October 19,1998
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LIVING: SLUMS New Lease of Life The amazing transformation of Indore's shanty towns wins architect Parikh the Aga Khan award. By N K Singh "I can actually walk down my road without holding my
nose."
Jain can take a bow. So can the 47-year-old Ahmedabad-based architect Himanshu Parikh. Aided by Rs 64 crore from the United Kingdom's Overseas Development Administration, they have transformed the lives of the five lakh people living in 184 shanty towns. Now the project, that began in 1989 and culminated in June this year, has been named one of the winners of the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The award, given every three years and worth $70,000 (Rs 29.75 lakh) to each winner, has been bestowed on two other Indian projects: the Bhopal Vidhan Sabha designed by Charles Correa and the Lepers' Hospital in Chopda Taluka constructed by two Norwegian architects. But it is the Indore project that is most remarkable, for in its urban renewal could lie solutions for a slum-infested India. It began with an unusual collision. Between a city teetering on the edge and an architect raised in Dar-es-Salaam and then educated at Cambridge who was told by his mentor, the Ahmedabad-based architect B.V. Doshi, "If you want to do some good work for the poor, go to India." Parikh did just that and now, 13 years later, wants to take his successful lessons from Indore to the slums in Mumbai and Vadodara. When Parikh arrived in Indore, he found what everyone there knew: the Khan and Saraswati had become cesspools posing plaintively as rivers. They collected municipal waste and industrial effluent: in effect, with the urban sewerage system serving only 5 per cent of the city's population, they were the town's drainage system. The slums were infested too, with crime and disease. Parikh was undeterred. He is an unusual man, who says, "One ninth of India's population lives in slums and semi-slums. Just one tenth of the advertising budget of India's industry would be enough to make their lives worth living." So he approached the IDA, which-having been assured of the Rs 64 crore grant-accepted his guidance. David Copperfield stand back, Parikh was the ultimate illusionist-sewer and water lines, streetlights, roads, a falling death rate, he would give half a million people all this for a mere Rs 8,000 per household. Sanitation, in a city that could not spell the word, was their first mantra. While a main sewerage artery was constructed along the city bank, new pipes snaked along the slums. No longer were the slumdwellers emptying their effluents into the river and dying from the disease that resulted. Getting the slumdwellers to invest in their own lives was pivotal. It could be a matter of simple cleanliness like pushing them to build private toilets; for those less affluent, pay-and-use public toilets were constructed, as experience showed their maintenance was superior to free lavatories. Something free, Parikh realised, never works; it just whets the appetite for more charity. So instead, residents were prodded to invest. The Madhya Pradesh Government's decision to award ownership rights of public land to squatters encouraged them to build pucca houses. Says Ashok Jarwal, "Earlier the area was so squalid that even those who could afford it did not buy houses. Now everyone is doing it." How life has turned around-residents of some areas, once labourers, are now construction contractors. Like a plastic surgeon engaged in a meticulous facelift, Parikh had an eye for detail. Nothing was ignored. Roads, actually lanes of slush, were paved; not with asphalt that self-destructs after every monsoon but with concrete. Showing his inventiveness, they were arranged at a gradient, thus doubling as stormwater drains. Streetlights followed, so did drinking water facilities available at every doorstep. Simple amenities were put in place and the fallout was remarkable. Income levels have escalated by 30 per cent, for women, instead of bickering while waiting endlessly to collect water, now have the time to earn money. Epidemics, that regularly hound slums, have come visiting less frequently. Now even residents of posh areas, which stand at kissing distance from the slums, cheer: if these slums get cleaner so does their environment. Says IDA Chief Engineer A.M. Tripathi, "The sewer pipes have decreased the pollution level. And we are trying to regenerate the dead rivers by pumping fresh water from tubewells." Yet, as if predictable, the project is haunted by a flaw of laughable irony: years and crores later, sewage is still dumped into the rivers. With funds shrinking, only 57 km of the main sewer line could be laid instead of the 64.46 km that was required to take it to the town's treatment plant. Downstream the river is still a cesspool. Town planners also complain that laying water and sewer lines shoulder-to-shoulder is fraught with danger, for should they leak and mix the result would be catastrophic. An absence of community participation-even NGOs were kept at bay-is a handicap too: in time funds will be required for maintenance and a cash-strapped municipal corporation is hardly primed for the challenge. But Indore will have learnt some lessons. Parikh certainly has. The slum-dwellers' financial participation is always his first mission. In Indore, he says, the slumdwellers must have pumped in Rs 150 crore; at his next stop, the 200-hutment once-stinking Sanjay Nagar slum in Ahmedabad, he was preaching this again. There the cost of laying sewer and water lines, paving roads and providing streetlights was estimated at Rs 6,000 per household. The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation agreed to pay Rs 2,000 per household, so did Arvind Mills; eventually the slumdwellers put in the remaining amount. Now, with the project completed, the stink long gone, Rameshbhai Patni, a mill worker, says, "We used to lose half a dozen kids every year to malaria but not a single child has died in the past one year." Forget the $20,000 (Rs 8.5 lakh), Parikh's share of the award. His town-planning is saving lives. There's no bigger reward than that. |
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It is a slum and then it is not. Makeshift
tin shanties seem to have been devoured by bulldozers and replaced by double storied pucca
structures. Black, foul-smelling mud that slithered over shoes has been covered by roads
of granite. Community toilets, in which women were assaulted, have been pulled down and
most houses given their own bathrooms. And where once filth and garbage gathered in small
hillocks, lines of pipes for sewerage and water criss-cross the area. Heaven this is not,
as the few noisy pigs still loitering around testify, but in these slums that lace
Indore's river banks there has been an extraordinary renewal of life. "This
summer," says a proud K.C. Jain, ceo of the Indore Development Authority (IDA),
"the incidence of gastro-enteritis was minimal." 
