ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the involvement of an alliance of three Indian organizations in community-designed, built and managed toilet blocks that now serve more than half a million low-income urban dwellers in eight cities in India. These three organizations are: the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and Mahila Milan. SPARC is an Indian non-governmental organization (NGO) established in Mumbai in 1984 that began working with women pavement dwellers. The NSDF links together and represents organizations and federations of slum dwellers throughout India; by March 2002, it was operating in 52 cities and nine states with over 750,000 members. The largest membership is in Mumbai where 250,000 households are members. Mahila Milan (meaning ‘women together’) are cooperatives formed by women slum and pavement dwellers that work very closely with the NSDF. These community toilet blocks are part of a larger programme of work in which the alliance of SPARC-NSDF-Mahila Milan 1 is involved. It includes community-managed resettlement programmes (see Patel et al, 2002), ‘slum’ rehabilitation programmes (for instance, the construction of apartment blocks in Dharavi, Mumbai's largest and perhaps most dense ‘slum’ to allow housing improvements without displacing any inhabitants) and housing programmes (for pavement and slum dwellers) (Patel and Mitlin, 2001).
