V Ramaswamy
Ayodhya, 6th December 1992, was a turning point in my life. The enforced curfews forced me to think and feel. The Muslim question in India, and the associated question of my own existential relation to my Muslim fellow-citizens, in flesh and blood, in my own city, and through my life and work – all these questions entered my being, and determined the course of my life in the subsequent years. This was not simply an intellectual matter, though, of course, the objective social, cultural, economic and political aspects also began to get fore-grounded in my thinking and observations. But it was fundamentally a personal, ethical and subjective matter, and one of attention to my own thought process, my conditioned subjectivity, and attention to the attitudes, expressions, views and actions of the different communities I was part of. It was also an innate yearning for union and partnership.
From 1996, I happened to engage with the question of Muslim bastis in Howrah, and in metropolitan Kolkata at large. For here, the nexus of poverty and environmental degradation appeared to have a significant impact, through gastro-intestinal and water-borne diseases, on infant and maternal mortality and morbidity. Thus began an action-research endeavour, which also had the support of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, towards understanding this, and trying to do something positive in that context. This was initiated through a state govt project, and then subsequently continued independently by me and my colleagues, through Howrah Pilot Project, a grassroots action organization, which we established in 1997.
The Right to Housing and Pedagogy
But there was another dimension to this whole process, as far as I was concerned. And that is the housing question, of Calcutta’s labouring poor. The question of the city’s squatters and slum-dwellers. My journey, of intellectual, civic and activist engagement with the labouring poor of metropolitan Kolkata began in 1984, when I began working with squatters facing imminent evictions, and joined the Chhinnamul Sramajibi Adhikar Samiti. I had wanted to work on pedagogy. As it turned out, through the journey and the quest for action to transform the cityscape, I arrived only at pedagogy. But that was in the cause of transformative action grassroots action.
The only solution, as I saw it, was community-led redevelopment of bastis, with enabling policy, legal and institutional efforts from the state. That required, most of all, community organizations in bastis, possessing the required awareness, capabilities, motivation, commitment, integrity, sustenance and ownership. Ownership of the vision, strategy and programme, of community action. The value of the land on which the basti-dwellers live is the only resource available in the system for redressing the immense social and human development gap between the basti-dwellers and the city mainstream. Based on this vision, a proposal was made for the city of Calcutta, for comprehensive renewal of blighted inner city neighbourhoods, in the canal-side area of Beliaghata-Manicktala.
But something like this required the action, across the spectrum of stakeholders, and with a bottom-up thrust and vision, through which a real transformation could be achieved, in the social and physical landscape of my city.
That is what I have been seeking. That is what I wanted to be engaged in. Something affecting the city I lived in, affecting my life, and the lives of people around me.
I arrived in Priya Manna Basti, in Howrah, in 1996 and shortly after that decided to personally work towards physical redevelopment, beginning with 1 basti plot. That was indeed foolhardy on my part. But since then I have been educated in the nitty-grittys of poverty and environmental degradation, thika tenancy, illegal building construction, illegal electricity, crime, party functioning and party affiliation, and on daily life in general in basti neighbourhoods.
I deduced that at the very heart of empowered community organizations must be empowered individuals. Achieving this empowerment, at the level of even 1 person – who then has a small nucleus around her - is exactly the process that has to be achieved at a mass scale, with its catalytic and critical mass effects. This is not a mechanical process, it is essentially a human, pedagogical process.
I mean “pedagogy” as in the title of Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Of course, pedagogy is also closely related to the question of education. Dr Siddiqui’s work in this field, about educating a backward minority, and the educational scenario of Kolkata’s Urdu-speaking minority – anyone concerned about this city, and anyone committed to transforming this city towards greater equity and social and economic justice, cannot ignore this work. Sohel Firdos has also undertaken a survey of poor houselholds in PM Basti in Howrah in 2005. That gives us a clear and insightful report on the nature of poverty in our city. Sohel has also undertaken an analysis of the politics of provision of civic amenities in Kolkata. Zakir Hussain too has written about education and slumdwellers in Kolkata.
What we need today is a programme to rescue the tattered fabric and poisoned ethos of this city, on a war-footing.
The road to city renewal
Dr Siddiqui is a genial and gentle person. But looking at the facts, even he is compelled to conclude that what we see is strategic deprivation of a community at large. And reading his analysis of Urdu-medium school system in Kolkata, one cannot but see what’s happening here as a form of ethnic cleansing, in this case ethnic crippling, through depriving a community of education. How it cripples and poisons, I have seen, in PM Basti.
Building leadership, capabilities and ownership among slum youth, through pedagogy, must lie at the core of any action plan. The focus of slum community youth action must be elementary education, and early intervention with poor children. These schools run by slum youth, for poor children, would be centres of pedagogy, the nucleus of slum transformation. They would be involved in pre-primary and primary education, adolescent girl intervention, back-to-school drives with school drop-outs, and literacy for child workers, illiterate youth and women. Not as funded NGOs, but as efforts emerging from the slum community.
If I were given the mandate and the power to define public policy and investment in the interests of Kolkata’s bastis and the city’s labouring poor – I would desist. For I do not, in all honesty, see anything coming out of that. It is like asking for the laws og gravity to be reversed. Substantive improvement in this specific local context, cannot but be from the bottom upwards. The existing conditions, and the long decades of neglect and toxification, the institutional vacuum and lack of capabilities, all make the notion of public policy a delusion. Bottom-up is slow. But its results are certain and enduring and strong. This can mean that with a 15-25 year perspective, one can really transform current reality. Which is the kind of time a phased physical renewal programme would anyway require. But no physical renewal programme has to contend with the Kolkata basti context. I don’t think something like that has been attempted in human history. And looking at the infrastructure side, and thinking at a city-wide and metropolitan scale, basti redevelopment can enable a radical physical transformation of the city.
The top-down would come, it would come subsequently. But public policy must first be preceded by public action, action in the public domain. By the public, by the people. Who see politics as engagement, together with basti-dwellers, in action in favour of the city’s labouring poor. For their rights, as equal citizens. And thus build the civil society of the city.
This city is waiting, for the vision of the empowerment of its marginalized citizens, to be owned in a meaningful sense, by its citizens.
See the city from here
The renowned Scottish town planner, Sir Patrick Geddes, had conceptualized something called an Outlook Tower, which he advocated for every city, so as to enable it to plan the city and its region. Howrah Pilot Project is also a kind of outlook tower, not looking out, out there, but looking in, from “there”, to the grassroots. Howrah Pilot Project is a live laboratory, of community action in the context of chronic poverty.
Image: from Joan Wink's Critical pedagogy: Notes from the real world.
