I recently started working on an urban poverty scoping exercise with a representative from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As part of this project, I have had the opportunity to meet with many urban planners, government officials, academics and civil society workers all over the country. I have learned a great deal about the obstacles in providing basic services to the urban poor. The common woe amongst all stakeholders that I have spoken to remains the lack of capacity required to dispatch services in an effective manner. Thus, when I asked these stakeholders which area under poverty alleviation requires intervention, many pointed out that a focus on capacity-building could help make poverty reduction programs efficient and targeted to achieve more success in shorter periods of time.

The 74th Constitutional Amendment mandates the local government with the responsibility of urban poverty alleviation. However, many municipal governments have shown incompetence in utilizing funds appropriately. Mr. Ajay Suri, Regional Advisor for Cities Alliance, stressed that municipalities are starved for skilled urban planners, economists, statisticians, researchers, designers and architects to take on the role of urban development. While money is abundant, the technical assistance required to implement projects and disseminate funds are not available, due to which poverty alleviation programs, such as Basic Services to the Urban Poor (BSUP, under JnNURM), do not always achieve their goals. A recent article in the Indian Express stated that The Intergrated Housing and Slum Development Program, which is another sub-mission under JnNURM, has utilized less that 50% of its allocated funds on projects. According to housing minister Kumari Selja, one of the reasons for under-utilization of funds was lack of capacity of local bodies to implement projects.

Over the past year, the GoI has established five new urban institutes in Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Chattisgargh. These institutes are intended to be the training grounds for new generations of urban planners, research organizations, and consultancies that provide technical assistance to cities. Unfortunately, working for the municipal government is not looked upon as an attractive profession. Furthermore, organizations such as the National Institute of Urban Affairs struggle with retaining young professionals due to the diverse and attractive employment opportunities that they are presented with. There is dire need for experts in municipal governments, without whom no amount of money or schemes can fully achieve success.

Vaishnavi Narasimhan

This video and write-up is from Video Volunteers  (http://www.videovolunteers.org/), a media organization that works towards empowering the world’s unheard and disadvantaged communities. We thought that this video captured some very serious problems with solid waste management in the city. People that live in low-income communities are often neglected when it comes to the provision of public services and amenities, such as solid waste management. Watch this video to learn more!

Over a million slum dwellers don’t have access to basic sanitation in Chennai – home town of this video’s correspondent.

Nearly 25% of Chennai’s 7 million citizens live in the city’s various slums. But when it comes to basic civic facilities like sanitation, the administration always tends to forget them.

In this video, Mani shows us an example in Kotturpuram slum where ten thousand people live in extremely poor sanitary condition. Every lane in the slum is covered with rotting garbage and sewage flowing out of homes and clogged drains. No municipality worker comes here to clean the roads or clear the drains.

This is because, Mani says, slums are never considered as important as other areas of the city by the administration. So services such as sanitation and garbage collection hardly reach the slum dwellers.

Though residents of Kotturpuram slum have made repeated complaints to the municipality over the unclean roads, nothing has been done. Now, if we are to think that every slum more or less share the same set of problems such as sewage, unclean water and road, we get a picture where the city administration is practically ignoring the need demand of nearly one and half million people!

Waste management and sewage treatment have been Tamil Nadu’s worst areas of performance. There are two rivers that flow through Chennai city – Cooum and Adyar. Both of them are heavily polluted. The Cooum in particular has been severely polluted with effluents from some business establishments, and plastic bags and sewage from slums on its banks.

Mani who lives quite close to Kotturpuram says that currently the government of Tamil Nadu working on a plan that aims to make Chennai ‘slum-free” by 2013.

As a part of the plan, Tamil Nadu government has started constructing several residential complexes across Chennai to rehabilitate slum-dwellers. But Mani says, besides providing shelter, the government also needs to provide other civic facilities to the slum dwellers. Otherwise they will continue to live in the unhealthy condition that they do now.

Are there civic issues in Chennai that you would like IndiaUnheard to report on? If yes, let us know by submitting your story idea.

“Source: Video Volunteers – http://indiaunheard.videovolunteers.org/mani/chennai-slums-garbage-woes/“

When I first heard about Transparent Chennai, I was interested by the incredible potential it had to create a sense of community engagement and ownership. I then happened to come across a website for a Kenya based project, with a theme similar to that of Transparent Chennai, and started wondering whether lessons learned in a slum in Nairobi could be used in Chennai.

The project I came across is called the Voice of Kibera (VoK) which shares some of the same goals as Transparent Chennai, and which uses effective tools to promote community participation. Essentially, the VoK project (www.mapkibera.org) aims to map various issues that are taking place in Kibera, one of the largest slums in Kenya. These issues, all of which are mapped through citizen reports, include new developments in infrastructure, news events such as ongoing medical camps, and emergency alerts such as updates on protests or riots. Community members have the option of either submitting reports via the VoK website or through SMSes. This information, whether in the form of photos, videos or text, is then uploaded to the map on the website.

The VoK team used a number of creative ways to keep the community engaged in this project. Some of these are mentioned below.

1. Engaging with and receiving feedback from the target audience early on in the planning process: NGOs and CBOs whose agenda and vision were aligned with those of the VoK teams were invited to be part of a focus group meeting in order to provide their feedback on the map. This could have been beneficial for the VoK team in multiple ways:

a. Listening to the voices of their target audience was essential for the VoK team to create a map that would cater to the needs of its diverse range of stakeholders, thus increasing the probability that the map would be used by its intended audience.
b. Participative discussions like this would ensure that focus group members stayed tuned in to the progress of the map and helped publicize it once it was up and running,
c. In return, the participating organizations could be featured on the map’s website thus providing them with publicity
The agenda, presentation and learnings related to the focus group workshop can be found here: http://mapkibera.org/wiki/index.php?title=Voice_of_Kibera.

2. Using internet cafes to publicise the online map: The VoK team spoke to owners of local internet cafes to allow them to set their website as the home page on all their computers. This was quite a unique idea to create publicity and also provide information to internet café customers.

3. Selecting and rewarding volunteers: VoK selects community members to serve as citizen photographers and messengers for the project. I feel that being selected to be part of the project could foster a sense of ownership and responsibility in the minds of the volunteers, which is something that just visiting the site may not be able to achieve. In order to encourage citizen reporting, VoK gives out incentives in the form of small monthly cash prizes to those reporters who have contributed the most info to the map,

It would be interesting to explore whether any of these ideas would be applicable in the context of creating publicity around the Transparent Chennai map and expanding the site’s base of users and contributors. Taking VoK as an example, the Transparent Chennai team may also want to consider sharing its learnings online in order to offer ideas to and connect with NGOs around the globe that are about to initiate similar projects.

Contributed by Namrata Asthana, Centre for Development Finance, IFMR, Chennai