An English daily advertises for ‘complete lifestyle experience’ for homes for urban residents outside the city in the lap of the countryside. The complete experience comes from designer homes that provide adequate space and privacy for each individual in the family, attached toilets with each of the bedrooms, well-lit and spacious kitchens, 24-hour electricity back-up and flowing water at the touch. Well maintained roads, street lights, security, garbage management services and maintenance support are inclusive of the package. Community living is supported with schools, health centres, post offices, residential markets and connectivity to the heart of the city and tele as well as cyber connectivity at the touch of a finger.

Let’s compare this to the situation of a village in Madhya Pradesh. The poorest are entitled to Rs 35,000 as grant support and may access another Rs 20,000 as loan to construct pucca (permanent) shelters. The maximum that can be constructed in the above amount is a room and cooking space with a toilet. For the better-off who need not depend on the ‘government subsidies’, housing loans are not available to bridge the gap between their savings and the requirement to construct a house. Construction services are sought from local masons who may or may not be trained to provide the best value. Running water is a distant dream as no water supply systems exist and no services are available. Electricity may be a single bulb if the village is electrified and provided there is current. Roads will come from the Pradhan Mantri Grameen Sarak Yojna but not necessarily coordinated with housing development. Other public facilities will each come from a separate public scheme in due course. All this will happen, of course, provided financial services for the rural families are available in the first place. The rural habitat experience is punctuated with numerous ‘ifs’.

Adequate habitat is a basic right. It is important that supports, services and opportunities exist that can ‘enable and facilitate’ people to access their rights. It becomes a duty of the State, therefore, to make possible the provision of services and supports that may be accessed by families and communities to improve their conditions. Such a facilitation can be carried out through provisions in policies and their application at both state and local levels. A case in point is the liberalisation of financial services in urban areas leading to the access by thousands of urban middle and low income families to housing finance, of course, supported by the availability of technical services through housing development companies across the cities.

Let us look at some examples where provisions of integrated services have helped rural families access adequate habitat:

• Women Self Help Group (SHG) members in villages of Tirucharapalli district of Tamil Nadu, linked with the NGO SEVAI, have accessed soft loans from their federation to construct pucca homes using eco-friendly and cost-effective technologies such as Ferrocement and concrete block masonry with the technical services including building materials from the local entrepreneurial building centre – the Econ Industries. Over the past 10 years, about 2000 families have accessed the services of Econ Industries.

• Over the past six years, more than a thousand rural families have benefited from services of the Ashraya Building Materials and Services Bank at Chowdwar in Orissa. They have accessed eco-friendly materials such as Stabilised Compressed Earth blocks, Micro Concrete Roofing (MCR) tiles, RCC planks and joists and flyash blocks to construct pucca (permanent) homes. Construction services are being accessed from locally trained masons and soft loans are being accessed from the Orissa Housing Finance Corporation linked by the NGO CORE, who is managing this entire process.

• In Odanthurai, a remote village in Coimbatore village the Panchayat, working in partnership with a corporate group and a commercial bank, has provided power, clean drinking water and waste management services for its village - all in a profitable manner, earning recurring revenues for village development in the process.

Each of the above cases describe a successful process of housing delivery in remote rural areas serviced by a technical support agency/ social entrepreneur that has created in its catchment area an assured supply of eco-building materials, a cadre of delivery agents and links to soft finance. In addition, each social entrepreneur provides a ‘customer support service’ that include technical supports of various kinds. Many of the families who have accessed technical and financial services are on the borderline of what is classified as Below Poverty Line (BPL). What is common is that all of them are linked to savings groups or common interest groups. Such ‘islands of success’ led by civil society organisations or the odd Panchayat exist in other states of India as well. But the fact remains that these islands are supported by external ‘development grants’. While all of the above-mentioned social entrepreneurs charge a service fee from their rural customers, not all businesses are profitable and depend on development grants’ support and cross subsidies for their survival.

If these islands are to multiply across the country, leading to Adequate Habitat for All, supportive policies are required that will create a favourable environment for sustainable habitat services to be delivered to rural families.

Public policy attention has primarily been on the provision of pucca shelters for the poor through grants in terms of aid. There is a growing recognition that unless the rural habitat in its entirety and the rural society as a whole is addressed, the ‘provision’ of subsidies for pucca house construction will not lead to any significant change in the quality of life in rural areas.

For this reason, the Ministry of Rural Development held a two-day workshop earlier this year, where the objective was to consult with government agencies, the corporate sector, civil societies, financial institutions and academia to develop a rural housing and habitat policy for India. Such a policy will address the need to make available and accessible building materials and skills, finances from banks and other sources, technical information as well as integration of infrastructure and facilities through the various divergent schemes so that rural society is also served as their counterparts in the cities.

The Journey
Readers of this newsletter will recall that from 2005 to 2007 the basin-South Asia platform, with its secretariat at Development Alternatives (DA), had led a nation-wide consultation for an inclusive and integrated rural habitat policy for India. These consultations resulted in a ‘proposal to the Government of India’ presented to the Ministry of Rural Development in December 2007. This document, along with the Report of the Parliamentary Committee on rural housing for the 14th Lok Sabha, was subsequently used by the Ministry as a base to prepare a draft for a rural housing policy, which has been circulated to state governments for their comments. This draft document was discussed at a consultative workshop on June 23-24, 2008. A subsequent sub-committee has discussed the outcomes of the workshop and it is heartening to know that the Ministry is working on the formulation of a rural housing and habitat policy. While the process is slow it is hoped that the new policy, when formed, will provide sufficient enabling provisions to fast forward the delivery of housing and habitat services in rural areas.

Capacity Building
While it is necessary to build a decent roof over everyone’s head, the major bottleneck is non-availability of homestead lands for all. In addition, systemic interventions are required for capacity building and making available a skilled work force, building materials, technical services, financial products and services to construct the millions of new houses and up grade the existing shelters.

This is a tall order and the new policy will need to synergise with the various other policies and schemes such as the national rehabilitation policy, national skill development policy, the drinking water mission, the total sanitation mission, the villages electrification programme, etc. An alignment of plans and programmes towards the one mission of improving the quality of life in our villages is clearly required. Synergies between the various programmes and clear roles for all stakeholders such as government agencies at Centre, State, district and local levels, corporate houses, civil societies, small private players and community groups need to be spelt out.

The citizens of India wait in anticipation for a national rural housing and habitat policy. Many agencies in parallel are already working towards making ‘adequate Habitat for All’, a reality in rural areas.

Many financial agencies under the guidance of NABARD and NHB are eveloping new housing finance products suited for rural families: some enterprises and financial institutions are testing out the waters in various parts of the country; R&D institutions are focussing on applied research to demonstrate practical, eco-friendly, affordable materials and technologies on ground; and civil society institutions through development support from national and international donors (both government and private) are demonstrating the different models of housing, sanitation, village energy, water supply products and services. Many construction workers’ training modules are now available and agencies are working to set up certification systems. Cement companies are exploring ways to deliver cost-effective and eco-friendly building materials to rural families, and some enterprising Panchayats are integrating various schemes and funding provisions at their disposal to develop ‘complete habitat experiences’ for their people.

The basin-South Asia platform is putting together a Lok Awas Yatra to create awareness about these numerous experiences. The Yatra is being designed to expose the enablers and implementers of habitat projects, programmes and services delivery to various ways through which rural families and communities may access adequate habitat. The Yatra will provide an opportunity for local government functionaries to interact with habitat projects of various kinds and to develop their own perspectives for the development of their villages. The exchange of experiences will result in a tool kit for local government functionaries to facilitate habitat services on ground. q

Zeenat Niazi
zniazi@devalt.org

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