Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

78 PLANET OF SLUMS
r
\ Their constant effort is to subvert, dis-inform and de-idealize people so
as to keep them away from class struggles. They adopt and propagate the
practice of begging favours on sympathetic and humane grounds rather
than making the oppressed conscious of their rights. As a matter of fact
these agencies and organizations systematically intervene to oppose
the agitational path people take to win their demands. Their effort is
constantly to divert people's attention from the larger political evils of
imperialism to merely local issues and so confuse people in differentiat-
L
ing enemies from friends.27
r Das's complaints are amplified in detail in Gita Verma's controversial
2002 book Slumming India, a fierce, almost Swiftian attack on the
celebrity cult of urban NGOs. A rebel planner and exile from what she
calls "The System," Verma characterizes NGOs as "new class" middlemen
who, with the benediction of foreign philanthropies, are usurping
the authentic voices of the poor. She rails against the World Bank
paradigm of slum upgrading that accepts slums as eternal realities, as
well as anti-eviction movements that refuse to raise more radical
demands. The "right to stay," she says, "is no great privilege . ... It may
stop the occasional bulldozer but, for the rest, it does little beyond
change the label from 'problem' to 'solution' with some creative jargon
in fine print." "Saving the slum," she adds, specifically referring to
Delhi, "translates into endorsing the inequity of one-fifth to one-fourth
l of the city's population living on just 5 percent of the city's land."28
Verma's account includes a devastating debunking of two of the
most celebrated recent slum improvement projects in India. The UKsponsored
Indore scheme, which won awards at the Istanbul Habitat II
conference in 1996 and from the Aga Khan in 1998, supposedly
provided the city's slum households with individual water and sewer
connections, but Verma says it was "faking success out of a civic
disaster." Although neighborhoods now had sewers, residents didn't
have enough water to drink, much less to flush waste, so sewage consequently
backed up into homes and streets; malaria and cholera spread,
27 P.K. Das, "Manifesto of a Housing Activist," in Patel and Thorner, Bombay,
pp. 179-80.
28 Gita Verma, Slumming India: A Chronicle of Slums and Their Saviours, New Delhi
2002, pp. 150-52.
ILLUSIONS OF SELF-HELP 79
and residents began to die from contaminated water. Each summer,
Verma writes, "brought project beneficiaries (or, perhaps, Project
Mfected Persons) more water shortages, more choked drains, more
diseases, more monsoon mess, and more cause to complain about the
shoddy project infrastructure and poor quality ... "29
Verma is equally scalding about the award-winning Aranya resettlement
project: one of a species of projects that rehouse only a small
number of evictees or squatters but confer international celebrity on
their "slum saviors." In this case, however, most of the project's
achievements were literally on paper.
The truth about Aranya, however, is that its winning elements simply do
not exist on the ground. There is no town centre, no flowing pedestrian
greens, and no 40,000 poor people living there. These exist only in the
literature on Aranya and for more than a decade we have been celebrat­
ing a drawing, a design idea, that we are not sure will work because it has
not yet been tested.3o
Even observers less harsh than Verma agree that while the World
Bank/NGO approach to slum upgrading may produce local success
stories, it leaves the vast majority of the poor behind. NGOs, observes
activist and writer Arundhati Roy, "end up functioning like the whistle on
a pressure cooker. They divert and sublimate political rage, and make
sure it does not build to a head."31 Syrupy official assurances about --\
"enablement" and "good governance" sidestep core issues of global
inequality and debt, and ultimately they are just language games that
cloak the absence of any macro-strategy for alleviating urban povertY' " J
Perhaps this guilty awareness of the gap between promise and need
explains some of the fervor with which international lending institutions
and NGOs have embraced the ideas of Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian
businessman who has become the global guru of neo-liberal populism.
A John Turner for the 1990s, de Soto asserts that Third World cities
are not so much starved of investment and jobs as suffering an artificial
29 Ibid., pp. 8-15, 33-35.
30 Ibid., pp. 90-9 1.
31 Arundhati Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati
RgI, Boston 2004, p. 82.