* REPORT : 29

India Report

India, 24-29 October, Ted Baumann

I’m not sure how to approach this report, since I feel obliged to keep up with the poetics of many report-writers on the pilgrimage to Mumbai, the home of ‘deep democracy’, but lack the skills or inclination to do so. So I’ll rather stick to my own dry style.

Why did I go? One of the key features of the SDI network is mutual support when there is an opportunity for one of the Federations to score a break-through with government. This involves bringing potentially sympathetic officials from one country on an exchange to meet actually sympathetic officials from another country, in the hope that the former will see the logic of working with a grassroots social movement. Strangely, given my undisciplined anarchism, I seem to have developed a talent for diplomacy with government officials, so I was selected to squire two good-natured officials from the city of Cape Town on a trip to Mumbai. These officials are central players in one of the biggest opportunities to come along in South Africa for some years: a major upgrading of the informal settlements along the main highway in and out of Cape Town, involving massive relocation and disruption to communities. The South African Alliance has proposed an enumeration as a first step towards a partnership with the City around this project, and these two officials were visiting India to see what can result from such a state-community partnership.

My job was to ‘translate’ what the two Cape Town officials were seeing into local terms, and both were mighty impressed with the work of Mahila Milan, NSDF, and SPARC (once they understood the differences). In fact, they were so impressed with the power of grassroots mobilisation through savings that one of them intimated a desire to join the NGO side and leaving his bureaucratic straight-jacket of a job. Always a danger of these kinds of trips, I guess.

The officials visited most of the major NSDF/SPARC developments, and got to see first hand what’s possible with an organised movement of the poor, supported by a good NGO, and a favourable policy environment. The high point of the visit was a meeting on the second day with officials of the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA). MMRDA is the lead agency for the Mumbai Urban Transport Projects (MUTP I & II), which led to the famous Railway Slumdwellers’ relocation, the template for subsequent deals between the Indian Alliance and the state. The Cape Town officials listened with fascination as the MMRDA officials explained the problem, their strategy, and the place of the Indian Alliance in that strategy. The Mumbai officials’ problem is essentially the same as Cape Town’s: there are a bunch of poor households living where they shouldn’t, officially speaking, and big political forces are pushing on the bureaucrats to move them, or at least camouflage them, so the cities can become ‘world class’. At this meeting I got to fire the one silver-bullet cartridge I’d brought along: I asked the MMRDA commissioner, who chaired the meeting, what they would have had to do without their relationship with the Indian Alliance. His reply was simple: “we’d have to go back to bulldozers”. That made a deep impression on the Cape Town officials, as it was meant to do.

There isn’t much more to say about the officials’ visit, except that, in terms of its objectives, it was highly successful. The officials are committed to working with the South African Alliance; and they’re prepared to stick their necks out (a bit) with the Cape Town City Council to do so. They want to form a formal advisory partnership with the South African Alliance around the Cape Town upgrading project, and to tap into the SDI network, possibly by inviting some Mumbai officials to Cape Town. That part of the mission accomplished – but of course the hard work is now, to capitalise on the officials’ enthusiasm before the realities of everyday work life overwhelm it.

One of the less obvious objectives of such visits is to find out as much as one can about the situation on the ‘other side’, in this case, the Cape Town City Council. My discussions with the officials revealed a serious obstacle to our efforts to broker a deal between the City and the communities affected by the upgrading plan. The elected councillors from the Wards in question are deeply suspicious of the South African Federation, and are essentially stonewalling our proposal for an enumeration (at no cost to the City). Naturally the councillors are concerned about losing political influence, but more ominously, the Federation’s reputation in Cape Town appears to include some very negative political interactions in the past. Violating the golden rule of the Federation strategy, the Western Cape Federation has not always remained apolitical, and is seen as aligned to a particular ‘faction’ in the regional African National Congress. This is going to make our job much harder, and the sought-for partnership may be stillborn because of it. Another unsettling (but no unexpected) bit of information gleaned form the officials was that some national officials who publicly appear to support the Federation’s approach to the City of Cape Town are privately warning City officials against it, out of fear of losing control of the process.

oo0oo

I’ve been to Mumbai many times before, and always learn something new. The pilgrimage usually leaves me refreshed and ready for action back at home in South Africa. This time, however, I came back feeling rather flat. There are a number of reasons for this.

First, the Indian Alliance has become so successful that they seem not to have the time they once did to devote to exchanges. This is understandable given the scale of their activities, but it would seem advisable to ask them to be more conscientious. Aside from our meeting with MMRDA, the visit was disorganised and lacking in focus. This dented the officials’ keenness a bit, but I did my best to keep them occupied. It gives a bad impression of the capacity of the Alliance model to leave government people hanging for hours on end and not to know what's going on or where to next.

Second, neither the South African Federation members nor the Malawians can be said to have had a proper community to community exchange (at least as far as I remember in the 'old days'). They were taken on a rapid-fire circuit tour of the Indian Alliance's developments with less than half-a-day spent on savings and credit basics, and almost no time with other slumdwellers. Nokangelani and Charlotte, who were supposed to get a refresher course on enumerations, got nothing of the kind as far as I can see. (It also seemed a bit odd to send only one person from the Cape Town settlements to be affected by the upgrading programme.) From a purely Federation perspective, the visit was a waste of time. There was a mix-up of communication about a meeting on the last day with the Byculla regulars, which was partly my fault, but inn the end it was indicative of a chaotic approach to the exchange arrangements by the Indian Alliance.

Third, after a decade of visits to Byculla, I finally got a chance to spend some private time with the SPARCies who work with Mahila Milan around savings and credit. I spent two hours with three of them at Byculla. I've been saying for years that the SPARCies play a vital role in supporting MM and in so doing, help maintain confidence in the 'system' – and been called an heretic who doesn’t understand the Indian system. By the SPARCies’ account, however, I’m right. They feel that assistance with record-keeping, especially around loan repayments, etc. by low-level SPARCies is a critical function in the Mahila Milan ‘model’. They might be rationalising (as might I), but they agreed with my observation that their role encourages savings and credit by putting an 'objective' third party into the process. And yet our Indian allies have always resisted any moves in this direction for the South African Federation. Perhaps they thought South African NGO people would end up dominating the process, or that the Federation has to get the basics right before it can risk the SPARC approach. Perhaps the SPARC technical role is driven by the NGO against community wishes. But it could also be that South African savings and credit practise never had a Celine d’Cruz to play that intimate 'third party' role, giving a savings scheme or two the confidence to take the risk of trusting each other and the 'system', and providing an example of the rest.

On a brighter note, the Malawian NGO person Skulile seems really promising. She talks when she has something useful to say and listens when she doesn't, and seems to have a good instinct for the diplomacy required of the intermediary role between community and formal. She's a keeper; I wish she was South African so that our Federation could do the keeping.

oo0oo

My overall impression is that we are doing the best we can here in Cape Town in difficult conditions. Hopefully this visit will have helped to create the conditions for a partnership between the City of Cape Town and the South African Alliance. But there is no point in glossing over the fact that the South African Federation is at a low ebb, for a number of reasons. Indeed, the visit also made me wonder if it is not going to become increasingly difficult for local Federation/NGO Alliances in the SDI network to keep their focus on domestic processes as well as international activities. The SDI process sometimes seems to run the risk of becoming the centre of attention, even though it is supposed to be an outgrowth of local activism. In our South African case, I tend to think that the NGO side of the Alliance has basically failed to support the Federation through the difficult job of ‘restructuring’ itself away from the dysfunctional tendencies that emerged during the subsidy-chasing days of the late-90s. This is a topic for another day and another writer who is more acquainted with the story, but if nothing else the recent Indian visit taught me that you can never take your success for granted.