Improving slum dwellers creditworthiness will help in accelerating the flow of private funds for slum development especially if this results in the coverage of the large group of ineligible households under formal financing schemes. This would not only provide an additional flow funds for shelter and other infrastructure but would also have the additional benefit of ensuring greater programmes ownership, sustainability and effectiveness. Making slum dwellers creditworthy, establishing funding mechanisms with transparent subsidy arrangements and innovations are important issues which require policy interventions. The nature of financial intermediation should be such that it encourages suitable local financial institutions to work alongside the ULBs (eg SEWA Bank).
Making Slum Dwellers Creditworthy: Savings and credit at the group level (see section 11 a) with upward linkages to formal sector finance will have a substantial impact on overall slum development and urban poverty alleviation.
Financial Discipline: This process would require support for establishing grass roots financial discipline and group capacity building which could be undertaken by specialist savings and credit organisations. Financial institutions should also be allowed to cover the non-eligible segment through acceptance of community and collective collateral in line with HUDCO scheme for NGOs.
Social Collateral: Institutional mechanisms should be evolved in line with Community Development Societies (CDS) system to mobilise community based resources to be linked as collateral to extend institutional loans.
Rational use of Subsidies: Subsidies in slum improvement programmes have become an all-encompassing feature firmly based on a welfare state approach. Even though subsidies for genuinely poor households are inevitable as a means of fulfilling their access to basic shelter and services, it has become imperative to make a shift towards establishing more sustainable financing mechanisms with the participation of the users to bring about desired change.
Firstly, this shift could be facilitated by quantifying/making explicit the quantum of subsidies and also making them more transparent.
Subsidies can also be used as cash security to leverage more funds for slum development.
Subsides could be rotated as revolving funds rather than being simple one time grants
Subsidies could be used as partial captive recovery as has been done in some of the housing projects
Strengthening Municipal Governance and Management
Urban Governance: The nature of urban governance has important implications for national slum development policy which requires the adoption of new approaches to urban management and urban poverty alleviation. Urban governance should be defined as the relationship between civil society and the municipality/ULB. This implies a shift, away from a perspective that defines infrastructure and services provision as exclusive concerns of government, to a new perspective that acknowledges the potential role, responsibility and impact of civil society. Civil society groups include: civic associations, community groups, women's groups, social movements, non-governmental organisations, community based organisations, private sector etc. etc. These groups already play a significant role in areas such as housing development, sale and rental of land, transportation and enterprise.
Capacity Building: A series of capacity building initiatives should be promoted to enable ULBs to effectively carry out slum development in accordance with National Slum Development Policy. This should include skill development, financial administration and management and human resource development.
Shelter Upgradation
This section of the Slum Policy is intended to emphasise the fundamental importance of empowering and enabling the urban poor to fulfil their own housing needs just like other city dwellers by facilitating access to serviced land, home loan financing and other technical and institutional support.
Given the magnitude of urban poverty and the availability of public funds is neither practical nor desirable to provide free housing for all the urban poor, especially since this would undermine the inherent capacity of most slum dwellers to provide for their own shelter needs within an enabling policy framework. Consequently, this Policy is committed to a shelter upgradation approach that will enable, support and extend individual and community initiatives for housing provision.
This policy envisages the primary role of the ULB in shelter upgradation as one of addressing and resolving the following critical bottlenecks:
Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E)
M&E is a tool for effective objective-oriented management of development projects and programmes aimed at benefiting the poor and disadvantaged groups. In order to find out the extent to which the programmes and projects of each strategic intervention under the National Slum Policy are being implemented and whether defined policy objectives are being achieved, a system of monitoring and evaluation shall have to be established at different levels of government with the Department of Urban Employment and Poverty Alleviation, Ministry of Urban Affairs and Employment, Government of India at the apex level.
A well defined monitoring and evaluation framework should be developed for every essential strategic intervention by utilising different performance indicators to evaluate and assess the changes that take place as a result of implementing the programme and project under this policy. It is also considered essential to ensure that the monitoring systems provide feedback for further developing and improving this policy framework and that a learning process takes place so that implementation and management of various slum development programmes and projects can be improved in future.
Monitoring and Evaluation - Action Points
Each intervention, programme or project under this policy shall need a monitoring and evaluation mechanism. Based on the guiding principles given above, key points necessary to design and build effective monitoring and evaluation into various projects of strategic interventions for achieving the objectives of the National Slum Policy are given as under:-
Monitoring and evaluation should be built into every programme and its management from the beginning in terms of clear responsibilities and budgets.
Ensure that procedures and conditions are connected to the results of monitoring and evaluation.
Try to ensure that monitoring and evaluation is carried out by credible bodies. These may include both the communities affected themselves and independent third parties.
Monitoring and evaluation should allow both immediate feedback to action and more considered reflection and response.
Monitoring should be frequent in the early stages, but requires follow up over an extended period until the desired and acceptable levels of project programme objectives are achieved.
[Note: The above is an abridged extract from the original, which can be viewed at the website of www.hudco.org]
