The National Advisory Council recently issued recommendations for changes to the Rajiv Awas Yojana, the slum-free cities program that the Congress government has been talking about since they were elected. The program has so far only been enacted as a pilot in certain cities, but it looks like the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation is gearing up for a larger scale project.

To my eyes, the design of the Rajiv Awas Yojana had left something to be desired. The danger in a program designed to create “slum-free cities” is that in practice, it would result in the widespread displacement of slums to the city’s outskirts rather than the accommodation of slum-dwellers in better quality homes with access to services within the city. There did not seem to be enough safeguards in the RAY against this happening. The NAC’s critiques address this issue and many others as well.

What are the NAC’s primary gripes with the current structure of the RAY? Firstly, they argue that the RAY’s definition of slums excludes many in the urban poor living in informal settlements. These include the “ultra-poor”: homeless people, people who live on the pavements, parks, vacant lands, and waste dumps, construction workers, and domestic workers who live in their employers’ houses. The NAC also argues that the definition of a slum used in the RAY, which requires any settlement of at least 20 households to be counted as a slum, leaves out the poor scattered in the city in smaller settlements who are usually the most vulnerable among slum dwellers. The NAC also notes that in some states, the RAY only covers those in notified slums, even though in cities like Chennai, new slums have not been recognized for decades. This has happened despite the RAY’s explicit focus on breaking down barriers between recognized and unrecognized slums.

Secondly, the NAC is concerned with increasing the transparency of the processes under the RAY and increasing citizen participation. The report argues that mapping and survey processes to determine the locations of eligible residents need to be widely publicized, and should be conducted by the Collector along with slum-dwellers and students (in Chennai, the Slum Board is using a consultant for this). The NAC also states that there needs to be an appeals process so that individuals and settlements that have been left out can appeal to be included. The current structure of the RAY leaves it up to cities to decide whether slum locations are tenable or not, or whether slums need to be relocated. The NAC suggests that decisions about tenability need to be taken through a specified process, and suggests that a committee with the Collector, officials, and slum-dwellers be formed to take decisions on tenability.

They also argue that the spaces for community participation currently built into the RAY are “rather passive,” and suggest changes to make community participation central to the scheme. These include making sure that community consultations are mandatory to all stages of RAY, from mapping to design to settlement. To ensure that community participation is not merely tokenistic, they say that the link between community participation and decision making needs to be clearly delineated and that successive disbursements of funds from the government should be premised on adequate participation. They also outline ways in which the capacities and responsibilities of CBOs in cities can be enhanced and institutionalized through the RAY, to further improve participation in the future.

Thirdly, the NAC is concerned with preventing current and future displacement of slums as much as possible. The RAY guidelines emphasize in-situ redevelopment, but the program does not have any incentives or structures in place to minimize slum relocation. Unfortunately, in most cities, eviction of slums and relocation to the outskirts – if they’re lucky! – has been the standard practice. And according to the NAC, the early test runs of the RAY have seen more of the same happening.

So how can RAY be restructured to prevent this from happening? Part of the problem will be addressed if procedures to decide whether slum-land is “tenable” or “viable” for in-situ redevelopment become less arbitrary and more transparent, which I discussed above. The NAC report also says that resettlement sites need to be selected and houses designed in consultation with residents. The NAC also suggests that for slum-dwellers on tenable land, full property rights should be granted to the individual, and the question of whether their title should be for the land or for the house should be left to the slum community as a whole to decide upon.

But the recommendations also look to the future – the report states that the RAY should reserve 25 to 40% of the land in the city for housing the urban poor. This seems like an awful lot of land, and unrealistic, especially given that slums occupy such a miniscule percentage of city lands now. Regardless, the NAC’s recommendations would go a long way towards rectifying some of the dangers of the RAY in its current form.

- Nithya V Raman

The Indian parliament enacted the Freedom of Information Act in 2002 which was repealed to formulate the Right to Information Act on October 12^th 2005.[1] The act was brought about to create transparency and reduce corruption by empowering petitioners with information relating to the work of public authority. But has it been effective? Does the petitioner get the required information from the concerned government body?

We at Transparent Chennai and CDF have filed several RTIs seeking information relating to public finance, environment and stocks of infrastructure to the respective government departments but have seldom received satisfactory answers.

Under the Act chapter 2- section7 (3), the reply to the petitioner should be sent within 30 days from the day the public authority receives the RTI. But on most occasions it has failed to reach the petitioner within the stipulated time keeping him/her guessing.

This blog is a firsthand insight of how effective the RTI has been at procuring public interest information from various government agencies and what happens behind the scene.

Response from the government officials for the RTI:

Most officials respond courteously, asking us about our background and the necessity of the information that we sought, and after we brief them about our initiative in the areas of research they co-operate. In some cases we are treated rudely, as the officials take offence on being obligated to reply with the information that the department might not possess, although by virtue of its work it should possess. We learnt that the RTI pressurises these already overburdened government officials. The reply requires them to co-ordinate with various subordinate departments for the information, editing if necessary and then mailing it to the petitioner apart from doing their regular chores of work.

Most of them felt that the government loses money, as a reply to an RTI costs the government the time of the officials and the department, and the costs of printing and extracting the necessary data and mailing the petitioner together costs more than the 10 rupees which the petitioner has to pay to seek this information, although under chapter 2 section 7 (3) the officials are liable to charge the petitioner the cost of gathering this information. They prefer that the petitioner comes directly to them and requests for the data before an RTI is filed. This ensures that they will not be under the immense pressure that an RTI creates and that they willingly disseminate the information.

What can be asked under the act? :

Under the Act chapter 1- section 2(f) the word ‘information’ means any material in any form, including records, documents, memos, e-mails, opinions, advices, press releases, circulars, orders logbooks, contracts, reports, papers, samples, models, data material held in any electronic form and information relating to any private body which can be accessed by a public authority under any other law for the time being in force.

As per the decision given by CIC vide para 5 of file No CIC/AT/A/2006/00045 dated 21.04.06, the RTI Act does not cast any obligation on the public authority to answer any queries in which the petitioner attempts to elicit answers to his questions with prefixes such as why, what, when and whether.

Under Chapter2 section4 (2,3)  the departments are to disseminate public information regularly on the website and through other means of communication, so that the public’s need to use this act is lessened. Despite this, every government department from the corporation/ development authorities to para-statal bodies, the central and state departments, Nodal Agencies and committees receive hundreds of petitions every year.

So we started off by asking: What sort of questions do petitioners ask? What sort of information is the government liable to disseminate? How does this information empower people in understanding the working of the government? What sort of information is relevant for the public’s knowledge? Why does it not disclose all the information related to the department’s working on the concerned website?

To understand this, we probed the officials about the RTIs and types of queries that they receive every month, the information that they seek and the process to collect and disseminate this information.

Apparently, the Corporation of Chennai forwards all the RTIs to the concerned zonal offices which reply individually after collecting the required information from the division or ward offices. We spoke to the executive engineers of 5 zones and all of them said that 80-90% of the RTIs they receive are grievances concerning neighbouring buildings that flout bye-laws, land disputes, properties affected due to road widening, employees seeking details about their promotions etc. There are minimal petitions about public interest. The subordinates murmured about the RTI becoming a money making business for some as many of the land related and bye law flouting related RTIs were regularly being filed by a few individuals.

Lack of Co-ordination within departments and authenticity of data:

Each public authority has a number of departments and moving the government machinery for seeking information in a particular infrastructure is a herculean task as the departments do not co-ordinate well with each other.

For example in my previous blog ‘Road Safety: Who is responsible for it?’ I had mentioned that the Traffic Police implements and enforces regulation; the accident data are recorded by the traffic police and within the department there is a separate wing that records and updates this data at the end of each day. In our RTI we asked questions regarding the following:

• The number of people affected age and sex wise.
• The number of people affected by using a particular mode of commute.

Both the data ideally should be the same but it differs drastically. This could possibly be because of an error in reporting it correctly or feeding it into the computer.

A similar situation happened with the public toilet data. As the corporation did not have a central data bank, we went to individual zones and collected the number of public toilets in each zone which was 512 in total. Subsequently we filed an RTI for the same and the reply was 715 in total. Which one should be considered? We assume that the one obtained from the RTI is the authentic figure.

Although the officials are burdened with RTIs, it has been effective in checking corruption. It deters politicians and bureaucrats and that is probably why RTI activists like Amit Jethwa are killed for opening the Pandora box through this power of information. RTI is our right, use it to benefit the society at large and to create transparency in the system.

Roshan Toshniwal, with inputs from D. Raja.

Policy makers and planners often neglect local conditions and local knowledge while formulating plans and policies for their region. Consequently, when plans do not reflect ground realities, they fail and cause opposition from the local communities. Hence it is important to properly understand local beliefs and attitudes to devise programs that are sound, cost-effective and sustainable in the long run. An article in The Guardian discusses community participation as an effective tool for solving problems that are localized in nature. It talks about Africa’s sanitation crisis and how regions within the continent are dealing with this problem. Some interesting quotes from the article:

“Know the area, know the people.It is only through talking and listening to the people on the ground that we will be able to make long-lasting and sustainable moves out of poverty. This is especially pertinent when trying to educate people about sanitation and hygiene and bringing about a change in behaviour.”

“In many rural areas in west Africa, the practice of open-air defecation is ritualised and bound in tradition. Beyond individual differences, the members of a group or society are united by similar ways of thinking and behaving, and will react to situations in similar ways. Our research showed that reasons for resistance to using a latrine included beliefs that one might be possessed by demons, lose magical powers or live a shorter life. Some believe a toilet is meant only for wealthy people or that, if somebody feeds you, you should in turn defecate in their field.”

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