The real meaning of sustainable development is the creation of sustainable livelihoods.  These should, through income generation and the provision of goods and services, fulfil basic needs and improve the quality of life.

Shelter activity can be an integral part of the sustainable development process if appropriate technological alternatives are made available to people through micro-enterprises. This will improve access to affordable, environmentally sound building technology and generate meaningful employment in local building economies.  It may also be the only way to improve the state of shelter by creating sustainable livelihoods on a wide scale and at a rate that actually closes the housing gap.

There is a housing shortage of over 31 million households (Census of India, 1991). Roughly two-thirds of this shortage is caused by families living in houses below the minimal acceptable standards of habitation.  In addition, a large majority of the houses that have been deemed to be acceptable in standard of construction are poor in quality and need repair, replacement of components or upgradation after only a few years.

Government policies and political imperatives have led to a widespread perception of housing as a welfare measure.  The rural poor wait endlessly to benefit from a system designed to give handouts to a favoured few. This is in spite of the fact that government agencies have supported less than 5% of construction activity in the last forty years.  These agencies have widespread reach, technically trained manpower and access to substantial funds but they are programmed to limit themselves to the scheme based supply of houses.  Awas Yojanas have proved to be highly dissipative, adopt rigid financing mechanisms, rarely use appropriate technology, and are not participative.  Above all, they have not multipliers that can stimulate accelerated change on a large scale.  The result is negligible impact.

Other formal delivery systems such as the private sector and the NGOs have not fared much better.  The private sector caters to the middle class and above.  NGOS are often badly managed and too far and few between.

More than 90% of houses in India, those of the poor and lower income groups, are built and upgraded through non-formal, small market operations.  These micro-enterprises have the advantage that building technologies are selected by people on the basis of determinants which reflect their own priorities and those of local role players.  They have a high quality to input ration, are highly participative and use innovative financing methods.  We all know the prolific rate at which informal sector systems multiply.

It is this sector that needs to be catalysed.  We need to improve its capacity to work with a depleted and altered resource base.  Ultimately this means the “appropriation” of technological alternatives.  What are the characteristics that these technological alternatives should possess and what route should we take to propagate them?

The selected technologies must:

- be more cost effective to users than existing building systems of similar performance and function;
- utilize materials, the availability of which can be sustained economically and ecologically;
- utilize locally available renewable energy sources;
- be deliverable through existing or easily trained manpower;
- be income generating and locally manageable.

The technology dissemination process should also be restructured.  Bigger government housing schemes, enlarged financial outlays and new institutions will not improve the state of shelter nor create sustainable livelihoods within building economies.  Both of these goals can only be met if basic funding form government or external agencies is re-oriented from house building to financial and institutional support for a process that enables technological change in shelter.  The process itself will involve the identification and development of appropriate building technologies an their transfer to local entrepreneurs.  It is our belief that action should be directed towards converting people’s needs into demand and technical potential into enterprise based supply at a human scale.

Work done by the Shelter Group of Development Alternatives indicates that organizations with sustainable development objectives and corporate style “Innovation-Production-Marketing” links within themselves have a vital role to play.  They can ensure that the demand-supply equation is not set up simply for short-term profit as they are suited to the tasks of technology selection, development, production of equipment, marketing of technology to entrepreneurs and market development for appropriate technologies.  Our most successful micro-concrete tile entrepreneur in Etawah, U.P. has completed 1,40,000 square feet of roofing in two and a half years.  He has recovered his investment of              Rs. 30,000/-, is continuously earning million rupees from the rural economy.  People have paid for better roofs in the area where the government would have had to set up a whole department to “hand-out” these seven hundreds odd roofs; where loans are nearly impossible to obtain and loan recovery is non-existent; where Volags find it hard to manager their own affairs let alone a housing project ; and where nobody has ever heard of housing corporations like the Ansal’s, DLF or L&T.

Initiatives in shelter should not limit themselves to the supply of houses.  They must look beyond to a point where they ensure the sustainable development of an area.

by Shrastant Patara