. Be thankful and now get on and build your homes"
Of course, it couldn't really work and it hasn't. For Moti and most of the others, that is the problem in a nutshell: no work.
“We all go in the bus, and we take the train from the main (station) and we go to town to work and come back.”
“So you go back to where you used to work everyday! How long does that take you?
Moti makes garlands of fresh flowers on the pavement outside Dadar Station, the sort of thing you take to the temple or drape over your doorway on an auspicious day.
But out here on the edge of the jungle, there's no station, no commuters, no temple, no worshipers. And no fresh flowers either!
So, every morning, Moti walks to the main road, hops on a bus to the nearest railway station and spends four hours a day commuting to and from her work in Dadar.
“When do you get back?”
“I'll go now and I'll come back 11 in the night.”
But if most of them had the option they'd never come back at 11 in the night.
“If the Municipality said: "You can go back to the street you were living on. We won't ever tear it down again!" Would you go back?”
A chorus: “Yes!..You see, the problem is that we would still go back, given the chance, for the simple reason, though the facilities are not there but we have work there, and it's nearby, and we don't have work here, so the problem is earning. There's no place here to get the work. We'll sell this place if we get a chance and go back
Many of the new householders are so fed up they've already done precisely that. Sold up and moved back to Racecourse and the pavement. Sure, they have running water and toilets, even a primary school here in Dindoshi.
But there simply is no work. It's as simple as that. And they can't afford the commute. One women says it costs her 200 Rupees a month. She only earns 800 selling vegetables on the pavement in Byculla. You can't make ends meet on that.
To these people Dindoshi the place is a curse. A bureaucrat's dream and a pavement dweller's nightmare.
A few hundreds beyond Dindoshi there's a gleaming white building set in immaculate green lawns. Looks like a palace or a corporate headquarters.
I ask Moti: “What is that building? “
”Oh, that is the development for the big people.”
It is a palace of a sorts. It's the offices of the Indira Gandhi Cooperative Development Bank!
“It's done for the leaders. Not for us!”
Two weeks later. The Scene: a schoolyard off Peerkahn Road in Byculla. The Speaker: Medina, unofficial school custodian and President of Mahila Milan. The subject: Dindoshi, of course. Medina is puffed up with pride and indignation.
“I have lived with pride. I will die with pride. I will not go to a place like that!”
“Could you just explain to me "why not!" What's wrong with it?”
“We do not need to go to that place. We've got our jobs secure in this area. If we go to such a far place we have no security, no job. We have to spend so much on travel...who the hell wants to go so far?”
“OK. But can you find a piece of land just in this area?”
“Maybe we cannot read and write. But our eyes are open. We can see vacant spaces around. The government says there is no place. The government has allocated money for the poor which never reaches us. But we are going to find out. We are searching. We keep finding out from sources who can tell us, and we are going to make it some day.”
“Have you found a piece of land that you want to build on?” Medina deflects the question and launches into her political speech.
“I have not got any formal school. But I've gone through three years of training programs with all these guys, and we have learnt something. We've benefitted a little bit out of all this. We've learnt to talk to government officials. We've learnt that if we come together we can negotiate for something, and we have the hope that we will get it.”
And Medina's learnt one very practical lesson.
“If you have money nobody can say anything to you. So, we've also kept our money ready. You procured this microphone because you had the money to buy it. Similarly, we are going to get our land because we made the arrangement for it.”
“Now you say We. Previously, it was I. So does that mean that you've organised yourselves as a group?” Remember it’s been almost eighteen months since I was last here, and that first visit was only for three days.
“All the women are together.”
“When did you start organising yourselves?”
“Late 1985. Now we’re about 600 members.”
Medina says there are many pavement people watching and waiting before committing themselves to the new organisation. Getting a house is the goal. But now, it's not the only”It may be that we never get a house. But for us, our organisation is more important!”
A little phrase. But it's not pro forma. As the years go by "our organisation is more important than even getting a house" will come to seem more and more prophetic. But for now I’m still exploring what the hell has been going on, following Journalism 101 on ow to ask basic questions.
“Now you talked about money. Have you started to save money, therefore, to try and buy a house? To buy a piece of land?: Medina launches into one of her impassioned war cries.
“Baroda Bank, Zindabad! You ring up the Manager and ask him how much we have in the bank! ..we've got more than two lakhs.”
For sic hundred of you? That's a lot of money!”
In the general euphoria, a tall, thin woman who's been listening to Medina now steps forward. She's wearing a pair of glasses, her face is well-traveled and her name is Sagira. Sagira comes from Bihar. She writes songs! Her song is dedicated to the then-Prime Minister - Rajiv Gandhi.
“We come from the the village, hungry and thirsty. We make our huts on the footpath and live there. We pick scrap and garbage. We keep the place clean. We earn our keep.”
“But the police beat us with sticks and harass us. Rajiv Gandhi - please help us! There's nothing for us back in the village. Bombay's our only hope. We're not asking for free food or clothes. Just a hut of our own.”
“The Supreme Court has decided against us. All our enemies are now hunting us with knives and spears. As long as we stick together we will never be defeated. But please help us get our houses, please.”
Later that afternoon, back in Mahila Milan's garage cum office. Sheela Patel, social activist and driving force behind SPARC, the small development organisation that’s helping the women of Mahila Milan, fills me in with with what’s been happening since I was last here.
“The demolitions per se have not reduced very drastically.”
“They are still doing it?
“They are still doing it, irrationally. It still works out that they break down these houses, and they come up the next day. But the difference is that the people have changed!”
Sheela and her fellow social workers have been training the pavement dwellers to think and take decisions for themselves. One of the first things is to design houses that make sense for them, that they can build and mantain for themselves. They've come up with four models.
Those designs are up on the wall. The winning house is a fourteen foot high room with a mezzanine that serves as a loft for sleeping. Simple to build, and it almost doubles the total living area. And, most important, the pavement dwellers designed it themselves.
A few months earlier, they built these four models for real, out of scrap wood near the Racecourse, and sent out invitations to anyone who was anyone in low-income housing: the man from the city, the man from the State of Maharashtra, the man from the Housing Ministry in New Delhi, even the man from the World Bank Housing Scheme.
“And these four came?”
“They came! Everybody came.”
“And what did they learn?”
“They learnt, they learnt a lot!..that was a very important turning point. And in a lot of ways all those things which we were doing before that..which were considered by everybody to be slightly crazy, suddenly became very legitimate.”
But there are still a lot of myths and misconceptions flying about. One of them is that Sheela and her fellow social workers in SPARC are running the show, calling the shots, imposing their values, their wishes on the poor, illiterate pavement dwellers.
Sheela says it simply isn't so! The pavement dwellers don't want to live like this for ever and ever!
“I do not see how I can bequeath this pavement to my grandchild. I want something better for my grandchild. My children have grown up here. I don't see this as a good place for my grandchildren. So, I want something better than this!”
“And right now, we're getting government to see that people are not these apathetic, idiotic, foolish people who they figure them out to be. You know, we have people who come and say: "Oh! These poor pavement dwellers!" Or "These poor, shelterless people."
“But they are only poor financially. They are very strong people and they have a lot of convictions. They have a lot of talents, and they are not weak in that sense....and the most exciting thing is that people see a role for themselves in this whole replanning, and they feel very capable of planning this.”
The proof of the pudding's in the eating. Back to Medina and Munni of Mahila Milan in the school yard on Peerkahn Road. Munni is small, pretty and charismatic.
“No, we're not planning to stay here. We've very much in favor of moving out. In fact, we are doing the Housing Training Scheme. All of us are in it together. And we are saving in the bank, and we've seen our land, and with all the work, is all going on for our housing, and we are not interested in staying here, but being resettled.”
Medina, puffing away furiously on a bidi, bursts in with a declaration of supreme sacrifice.
“We'll cut down on our smoking bidis, you know, if we have to travel back here for work everyday. But I’ll do that if I have to. Now I smoke. If I smoke two bidis now, I'll be smoking one bidi then, and this way we'll be able to, you know, do the traveling.”
The forced resettlement to Dindoshi in 1988 is now generally acknowledged to have been exactly how not to resettle pavement dwellers. Ironically, the handful who survived are now doing very well indeed, thank you. .