Urban Slum Communities

What signifies urban slum living is the absolute lack of civic amenities and sanitation, insecurity of tenure, lack of sustained livelihoods since most people work in the unorganised sector, ghettoisation of the poor and therefore their criminalisation by corrupt structures of power located in more socially acceptable environs and state institutions like the police. In the areas where we have been involved in recent times i.e. Khader Sharief Garden slums and Markam Road slum, these therefore have been the focus of our interventions.

Our Interventions 

One of our longest involvements has been in the Khader Sharief Garden slum which to date over 1200 families live. The land, is spread across 3 acres and 20 guntas. Shramik, the building workers cooperative, which has now evolved into the Centre for Vernacular Architecture was born in and out of the experience of working in this slum. Some of the residents here are among its founding and core workers.

Apart from this we have been working with the Markam Road slum where 17 families live. 

Our priorities of work and objectives here have been: 

· To improve Civic Amenities

· To empower the slum dwellers through forming and supporting local organisations to enter into structures of local governance.

· To fight for ownership and regularisation of the Land and Houses to slum dwellers through the necessary Government agencies which include among others the Slum Board, Karnataka Housing Board and the Bangalore Development Authority.

· To access the numerous Government schemes that have been formulated for so called weaker sections 

· To respond to issues like that of violence against women, communalism, linguistic conflicts etc. within and between communities.

In Khader Sharief Garden the focus of our struggle for many years has been the regularisation of land in the names of the slum dwellers. Since the land belonged to a private family, the concerned State Government department i.e. the Karnataka Slum Clearance Board could not hand over ownership rights. SIEDS intervened in this struggle and is now involved in a Court Case which helped to release the First Stage of slum land. We are now fighting in the Deputy Commissioner’s Court for the release of the Second Stage. At present, the empowered slum dwellers are running their welfare association and attending to their day-to-day issues. A Joint Action Forum of NGO’s has been initiated to counter the attempts of the private landlord to vacate the slum residents in order to claim a huge compensation from the State and Central Government.

In the Markam Road Slum we have been, along with the association formed there, putting pressure on the authorities to rebuild their houses after the BMP evicted them.

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