Slum Networking – Transending Poverty with Innovative Water and Sanitation Paradigm
This entry has been selected as a finalist in the
Tapping Local Innovation: Unclogging the Water and Sanitation Crisis competition.
An innovative paradigm of water and environmental sanitation correlated with nature to alleviate poverty, ill-health, illiteracy; overcoming aid dependence with latent resources and local partnerships.
About You
Location
Project Street Address
Project City
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
Your idea
Field of Work
Sanitation
Year the initative began (yyyy)
1987
YouTube Upload
Web site (url)
Positioning of your initiative on the mosaic diagram:
Which of these barriers is the primary focus of your work?
Limited focus on long-term impact
Which of the principles is the primary focus of your work?
Connect solutions to the housing & finance sectors
If you believe some other barrier or principle should be included in the mosaic, please describe it and how it would affect the positioning of your initiative in the mosaic
Barriers:
Poverty and dirth of resources and mechanisms for alleviation.
Principles:
Using water and sanitation catalyst to alleviate poverty.
Using local partnerships and self-sufficiencies to augment resources and implementation.
Name Your Project
Slum Networking – Transending Poverty with Innovative Water and Sanitation Paradigm
Describe Your Idea
An innovative paradigm of water and environmental sanitation correlated with nature to alleviate poverty, ill-health, illiteracy; overcoming aid dependence with latent resources and local partnerships.
Innovation
What is your signature innovation, your new idea, in one sentence?
An innovative paradigm of water and environmental sanitation correlated with nature to alleviate poverty, ill-health, illiteracy; overcoming aid dependence with latent resources and local partnerships.
Describe your innovation. What makes your idea unique and different than others doing work in the field?
* Slum Networking exploits the correlation between slums and the natural riverine paths of the city to improve the environment and provide quality, gravity based, house-to-house water, sanitation, storm drainage, roads and landscaping at costs lower than the conventional ‘slum’ solutions such as public standposts and community latrines. The various components of infrastructure are bundled for economy and integrated from micro to macro level with respect to topography. It uses innovations such as holistic computer modeling, earth management, constructive landscaping, using roads as storm channels, miniature appurtenances, storm flushing of sewerage and self ventilated manholes to improve performance and reduce cost.
* The water and environmental sanitation infrastructure in turn stimulates massive community investment in its own shelter. We have demonstrated that the `poor’ can, in conducive circumstances, mobilise huge resources, especially when coupled with constructive partnerships with the government and the private sector. This latent strength is tapped to remove aid dependency. The knock on impact on health, education and incomes is substantial and rapid.
Delivery Model: How do you implement your innovation and apply it to the challenge/problem you are addressing?
* There must be tangible and measurable results. The communities are weary of platitudes.
* The approach must make business sense to attract capital and reduce aid dependency.
* The community must be a capital partner to ensure its commitment to the project and the subsequent maintenance. If community invests, it is an acid of the efficacy of the solutions.
* There must be a huge multiplier in the process to leverage at least 10 fold ultimate investment from community on the initial outlay.
How do you plan to expand your innovation?
Our initial work was in the slums of Indore, Baroda, Ahmedabad and Bhopal cities with different partners. However, the plight of rural areas is not much better than slums. 70% of the population in India lives in villages without decent physical infrastructure and housing. The concepts of Slum Networking are equally valid there.
The recent work attempts to extend the “Networking” from urban to rural to reach this larger population. Byrraju Foundation, the partner NGO is at present implementing the work in two villages of Andhra Pradesh covering 5,000 people.
The major goals in the coming years are:
* To upscale infrastructure development from the present two villages to 150 villages covering a population of about half a million. Byrraju Foundation, an NGO associated with a leading software house of India, has already established organizational structure in these villages for their health, education and livelihood activities.
* To develop a bankable model and delivery structure for upscaling. Dialogue has already started with the banking and financial institutions.
Do you have any existing partnerships, and if so, how do you create them?
There are three main partners in the model, namely, the community, government and business.
The community’s role is that of a client, consumer and a capital partner, not a “beneficiary”. It also subsequently manages local maintenance within the settlements.
The government partner channels its development budgets into the project. However, as much as the resources, its partnership helps to develop policy framework and address issues of tenure.
Apart from funds, businesses bring planning, implementation and management skills to the project. In Baroda this was done by United Way set up by the Federation of Baroda Industries. In Ahmedabad pilot slums, Arvind Mills, a city textile group, ran the project on behalf of the community and the municipality through its own NGO Sharda Trust, supported by Saath. The Vice President of Arvind Mill sees this as “enlightened self interest” and not philanthropy.
The Andhra villages are managed by Byrraju Foundation, set up by Satyam Computers, and supported by Royal Society of Arts and Manufacturing (RSA) in UK.
Impact
Provide one sentence describing your impact/intended impact.
To alleviate poverty through water and sanitation and to replace "social paternalism" and aid with a "business on hand" model of tangible achievements.
What are the main barriers to creating or achieving your impact?
A mindset of “poverty” itself is a barrier to development, leading to excessive dependence on aid or state grants. Neither is aid sustainable nor poverty insuperable. We should enshrine the principle of self-sufficiency in the development process by harnessing the economic forces of nations and their people to transcend poverty.
Making a good business of development on an open market platform would overcome many problems of corruption, inappropriate solutions, shoddy implementation, cost overruns and inefficient maintenance. Governments of developing nations may not have all the resources and delivery structures but they can create appropriate legal and administrative frameworks for private capital to bridge the gap and attract business skills to implement and manage efficiently.
Integrated physical infrastructure of a settlement cannot be developed piecemeal across intermittent dwellings. Even 10% failure of participation would subvert the delivery of services. It is a challenge to foster 100% group action by the community with appropriate community safety net mechanisms to draw in the indifferent minority and also cross subsidise cases of extreme hardship.
How many people have you served or plan to serve?
The Slum Networking concept has been tried in several cities of India such as Indore, Baroda, Ahmedabad, Bhopal and Bombay directly transforming lives of about a million people.
More recently, we are replicating the same concepts in rural areas starting with two villages in Andhra Pradesh with an objective to eventually expand to 145 villages.
Directly
Around one million people have already directly benefited from Slum Networking.
In Ahmedabad, the Slum Networking Project has gained its own momentum with the city authorities, NGOs and micro finance organisation taking over from our pilot efforts to cover the entire city slum matrix. The work has now spread to 40 slum settlements in the city.
The last two years we have been concentrating on transferring the techniques to the rural areas. The pilot work started with Tadinada village in Andhra Pradesh covering 2,500 people in association with Byrraju Foundation and Royal Society of Arts and Manufacturing, UK. We have now moved to the second village of Patalmeraka with similar population and Byrraju foundation has earmarked 10 more villages to be taken up after that to cover 15,000 more people. Ultimately the project isplanned to cover 145 villages and 75,000 families.
The most heartening fact is that this effort breaks the poverty cycle and lifts the future generations too out of poverty.
Indirectly
The number of people benefited indirectly is countless.
As Slum Networking exploits the powerful correlation between slums and natural drainage paths to transform the environment and infrastructure of distressed cities, there is a vast non-slum population which also benefits from improved infrastructure and better environment of the city. Slums are no longer liabilities but, instead, wonderful catalysts of change.
The indirect impact of the increased prosperity of the slum dwellers and their purchasing power on the city economy is not easy to assess but must be quite significant.
Please list any other measures of the impact of your innovation?
In Ahmedabad project, the average investment in housing by slum families has been a whopping 58,000 rupees, a 6 fold multiplier on the initial investment on infrastructure.
Equally striking, the infant mortality has dropped from 6% to 1%, working days lost to illness reducing from 64 to 9 per year per person and medical expenses almost halving. The number of children attending school has jumped from 41% to 72%. The monthly expendable income has increased by 50%, the greatest rise being in female
Is there a policy intervention element to your innovation, if so please describe?
As our work is complex and requires holistic actions involving multiple actors, there is an absence of appropriate legal and administrative framework to scale up. Thus, we use each project to set policy precedents on various facets of development such as security of tenure, rules for private sector participation in essentially the state domain, arrangements for the connectivity to the larger state infrastructure networks, interface with the local bodies, maintenance by the community or private sector, taxation mechanisms for the subsequent running costs and empowerment of the local communities to act. In India, devolution of power is enshrined in Amendments 73 and 74 of the Constitution for rural and urban areas respectively. However, its adoption and implementation by the states remains at a nascent stage.
Exactly who are the beneficiaries of your innovation?
Our targets are the slum dwellers in urban India and the poor villagers, together constituting over half the national population. Our objective is to mainstream this vast population in the development process as capital partners, clients and consumers of services and certainly not as "beneficiaries".
Considering the vast population of India, all our efforts so far have still reached just a miniscule of the nation. We have yet a long way to go.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
How is your initiative financed (or how do you expect your initiative will be financed)?
Our first project in Indore was funded by British government aid. Whilst the engineering concepts of Slum Networking were first conceived there, the subsequent maintenance went astray as the aid finished and the implementing city authorities lost interest. All subsequent innovations in Slum Networking in other cities and villages have been on developing self-sufficiency and alternative implementation paradigms.
Currently the infrastructure development costs are shared almost equally by the community, government and business, sometimes augmented by additional partners such as UNICEF or RSA. However, the subsequent costs of shelter improvement are met exclusively by the communities from their own sources, thus contributing a lion share of the total ultimate investment.
The community also then pays taxes to the civic authorities for the maintenance of their infrastructure.
Provide information on your finances and organization:
The concept of Slum Networking has been developed by Himanshu Parikh Consulting Engineers. It is a professional practice which earns about 2 million rupees ($50,000) in fees each year.
In the 35 years of the Practice, whilst most of the fees were earned on structural engineering design projects, some professional fees in the earlier years were earned on infrastructure development assignments such as the Indore Slum Networking Project. However, in the later years, as we moved away from the established aid models, the fees from funding agencies dried up. We thus had to fund our ideologies of development with our own resources, cross-subsidised from the profits from structural engineering work.
We are constantly amazed that we have managed to reach such a large poor population with scanty resources by bringing together partnerships between community, governments and business. Imagine what can be done if the huge resources available with international development agencies and bilateral aid were at our disposal instead of being frittered away!
What is the potential demand for your innovation?
India has 100 million slum dwellers and half the 700 million rural population is poor. The aggregate national demand is thus 450 million persons. At rupees 2500 per person (1$=45rupees) for infrastructure development, the market size is $25 billion. The complementary demand for housing finance is even greater at about $100 billion. If extended to the global poor, these markets increase to mind boggling numbers!
As such funding is beyond government budgets and aid, cost effective technical innovations and catalytic partnerships are better alternatives.
What are the main barriers to financial sustainability?
It is a challenge to motivate the private sector partnership. Businesses are risk averse and do not readily buy the arguments of “enlightened self-interest”, bottom of pyramid markets and business opportunities of infrastructure development. A CEO of a multinational in India once said succinctly about sanitation that “shit doesn’t sell”!
Similarly, the formal banking sector is still learning to finance the poor with their small borrowings, seasonal earnings, absence of land title collaterals and using peer pressure with community underwriting to recover loans.
The Story
What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story.
In 1987, walking through slums of Indore city, I noticed their proximity to streams and the river. My subsequent studies show this as a global phenomenon. It struck me that this correlation could provide economic, gravity based infrastructure networks to slums and the city. If rivers do not need pumping stations, why should drainage? I developed the complex computer modeling techniques for design, helped by committed people in my office.
Wherever water and sanitation infrastructure was implemented, I noted a quantum jump in the investment made by the slum-dwellers on improving their shelter from shacks to pucca houses. This investment was several fold larger than the initial capital outlay and revealed a latent resource capacity of the so called “poor” to overcome aid dependency.
Over time, we embraced the associated social and economic issues and worked at putting partnerships together for upscaling. My daughter Priti Parikh, an engineer planner, has been my mainstay throughout and has currently taken up doctoral research at Cambridge University to validate the hypothesis that water and sanitation radically stimulate housing, health, literacy and incomes of the poor.
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material
Himanshu Parikh has done pioneering work on infrastructure development of low-income settlements in India. He also teaches occasionally at CEPT University, Ahmedabad and Cambridge University.
He had been in the Planning Commission Urban Poverty Group and on the Governing Council of Department of Science and Technology, India. He received United Nations World Habitat Award in 1993, Aga Khan Award in 1998 and a Government of India Citation the same year. In 2005 he was invited as a Fellow to Royal Society of Arts.
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 | 60 weeks agoCynthia Davidson said: Your project is very important for the world. Keep up the good work! about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 76 weeks agoMark Slay said: This is a really cool competition and set of proposals. Sao Paulo Favela Arquitetura is another study, which I ran across in researching ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 97 weeks agoCriar Site said: Very impressive work. It should be copied in other continents. about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 202 weeks agoJoram Oranga said: Your idea is remarkable and projected to address sanitation issue at the community level. But again how you demonstrate the community ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 208 weeks agoAnita Yang said: Dear Mr. Parikh, Congratulations on your achievement. I am very interested in your work and would like to explore a potential ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 210 weeks agoSlum Networking – Transending Poverty with Innovative Water and Sanitation Paradigm has been chosen as a winner in Tapping Local Innovation: Unclogging the Water and Sanitation Crisis. |
| 211 weeks agoPeter Sigrist said: Very impressive work. It looks like this could be replicated in other parts of the world. about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 212 weeks agoVictoria Cronin said: This excellent model is a viable solution to the water and sanitation crisis affecting many of the poor today. Slum Networking offers a ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 212 weeks agoNarla Prakasam said: Dear Sir, I think that this is excellent and Umbrulla Organissation of NGOs.. which will serve the slums communities. Our ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 212 weeks agosarjana Parikh said: This approach could help in reaching the water and sanitation targets for the Millennium Development Goals. about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
