Q&A with Dr. Ramya Ramanath
Author of, "A Place to Call Home: Women as Agents of Change in Mumbai"
Housing is an essential element of placemaking and community building. In this context, resettlement of housing can both disrupt and catalyse the bonds of community that transform physical brick-and-mortar housing into thriving neighbourhoods of work, play and life. In her recent book, Dr. Ramya Ramanath explores these aspects through the lens of a specific resettlement colony in Mumbai. The book, titled ‘A Place to Call Home: Women as Agents of Change in Mumbai’, is an ethnographic field study that examines the lives of the women who were displaced by slum clearance and relocated to the largest slum resettlement site in Asia.
The book, ‘A Place to Call Home: Women as Agents of Change in Mumbai’, is available for purchase on Amazon
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The research draws on disciplinary perspectives in urban planning, anthropology, and urban sociology. Through extensive research involving conversations with diverse women of different ages, levels of education, types of employment, marital status, ethnicity, caste, religion, and household make-up, Dr. Ramya manages to paint a comprehensive picture of the women as agents of change as they transition from makeshift housing in a park slum to ownership of a high-rise apartment in a posh Mumbai suburb. The book provides a novel source for reflecting on how integral housing is to the everydayness of life. The rich ethnographic works and nuanced attention to the narratives of the women’s experiences contribute new insights into the research and practice domains of housing and habitat.
Dr. Ramya Ramanath is Associate Professor and Chair of International Public Service at DePaul University, Chicago. Her research focuses on the behaviour of international and domestic non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the context of their interactions with government agencies, other NGOs, and intended beneficiaries. She teaches courses on the management of international NGOs, sustainable international development, cross-sector interactions, and policy implementation. Prior to her academic career in the USA, she has also worked with housing finance and development agencies in both rural and urban India.
To know more, visit: http://www.ramyaramanath.com/
Indian Housing Federation (IHF) reached out to Dr. Ramya Ramanath to know more about her research on the subject and the implications of this research for housing policy. The following questions were answered directly by her in writing and have been reproduced below as such.
What motivated and inspired your research to document the gendered experiences of living in a slum and then rebuilding lives in the resettlement site?
What motivated and inspired this book are several factors, but I shall try elaborating on at least two of them. The first of these is my fascination with large cities and the many paradoxes they produce. Cities, to me, are a cluster of activities which if ill-managed can erode biodiversity yet are immensely creative sites for quality living. One would think that with humanity's cultural and technological advancements, we would have devised a means to plan and design cities that balance a need for privacy with community; preserve nature alongside development; manage urban growth with equity considerations but we have not been as successful. I attribute this, in no small measure, to the inability and blatant unwillingness to authentically account for the voices and practices of those in marginalised neighbourhoods, especially its women, in the policies, planning and practices that shape livability.
The most visible manifestation of urban marginalisation, besides homelessness, are the jhopadpattis/slums/favelas of megacities like Mumbai, Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro. I will not get into the definition of a slum but will say that my interest in slums is related to my concern with the paradoxes that an urban space called a “slum” engenders. On the one hand, labeling a space a slum summons the possibility for several kinds of state interventions, whether demolition, improvement, upgradation, redevelopment, or as is the case in my book: demolition followed by relocation, and resettlement. All such interventions are a means to align these informal urban spaces with the vision to transform cities like Mumbai into “global” or “world” cities. But when pejoratively used, calling them slums and treating them as eyesores erases all sense of place, and thereby the history and memory of the space and its people. I therefore wanted to author this book as a call to collect more historical ethnographies of the urban poor in India and elsewhere, and especially its women because they treat their homes, wherever such homes might be, as a place that they must make. I wanted to capture the highs and lows of a woman’s journey of making home, how she negotiates and evaluates the political and policy drive to create “slum-free cities.” Women are often considered the most vulnerable “victims” of demolitions and resulting displacement, but they are rarely characterised as evaluative participants who actively make sense of (and give sense to) home and work.
Can you spotlight the context in which this Resettlement and Rehabilitation project was undertaken?
I will begin by sharing the context of my association with this resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) “project” called Sangharsh Nagar (meaning a neighbourhood born of struggle), Asia’s largest slum resettlement site. Up to the point of collecting data for this book from 2012-2016, much of my research in housing had focused on institutional stakeholders including governmental and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) involved in the planning, design, and delivery of housing options for the urban poor. So, the journey of my association with this R&R project goes back to 2002-03 when I was completing my doctoral dissertation work. As part of the work, I had analysed several different slum housing redevelopment and resettlement initiatives in Mumbai but had done so from the perspective of the NGOs and government agencies involved. One of the three Mumbai-based NGOs that took part in my doctoral work was the NGO that was leading the design and development of Sangharsh Nagar, a site meant for those who lived in “illegal” settlements around Mumbai’s only national park i.e., the Sanjay Gandhi National Park.
Informal settlements on the fringe of Sanjay Gandhi National Park
Photo Courtesy: Dr. Ramya Ramanath
I had known some but not all the 120 women whose work and words are the core of this book a decade before I started collecting data for my book. The first time I met them in 2002, they lived on the fringes of the national park, an area referred to as the buffer zone. The park is nestled in the northern parts of the city and extends into the much larger metropolitan region. Back in 2002, at the time of my first encounter with some of these women, they were recovering from a massive demolition drive led by the state government. The demolitions were the result of a High Court case fought between an environmental rights organisation and a housing rights organisation—both NGOs. The environmental rights activists won, and the court ordered the demolition of the homes, some 75,000 to 86,000 “illegal hutments” but according to state government rules, the homes of those who could prove residence in the city on or before the 1st of January 1995 were to remain untouched until they were offered alternate housing. It was these 22,000 eligible households that lived in eight settlements, some of the densest of settlements on the park’s fringe areas, that were to become the focus of the book.
Following the demolitions, the residents waited for 12 years in residential limbo, i.e., not knowing their housing futures. Then, finally in 2007, the women and their families had begun their journey to a newly developed slum resettlement site that was built on a former stone quarry. This was on land owned by a private real-estate developer, spread over 45 acres, and located about 10 kms from the park. It is in some respects, an unusual resettlement site because it is situated in the heart of the city, in a posh Mumbai suburb. Most resettlement sites, if they are ever built, are situated in the far-off fringes of the city; slum dwellers tend to be pushed away from the city center to its distant, unseen suburbs. So, these residents of the park slums were making their move to become legal owners of small, cookie-cutter 225 sq ft apartment units in the site. But the site christened Sangharsh Nagar had not developed according to promises made by the NGO that had fought for their rights.
The Sangharsh Nagar apartment buildings
Photo Courtesy: Dr. Ramya Ramanath
In fact, little worked out as planned. The NGO and the private developer had a falling out. The city’s real estate bubble had burst and so did the developer’s interest in building a model site of low-rise buildings and generous open and commercial spaces with amenities. The developer sidelined the NGO from the partnership and developed a site that hosts some 200, eight to 24-story-tall apartment buildings with no dedicated areas for playgrounds, places of worship, retail business or any other promised amenities. Prior to starting data collection in August 2012, I would visit Mumbai to catch up with friends I had made in the park settlements, some of whom had moved to Sangharsh Nagar. Besides spending time in the park, I would also walk around Sangharsh Nagar, sit at the NGO’s office in the site, hang out at the roadside bazaar and would casually ask the residents, both men and women, boys, and girls, about their lives after resettlement. Occasionally, my questions and probes would generate conversations. It was women, always the women who were the most vocal about their satisfactions and struggles, their highs, and lows about their new lives at the resettlement site and I made up my mind that this is a phase that would soon be forgotten so I must document this far more systematically.
What were your challenges and experiences in the process of bonding with the women and capturing their life-stories?
I would call them the typical trials and thrills of fieldwork. The process of bonding, as you can imagine, is not a finite process. It has its joys but is also time-consuming and strenuous. Joyful because I would rather spend time in the field collecting data than theorise, analyse and deal with my own life challenges! That said, what made it strenuous were three aspects: maintaining methodological precision amidst the commotion of participant recruitment, managing the enormous physical distance (between Chicago and Mumbai), and then being constantly reminded that I am constrained in my ability to help them realise their vision of a livable place.
I shall elaborate on the methodology because in doing so I shall touch upon the other two challenges I listed. The book relies on 11 focus group discussions with 100 women and individual interviews with 20 others. The intent of the individual interviews was to gather life-stories from women unable or unwilling to attend a focus group discussion. In these interviews, they’d share their life stories, specifically about their residential lives from as far back as their memories traveled. I gathered nearly 40 hours of conversations with these 20 women over 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2016. I would collect data, return to Chicago to analyse it and would be tempted to fly right back to Mumbai to fill any gaps. I therefore took my time to “complete” my individual interviews and did them over a period of four years. I have since kept in touch with most of these 20 women.
But what I least expected was that the process of recruiting women for focus group discussions would a) be as physically exhausting and time consuming and b) would yield equally compelling and detailed life-stories. More than a hundred of them were recruited for participation in 11 different focus group discussions held in August and November - December 2012. The first conversation with each woman was a meet and greet and did not immediately lead to an intake interview. In fact, not all such initial encounters were exactly pleasant; some women and/or their family members would argue the utility of the research with me and I’d, of course, share the potential benefits of the research. Occasionally, women would argue and would say nothing about their intent to participate but would retain the consent form (written up in Hindi/Marathi). A few hours later, I’d get a phone call from the husband or the son who would check on my identity and intent and if satisfied, would invite me over for the “official” audio-recorded intake interview where I’d fill up the questionnaire as the woman spoke.
While each intake conversation was anticipated to take about 15 minutes to complete, the woman (and all those present!) were as curious about me as I was about her. As such, her response to each question was interspersed with extended discussions about life not just with the potential participant but with the rest of her household members, visiting relatives and, often, curious neighbours. It was not uncommon to have an hour or 1.5 hour-long conversation with each woman/her kith and kin during this recruitment process. But it had its benefits. Beyond building familiarity and trust, it informed my research methods and resulting findings. It, for instance, helped reveal that a woman’s story about adapting to life at the resettlement site varied depending not only on her sociodemographic characteristics but the time her family spent awaiting relocation and the strength of her households’ ties with other residents and external agencies including NGOs, political parties, and community-based organisations within her immediate neighborhood in the park slum. So, each focus group discussion was meticulously populated: 9-12 women who reflected the diversity of experiences revealed in my intake conversations. The resulting group discussions were made that much richer.
The book brings women’s agency to the forefront, but during your journey of writing the book did you encounter instances of some compelling stories from other stakeholders who play subtle roles in housing decisions of households living on the margins?
This is a tough one to answer briefly. I invite you to read the book’s third chapter, titled “Deliberation over legitimate benefactors in a neoliberal bazaar,” to get a more well-rounded answer but I can briefly share one such instance. The commotion surrounding the proposed relocation of park residents to Sangharsh Nagar had sparked activity among political leaders with electoral constituencies in the park slums. They began making their own promises to relocate residents and urged them to disregard Sangharsh Nagar and wait to get resettled closer to the park’s borders. One such player was a local female corporator who was popular among residents of one of the eight slums targeted for relocation to Sangharsh Nagar. Backed by lawyers, she accused the Forest Department of unjustly demolishing homes on roughly 200 acres of land over which it had no jurisdiction. In a conversation I had with her, she alleged:
Why not allow the slums to be where they are? Their land has nothing to do with the forest [area], so how can the forest [department] demolish the settlements? The poor should not be deprived of their dwellings just because the government is not clear about its maps and land records.
Contentions such as these caused enormous confusion and made mobilising and organising residents to accept the resettlement option of Sangharsh Nagar (and legitimately occupy their apartment homes) an uphill task for the NGO that was “branding” Sangharsh Nagar as the most favorable housing alternative. This is a high-profile Mumbai-based NGO but its work was rendered difficult because it was not particularly well-known across all the park slums or was not outrightly trusted as a legitimate housing provider. The long waiting period, the spate of competing promises by various stakeholders, the pre-existing income and wealth heterogeneity among slum residents, and then the early inauguration of Sangharsh Nagar without all of the promised amenities—caused park residents to go hither and thither. For instance, some who could afford to, restarted their lives in middle-class housing developments in far off city-suburbs or returned for good to their hometown or villages. Many of these very families sold or rented out their apartment units in Sangharsh Nagar, unfairly profiting from the state government’s negligent monitoring of housing entitlements.
Thus, the interim period between the start of demolitions in 1995 and the inauguration of Sangharsh Nagar in 2007, had created a chaotic R&R environment which the women characterised as difficult, but not impossible to monitor. Having more organised eyes and ears on the ground to monitor conditions, they noted, might have prevented the many alleged instances of fraudulent dealings in which residents got their hands on more than one apartment unit and made a profit off selling or renting them.
An excerpt from your book reads: “Their longing for years past was a clear indication of what these women sought in their built environments - a place of togetherness.” Which were some of the prominent collective memories of ‘togetherness’ the women shared with you, especially from their originally inhabited slums on the fringes of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park? What intangibles (culture, emotions, bonds etc.) from these settlements should policymakers strive to preserve when planning resettlement?
It isn’t the intangibles per se but, as you rightly observe, the incorporation of the so-called intangibles in eventual design and development that are wanting. The women had suggestions aplenty on how to do so! The book has several such stories of the quintessential elements of “vibrant matter” in their past residential lives and how they could be recreated/reconfigured at the new site. I shall share one of these as an example.
A glimpse of life at the Sangharsh Nagar resettlement site
Photo Courtesy: Dr. Ramya Ramanath
For instance, the architecture of the site has redefined the meaning of community and safety for the young never-married women, ages 18-25 years. At Sangharsh Nagar, the state government require some 15-18 adjacent apartment buildings, called a cluster, to register themselves as a cooperative housing society. This society was responsible for maintaining the built environment at the new site. For young adult women like 20-year-old Amrapali who had spent all their lives up to this point in the slums, the rules imposed by the managing committee of these cooperative housing societies were constricting. They complained about the rules governing the safe interior spaces of their building clusters and the unsafe conditions existing right outside of these clusters. Amrapali summarised this well during a focus group discussion when she said (see Chapter IV):
The way it is here is that when you get down out of your building cluster gate, all the boys are staring. In the slum we could disappear, disappear in those alleyways of Prem Nagar [her neighborhood]. They [the alleys/lanes] were tiny. You would get out of here and enter there. We friends would race in them. We were not allowed to run [in our lane], but we ran. We could pick and choose the shortest route and here, they [rowdies] are everywhere. There at 10 or at 11 at night, we could go, but here it is hard to get out of the house because the rowdies keep coming and they all have their own areas. At 8:00 at night it feels like midnight. No girls step out. You have to keep thinking who might be standing in the next corner. There were also no [street] lights in the first few months. My brother wouldn’t let me get out of the house after 7:00.
For Amrapali and many like her, a move to the resettlement site with apartment housing saw a decline in collectivism and the emergence of a more atomistic, individualised lifestyle due, at least in part, to the separation of those who would live near one another in their respective chaalis in the slum. However, this was not a complaint shared as a permanent or unchangeable condition but to generate a healthier balance between privacy and community. The same Amrapali (see Chapter V) offered a solution:
If girls have to step out and if their parents, their in-laws, do not permit [it], then they should be made to understand nicely. They have to be made to understand that if they want to do it, they should be allowed to. That they should not be told not to. This is our class [she was undergoing jewelry-making training offered by an NGO], this is our institution—we want to have them stand on their own two feet. We will give them good training and they can go out. Parents have to first understand that yes, their daughter can do something. That she is old enough and can help with household expenses.
Nineteen-year-old Leela who was pursuing her baccalaureate degree in college chimed in stating this:
We need a ladies’ police station here. So many people and no police station?
Many of the women concerned about rowdies had grown into young adults after relocation and it would be reasonable to assume that they perceived attention from males as harassment and a deterrent to their mobility. However, many of them vehemently argued that there was more to it than just their transition from girlhood to womanhood. Amrapali and other young, never-married women made a case against gender awareness and consciousness-building programmes popular among NGOs and institutional donors. They argued, instead, for tangible resources to help counter parental restrictions and harassment from community males, both of which were identified as limiting their future aspirations and employment options.
While the experience of transitioning to a new home depended on the socio-demographic characteristics of the women, how did the change in housing conditions from insecure to secure home-ownership translate into newer aspirations for the women and their families?
I must point out at the outset that despite their move to “secure” homeownership, the woman’s name was not included in the title-deed to the apartment unit; a key miss by the NGO that coordinated this R&R project. This meant that in the event of a separation, divorce or widowhood, the woman has to fight a protracted battle to establish her claim to the apartment unit. This was a challenge that several women included in this book were struggling to tackle.
But there were several others, especially the young adult women, who had little trouble identifying newer aspirations, positive events within the resettlement site. Many of these positive, newer aspirations in Sangharsh Nagar involved getting together with friends to acquire new skills and convincing each other that a move from a slum to a high-rise represented upward mobility. In addition, women accustomed to stepping out of their homes to earn a living described their lives in the slum as “difficult” and “challenging” because of the twin responsibilities of home and work. While they were still shouldering both sets of responsibilities, they positively appraised their new homes for freeing them from fetching water, protecting their homes from seasonal rains, walking into the jungle to relieve themselves, and most importantly, worrying over their children’s safety while they were away at work. Many of these women were in the age range of 34–49 years old but they also had the advantage of not being the sole earners of their households.
The stories from most other women were less positive but nevertheless, were laced with concrete ideas of how the shortfalls could be remedied for the benefit of their own lives, those of their families and the site, at large.
What are the most significant takeaways from the place-making stories of the women that must be incorporated into housing policies, planning practices and the wider public discourse of “right to the city”?
There are at least three significant takeaways that the book’s concluding chapter highlights, but I shall elaborate on one of them. What the place-making stories of the women reveal is that the “right to the city” is an ongoing struggle (a sangharsh!) that takes place around clumsy, even fickle institutional arrangements but the claim-making finds a semblance of order around innumerable, tiny, and dense circles of social solidarity among women. What matters more and receives less than necessary attention is the path that the urban poor take to becoming a state recognised homeowner and the path they navigate to hold on to (and/or capitalise on) that ownership. As policymakers and implementers, we lack ideas on how to intervene in this path to change the local public realm and its governance and the kind of city and political community we want to create instead.
The women in this book offer us a way forward to creatively respond to and generate positive alternatives to the disorder in neoliberal city governance. Let me try to illustrate how this might look by sketching one such circle of social solidarity at work at the resettlement site (extracted and significantly altered; see book for a detailed depiction of this place-making story). I will share the story to a point and then shall invite you to read the book’s Chapter V and VI (or alternatively my article in World Development). These sources uncover how women apply these experiences/stories to inform what they believe can and should be done to improve lives and livelihoods.
A roadway between the two clusters of apartment buildings at Sangharsh Nagar
Photo Courtesy: Dr. Ramya Ramanath
Alpana, 35, had moved to Sangharsh Nagar after living in the Kranti Nagar slum of the park for nearly two decades with her husband and their two teenaged children. In the slum, Alpana had worked from home stitching surgical facemasks, an informal enterprise that she said her suspicious husband (a truck driver for a city-based company) had encouraged her to pursue. The home-based, piecework brought in about Rs 5,000–6,000 a month. When the move left Alpana and those like her without their previous outlets for subcontracted home-work, she and her husband started a petty shop in the bazaar adjoining the resettlement site. Alpana now managed the shop on her own, selling fresh flowers, fruit, incense sticks, vermillion, camphor, cotton wicks, books and other items used in Hindu rituals and festivities. However, within a month of launching their new enterprise, altercations between the couple hit a new low (in the dialogue shared in the book, you shall learn that she was severely beaten and then encouraged by her mother to move out of the marital residence i.e., the allotted apartment unit).
When I first met and interviewed Alpana in December 2012, the police case against her husband was due soon for a court hearing and she along with her daughter Aarti were renting an apartment unit on the seventh floor of another building in the resettlement site. Aarti, 15, was completing high school and occasionally helped her mother run the shop in the bazaar. But without any financial support from her husband, making ends meet was a perpetual challenge. Their 225 sq ft apartment unit cost Rs 3,500 in rent and Aarti’s school-related expenses and the dreaded monthly maintenance fees and other household expenses sent Alpana helter-skelter in search of finances. Earnings from their tiny shop were good, during the Diwali season, bringing up to Rs 5,000 a day. At all other times of the year, Alpana commonly took home just Rs 200–250 a day. With her only other income coming from occasional tailoring of saree blouses, Alpana confessed that she received substantial financial and emotional help from her friend Madhavi.
Madhavi [who I recruited for a focus group discussion], was relatively well off. Her financial means had enabled Madhavi to start a rotating savings and credit group among women who lived in her cluster of apartment buildings. Groups like hers, called fund or bishi, were common in the slum. They re-emerged with renewed rigour after relocation led by women with authority or business acumen who mobilised members from their own caste and ethnic affiliation. All the women in Madhavi’s group were Maharashtrians and all of them, save Alpana, identified themselves as Jai Bhim.
How can planners use narratives such as these to organise improvements in the lives and livelihoods of women like Alpana? As I note above, I invite you to read the book to see the way forward as charted by Alpana, Madhavi and others like them.
How can other Indian cities take inspiration from the findings of this research work in a way that enables better housing interventions?
Cities in general have, I strongly believe, a lot to learn from women. The lived experiences of those who work as hard as these women have to make their places a home, deserves careful, nuanced listening. What we have today in resettlement and rehabilitation policies and in many other policy arenas including education, health care and economic and gender empowerment is that NGOs and other private sector players are being called on to serve ostensibly as bridges between what is and what should or could be. The current housing policy environment (and much scholarship) treats NGOs and all other players including, donors, government agencies, political parties, and private firms, as instruments of capacity-building and social change. This decentralised policy environment is clearly not yielding expected results. Although each woman in this book describes her home-related identity differently in distinct places through time, what she makes clear is that we need to pay a whole lot more attention to many other forms of (re)organising that are taking place despite and indeed because of the shortfalls of these very institutional benefactors.
If the housing futures of the urban poor in the city’s slums must work better, then a series of systemic changes are in order. State governments need to use policy tools to get rid of what generates a tale of two cities, with low-quality, free/heavily subsidised owner housing for slum residents on the one hand and luxury housing for the rich on the other. This divergent cityscape could be transformed if state governments did not remain passive spectators but proactively engaged as planners and managers of the owner-housing process. Furthermore, to create more affordable housing stock in the city, the state governments must, on an urgent footing, work to direct subsidies towards energising the public and private rental sectors.
All this stated, reforms in the housing policy framework are far from the only solution to the housing challenges facing residents in India’s large cities. As the women in my book point out, job creation, greater income parity, safety, preserving pre-existing and newer social/support networks, access to education and skills-training—are all equally essential ingredients for creating a more livable city. I will end my response with what the women implored to improve the housing process: The best of laws and policies and the most painstakingly/intricately designed housing interventions, they noted, can falter and fail if those who deal with putting them into practice are not themselves engaged and empowered as agents of change. We need to gather more stories of those that do the work to empower. How much and what type of power, for instance, do the NGOs and their frontline workers have to empower the clients they serve? How well do they know their clientele? How do they organise and mobilise their attention? When are they most effective and when are they not? What are some innovative methods they have used and how can such innovations be encouraged and supported? Answers to these questions might point a way out of the shadows that low-quality, high-rise apartment housing have cast over their lives.