A Fair Shake

What poor people needed was a fair shake. The vexing problem SKAA faced was how to outmaneuver the tenacious troika of corrupt officials, land grabbers, and local louts. Government funding expired when Siddiqui took the SKAA reins, but it scarcely mattered. SKAA expenditure over the last decade has been met by lease payments from house purchasers and by outside contributors—including the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, Rotary Clubs, and various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Inside Karachi city limits there are 539 katchi abadis with 2.5 million occupants. Rehabilitative work has started on 450 katchi abadis across Pakistan, almost half in the Sindh. A 1987 Squatters Law decrees that some katchi abadis will be moved because of hazardous siting, occupation of private land, or security reasons, but the vast majority are “regularizable” at their present locations, which are usually public lands. Since 1992, about 80 percent of the rehabilitation has been completed in 53 katchi abadis and about 50 percent in the remaining 244. The SKAA and an NGO called Saiban (Action Research for Shelter), which Siddiqui based on the model of the Orangi pilot project, build their leasing facilities on-site so that supervisors meet the residents and applicants, earning their trust on a daily basis. In Siddiqui’s highly adaptive schema, NGOs provide the research, planning, and training for his staff and community activists, and the results are readily apparent.

In Taiser Town on the southwestern outskirts of Karachi, we visited a joint venture between the local development authority and Siddiqui’s organization. Driving over a parched land of shacks, shrubs, and wandering goats, we suddenly pulled into gleaming rows of spare stone buildings neatly laid out on a 60-acre site of some 1,700 plots, including a school, parks, playgrounds, and a mosque under construction. Open spaces and community amenities are very rare in illegal settlements. The leasing contract is written in huge script on the front wall of the leasing office, and literate guides from the community are available to help applicants. A house costs 37,000 rupees (about US$700) with a 4,000-rupee down payment. People in the community typically earn 3,000 to 4,500 rupees a month. Several families we interviewed tell of paying far higher rents in price-gouging illegal settlements. Now they can build their own homes with a sense of security and even start small enterprises. Although the leasing prices are slightly higher than in Karachi municipal schemes, which are subsidized but open to petty abuses and swindles, people do far better in Taiser Town in the long run.

However, potential abuses of power are never far away. In July 2001, some 500 contractors lobbied the military government and the local Sindh cabinet to subsidize a vast array of illegal construction projects by paying only a fraction of the value. In exchange for “reviving the building industry,” which is how the ruse was packaged, the local authority collects a tiny payment for illegally built properties that will then be sold at six or seven times the price paid by the authorities. This perverse but familiar form of regularization, according to Ardeshir Cowasjee of the Dawn, a Karachi-based English daily, “makes the builder’s mafia the new town planners.” The ordinance—an enrichment act for speculators who overbuilt unauthorized offices—is currently being challenged. There is a growing international movement of shanty dwellers—from the streets of Bombay to the favellas of Latin America to the shacks of Soweto—who are fighting these machinations wherever they occur. A new umbrella group known as the All-Pakistan Alliance of Katchi Abadis marched last winter in Islamabad, where even civil servants suffer from a housing shortage, to protest the demolition of thousands of homes in Karachi and hundreds more in Rawapindi, Lahore, Quetta, and Peshawar. They pointedly asked why the government refrains from bulldozing the properties of speculators who illegally build personal mansions and commercial plazas on public land.

In contrast with the usually hidden public-sector dealings, “everything is transparent,” explains Taiser Town site organizer Akhtar Ali Khan. “Everything is incremental, taken in small steps and amounts. So there are no kickbacks, no opportunities for corruption.” The housing development in Taiser Town was initiated in March 1999, and today more than half of the plots are inhabited. Residents in every row of 12 houses choose “lane managers” both as street-level mediators and as representatives who engage in regular brainstorming sessions with local officials who live on-site. This is what Siddiqui calls “participatory government” in action.

A few houses, though fashioned mostly of rags and wood, are slowly taking permanent form in concrete blocks as quickly as the families can afford materials made by a small contractor on the site. Small loans are available from a microfinance bank for indigent families that need a start, and applicants are required to spend at least 15 days there before moving into their new homes. This requirement functions as a minor rite of passage for home seekers and weeds out infiltrating opportunists. Immediate and constant occupancy afterward is required or else the plot allocation is canceled. After five years of ownership, families can obtain a 99-year lease and the right to transfer the property. In over 240 katchi abadis, nearly one million people are already benefiting from similar programs.

Previous state initiatives have suffered from over-design, overpriced inputs, larded-on charges, and bribery that inflated the cost of housing units. According to Siddiqui, the government simply cannot afford to provide housing at market costs to every poor person, but considerable savings result from tapping local community skills, insuring honest bidding among contractors, and keeping a strict watch on purchasing decisions at all stages. The SKAA and Saiban’s engineers plan, survey, redesign, make estimates, and help execute plans in conjunction with community members, whom they consult constantly. Siddiqui, who created a work climate in SKAA supportive of this flexible approach, supervises some 160 officials in field offices around Karachi. Many employees formerly worked for state agencies but were drawn to SKAA’s work, and after training they go on the Saiban—not state—payroll.

Transport needs are arranged carefully; bus service takes residents to work in the city. Commercial plots are charged higher fees to subsidize residential housing, and resident artisans’ skills are everywhere in evidence. “Costs are reduced because government agencies and private contractors are not involved and seeking out corruption and profiteering,” says Siddiqui. Only three to four junior officials are needed to manage each katchi abadi, and Siddiqui’s organizations provide credit for potential income-generating activities undertaken by the residents. Because of this program, one third of the population finds employment within their town.