The Govindpuri Redesign Initiative

our community

From the time I have known the people of Bhumiheen, Navjiwan and Jawahar Camps, the one fact of their life that has been constant is their vulnerability, their lack of security. From 1991, 1992, we remember children wondering if they would be removed from where they live to somewhere else. Would we? They would ask when they came into school. The women, when they got to know me enough to talk to me, had similar questions. They were not pawns on a chessboard, but for all they mattered, the successive governments had seem them as such. Arun Mahtre's "Nagadhuyya" would often come to mind, the facelessness of an urban city, the unimportance of children, women, trees, animals, in an urban planer's dream of the "ideal picture" in slum development. we felt that we would not have lived in the kind of dumpy building that celebrates "appropriate technology" if we was not working in Govindpuri slum. Augistin (400 AD) said that "cities are made up of people and their hopes - not of buildings and streets." Unfortunately, our children's dreams and hopes were not recognized by government which had built nice broad roads and universities, given us basic amenities and water for shower baths. Delhi has, in its urban plan, four universities and a technology university with 200 and more acres of land. Space for more malls than we can walk or buy in. But our slums?

GReDI students designing

Since 1990, we have seen how without a development strategy our slum cluster had grown. Government was confused most of the time - would more people pour into the city if they were given more amenities, if someone though of them as human and not as "scum"? Would they eat into the precious "little" water and electricity and everything else that Delhi had? Sanjay Gandhi had tried removing them: "Come and clean our toilets, wash the bottoms of our babies, scrub our flats clean and be the vacuum cleaners of our impeccable lives, but don't dare be seen."

Even today's government does not seem to think any different, or many a times it so seems. Sixty percent of Delhi lies in slums. Here are one hundred and fifty thousand people in just ours, yes, 150,000 children, women, men - but for all any town planner or urban designer cares, they could vanish today and they would not be noticed. For other pawns will take their place from Rajasthan or Haryana or UP and feudal habits have not changed.

Delhi is not a very responsible city. We do not heed exhortations that, "[e]ach city needs to recognize and to identify its own opportunities and problems, which may vary considerably according to its location, level of economic, social and institutional development and many other factors." We thought that time had come when Katha would attempt a kind of collective strategy so that we could be more actively behind the community's struggle for better housing, better water and sanitation and garbage collection, besides other things. We could see women coming together, as they have always done, but under a kind of strategized plan for safe water and sanitation, housing and health, especially reproductive health, education and economic revitalization.

[SHE] 2 And GREDI are very much part of this effort - the GOVINDPURI REDESIGN INITIATIVE. But it was more, too. This was all in the hands of our children. The idea put to them, it was their responsibility to dream and vision up, to talk to people and strategize and come up with a total plan for slum revitalization. We could see the shopkeepers coming together not just to eke out a living as they were doing now, but to better their lives and that of their children by a double charge system - subsidize their own village by charging those in surrounding colonies a little more. A cess system was what we had in mind, but even with such a fee, the adjoining well-to-do colonies should get their stuff at lower rates, if we played our game right. But who would come if they place is not clean and hygienic (which it is not now)? And so the Bhumiheen Mall came up as a castle of our dreams in the place of the struggling group of shacks and stalls - a Shopkeepers Guild would bring in synergy for the whole plan of revitalization - and the students of KITES. The KATHA INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP SCHOOL - actively brings this about. It was time that we became proactive about our own lives and living, instead of bemoaning the fact that government was doing nothing about it.

The last few years have been days of active talks and discussions and planning. Nearly 30 self help groups have been formed amongst the women. The Shopkeepers' Guild has been formed. Ideas of a Bhumiheen Mall have been broached. Government of Delhi has been approached. The Commissioner of the Municipal Council invited to grow or as we have seen in an advertisement - " 100 ways to parlay a good idea and very little cash into a fortune ." Could our students bring themselves together to bring about this change? This was the forgotten meaning of the English word "university" - " a body of persons gathered at a particular place for the disseminating and assimilating of knowledge in advanced fields of study." Could our "slum school" of 1200 children convert itself into a "university of ideas" to carry forward the dreams and aspirations of the people that belonged to it?

The idea was exciting. Compelling. And this is what the Pradhan of our area, Mahendra Rai. The women, members of the Ma Mandal and also now increasingly of [SHE] 2 and the students, children of our community who are also part of GREDI, are plotting and planning about., looking at the "cumulative impacts of poverty" and devising ways to bring themselves out of it. Talk has started with town planners and students of design and architecture schools to help us. We have a wonderful adviser in one of our Governing Council Members. And a Challenge 2010 to met.

Won't you join the movement?