Urban Poverty, Unplanned Growth and Remedial Measures

Alok Sinha

WORKING WITH GOVERNMENT: THE STORY OF OPP’S COLLABORATION WITH STATEAGENCIES FOR REPLICATING ITS LOW COST

SANITATION PROGRAMME

By Arif Hasan

City Press, Karachi, 1997, pp. 269, price not mentioned.

AKHTAR HAMEED KHAN AND THE ORANGI PILOT PROJECT

By Arif Hasan

City Press, Karachi, 1999, pp. 58, Pak Rs. 60.00

COMMUNITY INITIATIVES: FOUR CASE STUDIES FROM KARACHI

Edited by Arif Hasan

City Press, Karachi, 1998, pp. 181

HOW COMMUNITIES ORGANISE THEMSELVES: STORIES FROM THE FIELD

Compiled by Kenneth Fernandes

City Press, Karachi, 1997, pp. 115, Pak Rs. 50.00

TEN DECADES OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT: LESSONS FROM INDIA

By Akhtar Hameed Khan

City Press, Karachi, 1998, pp. 69, Pak Rs. 60.00

T These are a set of papers and booklets on the issues of urban poverty, unplanned growth, civic cesspools of Pakistan-focusing on the valiant attempts (entirely people-oriented) towards remedial action in the slums of Karachi.

Indian perceptions of Karachi are that of a Mohajhir-based, MQM (now banned)-dominated shanty town peopled by local Sindhis, to which were added lakhs of Indian Muslims (seeking a “pure” homeland after 1947), of East Pakistan’s infamous “Bihari” Muslims (having murdered thousands of Bangladeshis at the behest of the Pakistan army and then disowned by all), and finally of the anti-communist Afghan fighters (who soon degenerated into a band of arms smugglers and drug peddlers fuelled by fundamentalism) of such a disparate urban crowd punctuated by regular bomb explosions that are aimed at unarmed people.

These books present a picture that is quite familiar to Indian cities. In Karachi, more than half the populace live in slums known as kutcha abadis, in abysmal poverty, with no civic facility whatsoever, and with the State (and its rich and powerful) indifferent to the lack of public hygiene, sanitation, education you name it and the poor (who man the informal sector that keeps the city and its economy going) don’t have it! And similarly familiar is that the only ones who are both anxious and active to go in for remedial action are some well-meaning and serious-minded community leaders (not the politicians, not the administrators, not the theorizing intellectuals, nor even the power-chasing media-even when their primary job should be to service the poor majority).

The chief thread of such community efforts for the Karachi poor are the valiant jobs done by the legendary Akhtar Hameed Khan (formerly of the ICS, then of the Comilla Rural Development Project of East Pakistan, latterly a respected Don at Michigan in the USA, and finally the Chief Volunteer of the Karachi poor) and his Orangi Pilot Project (OPP). “Living through a period of social dislocation where people

have been uprooted from their old familiar environments” (due surely to Pakistan, Bangladesh, the latest Afghan war?) called for the creation of “local level social and economic organizations.” And very correctly, the issues he targeted were low-cost sanitation and Housing programmes combined with a basic health and family planning programme backed up by a women’s work centres programmes. This was a comprehensive package of objectives which threw up a host of achievements and lessons. Correct in its premise that appropriate development “is fundamentally a process of creating more equitable relations between various actors in the development drama”, OPP found that such a necessary state is “rare due to the inflexibility of the governmental factor.” And in any case, frequent transfers (of government staff) disrupt continuity needed for institution-building. Further, “international agencies have no love or respect either for the people or the work that they do…they have their own agenda of quantifiable targets and large-scale spending (and) manage to impose their own (lavish) culture on government agencies.” In any case, the “lower level staff is never consulted (since) decisions are taken at the top with people who have nothing to do with their implementation.”

In such a grim scenario where the system is loaded against the poor, the OPP looked “into the possibility of communities taking on the responsibility of not only their own task of internal development but even of the government’s task of external development. Hence Akhtar Hameed Khan led the OPP to change its strategy by “now giving much less importance to working with government and more importance to working with people and communities.” But one has to be wary, for success of the community-based organization (CBO) attracts the foreign donor and the NGO since the consequent “new found affluence creates a gulf between them and their constituency.” The chief lesson of the OPP, thus, is not only that the CBO could and should complete the pro-poor tasks of the governmental system, but also that, being community-based, it does it far better than the “outsider” NGO.

The unstated follow-up question that must not be avoided is who then will do all the unfinished developmental tasks of a government that not only stagnates in a work-ethic inheriting historical sifarish and colonial patronage-but, made additionally worse in a Pakistan bedev-illed by repeated doses of authoritarianism and now by fundamentalism as well. The question, reworded, is can the poor (who are the majority) look after themselves when the state (no longer theirs) has decided to enrich the elite while abdicating its responsibilities towards the poor? Are the CBOs adequate both in numbers and in power to do it?

This primary issue is evaded not only by the OPP’s “success story” but also by the field experiences of other CBOs. Yet the limited lessons drawn by them are both interesting and useful and give an insight into the Pakistani mind-set.

One fancy conclusion drawn by the Nawalene, Lyari case study is that corruption and malfunctioning are to be controlled not by the politician or the conventional lobbying process but “by community organisations that supported technically by NGOs and profession-als”-how it does not say, especially when the politician who institu-tionally calls the shots and is also corrupt will not curb corruption. The question is, can the fountain be cleansed from the lower levels while being uncontrollably polluted from the top?

On the other hand, the Welfare Colony case study is realistic in its limitations in holding that however much people may support a CBO and its leadership, “in elections people vote on the basis of their

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The question, reworded, is can the poor (who are the majority) look after themselves when the state (no longer theirs) has decided to enrich the elite while abdicating its responsibilities towards the poor? Are the CBOs adequate both in numbers and in power to do it?

ethnicity or on the basis of support to a political party (since) national/city level politics take precedence over neighbourhood issues”. The question is, can national politics do good governance while leaving the poor-man’s issues to the lowly neighbourhood?

Yet the Manzoor Colony case-study is functionally proper in holding that the CBO’s “lobbying process becomes effective once it is backed with alternatives, cost estimates, and the implementation procedures.” When will the powerful politician rise above the loud rhetoric of slogan-mongering and elimb to the quiet but solid home-work of the CBO which alone will improve the Pakistani slum world?

The Ghaziabad-Orangi case study is poignant in outlining how a background of civil war, POW camps and persecution (by state power) robbed its activists of confidence when dealing with powerful politi-cians. Inspite of the utility of these field stories, there are the problems of lack of conceptualization, of a tendency to pat oneself on the back, and hence also a disinclination to measure the spread-effect of the CBOs efforts. And hence also a complete evasion of the issue of the place a CBO has in a system that is authoritarian. These drawbacks are not surprising, given the religious basis of the founding of Pakistani nationhood, made worse by now fundamentalizing the polity in an irresistible manner which further pushes back the poor while not touching the Rich-and-the Powerful.

In the aggregate, the lessons thrown up in the local Karachi context are indisputable. No one listens to the poor unless they lobby for themselves is a true axiom. Hence it is also correct to exhort commu-nities to organize themselves that is, a mass political line is function-ally essential. And they are poignantly expressive in voicing the feelings of the poor in the urban slums “your dogs have water, our children have none…there is water for your gardens, but none for us to drink.”

The problem is that such an acute gap between the resources of the rich and the poverty of the downtrodden cannot be bridged by CBOs alone (who in any case are scattered). No doubt CBOs are essential to help the poor, especially in Pakistan where democracy is revived in fits and starts but has never been multi-layered in its devolution of power. But, especially in a heavily populated country, can CBOs do the work of a governmental system that has abdicated its responsibilities to the poor, and has been existing only for the military, the rich, and the Jehadis?

But what does one do in a country raised on communalism and is yet peopled largely by the poor whose many problems can be voiced by CBOs but not helped by the authoritarian set-up? It unavoidably sets up contradictory thoughts that are so acutely reflected in the life and thoughts of Akhtar Hameed Khan. He gave up a glittering career in the ICS because he not only found most of his colleagues extraordinarily materialistic but also because the problems of the people-being of a social and economic nature-could not be solved through administra-tion. Yet, neither his Comilla Rural Development Project (in East Pakistan) nor his OPP (in Karachi) even mention the need for adminis-trative or structural reforms: his solution is to neatly by-pass the unresponsive administration by the conduit of a CBO, Clearly, the legendary Akhtar Hameed Khan would have the poor man’s CBO fend for itself while the authoritarian state fattens both itself and its rich clientele!

And when Arif Hasan almost defies Akhtar Hameed Khan, his philosophical outpourings are revealing. He combines the contradiction inherent in any intense religiosity-of piety and contempt. Hence he is frugal in his lifestyle, and that is how he styles his OPP and that is how he scorns the luxury of foreign donors. But he also was “taught to admire and glorify the exploits of Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi, who plundered Indian cities and temples seventeen times in thirty years and

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finally smashed the big idol in Somnath” and yet was confused about Sufism-he admired its pacifism and universal toleration, but also suspected that its “quietism” was somehow responsible for the decline and fall of Muslim empires.

As the apprehensive and quarrelling brother who renounces his ancestral home and yet cannot leave his past behind, and hence forever compares his present with that of his partitioned, left-behind home, Pakistan forever eyes India. As a reflection, Akhtar Hameed Khan traces out ten decades of Indian rural development for his Michigan. University sabbatical (compare this with a glaring lack of Indian studies on Pakistan!). His perceptions, however, are quite in order. Disagree-ing with the colonial view that famine (so recurrent in colonial India) was a natural Asian phenomenon, he is also correct and quite intriguingly Marxist-in his view that “the old approach, originally intended to counteract subversion, was after 1947 found extremely appropriate as a non-revolutionary philosophy and technique of rural development” (while) a revolutionary organizer like Chairman Mao had entirely different ideas about the characteristics and roles of peasants, bureaucrats, and the gentry.

Indeed, his comparisons of the Indian model with the Chinese are not only appropriate but would warm the hearts of all who still yearn for the communist models of development-“Nehru admired the dynamic role of cooperatives and communes in China and expected similar performance from his local bodies but did not do what Mao had done to enforce rural autonomy to curb the elites and to curtail the urban bias. Unlike the (Chinese) communes, the role of the (Indian) panchayats remained subordinate, secondary, and insignificant.” Little wonder then that while in China “the vicious cycle of privilege and poverty has been broken, few experts can claim that the same has happened as yet in India.”

Such open admiration for the non-godly communists from one taught to admire the Ghaznavid depredations of Kafirs is noteworthy. But it is equally noteworthy that the comparisons between India and the Chinese models completely bypasses any comparisons with other subcontinental experiences. Do the CBOs of Pakistan or the Grameen Banks of Bangladesh-toured as great successes-present alternative models? In fact, such lack of comparisons between the Indian and Pakistani and Bangladeshi experiences stand out as the glaring deficien-cies of all the booklets under review. Additionally, by not even attempr-ing to measure the spread-effect of the CBOs takes away any broad view of their nation-wise efficacy, especially since the authors do not also see if the CBOs are to supplement or to displace the pro-poor tasks of a government system that being authoritarian cannot express the voice of the poor.

Alok Sinha has been Commissioner of Rural Development in U.P. from 1992 to 1996.

SPECIAL ISSUES

The Book Review celebrates its Silver Jubilee in 2001. To mark the occasion, in addition to organizing semi-nars around books and lectures, special issues focussing on books from South Asia and on languages of the subcontinent will be brought out. Bhasha Special / is scheduled for December 2000 and South Asia Special II for February 2001.

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