Financial Times; Nov 6, 2000
For 29 years Sulochana Parab lived about 3ft away from the railway track linking Mankhurd and Govindi in suburban Bombay. In March, under a World Bank-backed scheme, she was rehoused in a pleasant seven-storey building nearby.
She is among 100,000 railway slum-dwellers being rehoused in India's biggest urban resettlement project. "We believed and we dreamed we would get this," she says, proudly showing off her apartment.
The resettlement is part of a Rs38.60bn (Pounds 570m) urban transport project. The World Bank, whose president James Wolfensohn arrives in Bombay today on a 10-day visit to India, has loaned Rs23bn to the scheme, whose primary aim is to improve Bombay's railways.
The scheme is typical of how the World Bank, of which India is one of the largest clients, has learnt to combine its traditional role of funding physical infrastructure with an increased focus on the social impacts of its work. Building more tracks and platforms is one way of improving railway efficiency. But in India, tracks and platforms are also people's homes. Although the financial cost of resettling railway slum-dwellers is marginal, the issue of housing was always going to be the most sensitive element of the Mumbai Urban Transport Project.
Some 19,000 families will be moved under MUPT, due for completion by 2005. People forced to move will be given a 225 sq ft home built by private developers. Urvinder Madan, project manager of MUTP, says: "In exchange for building these low-cost houses, developers get a certificate to build commercially viable properties elsewhere."
Inevitably, matters got off on the wrong foot. The government-owned Indian Railways, a big landowner and reluctant to set a precedent by getting involved in a resettlement scheme, sent in bulldozers to crush homes alongside the tracks at Mankhurd earlier this year. Indian Railways said the encroachment of slum-dwellers threatened the efficiency of services and passengers and demanded that shanty dwellings within 32.5 ft of the track be removed.
Yet controversy has been the exception rather than the rule. The World Bank is obviously relieved. Its annual spending - currently around Dollars 2bn (Pounds 1.4bn) in loans - is small potatoes in the Dollars 400bn Indian economy. So the bank has shifted its spending towards clearly defined standalone projects.
It has targeted individual states such as the information technology-rich southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, which it believes are sufficiently clear of corruption and mismanagement for its work to have maximum effect.
World Bank rules mean all lending has to be routed through Delhi, but the concentration on projects in favoured states, which are then intended to provide a good example to others, is increasing.
Its work is still not without controversy.
Deeply involved in trying to restructure India's ramshackle power sector, the bank's strong belief that realistic prices should be charged for electricity and fuel has involved it in furious rows over increases in power charges imposed by national and state governments.
When Mr Wolfensohn visits Andhra Pradesh later in the week, some expect the regular protests against the fuel price rises imposed by N. Chandrababu Naidu, the state's dynamic young governor, to find a new target in the bank's president.
But as far as the Bombay project is concerned, the new approach seems to be working. "This resettlement is working because all the parties' interests have coincided," says Sheela Patel, director of Sparc, a non-governmental organisation. Together with the National Slum Dwellers Federation, Sparc first persuaded the slum-dwellers to move and then argued their case before government. "We are all beneficiaries."
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited
