Mighty in deed

On the occasion of his first death anniversary on October 12, social scientists from all over Pakistan gathered to honour the memory of one of the sub-continent's greatest Gandhians - Akhtar Hameed Khan. ANIL AGARWAL and SUNITA NARAIN write on his achievements in the field of urban management. He will be especially remembered for his involvement with the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi, where he mobilised the residents of this illegal squatter settlement, to finance and construct their own sanitation system.

JUST who would you vote for as the greatest Gandhian in the Indian sub-continent in the post-Independence period? Our vote will unhesitatingly go to the Pakistani social scientist Akhtar Hameed Khan, in whose memory social activists from all over Pakistan met on October 12, his first death anniversary, in Karachi.

The biggest contribution that Khansaheb made was to correct our distorted perception of the poor. Most "educated people" consider the poor as helpless and incapable people who need constant support. On the other hand, Khansaheb taught us, through his lifelong work, that the true poverty of the poor arises not out of lack of money but out of constant disempowerment. In other words, it is not economic poverty that keeps the poor poor, but it is their political poverty. What the poor need is empowerment in the form of some technical knowledge, maybe some catalytic financial support, but, most of all, institutions which give them the right to decide on all those issues that affect their own lives. But this means that the so-called educated must learn to respect the poor and develop a firm belief in their capacity to manage themselves.

Urban management is in a state of crisis across the developing world. Our towns and cities are today cesspools of filth and pollution, and becoming worse by the day. This is in the very nature of Western-style urbanisation which presents poor countries with two key problems. One, this type of urbanisation is extremely capital-intensive, which means that most Western- style urban services cannot be afforded by the majority of the urban dwellers in poor countries and their application immediately divides the population into haves and have-nots. This sharp disparity can be seen in any South Asian city today. Two, Western urbanisation is extremely material-intensive, which means it draws in enormous materials from the hinterland leading to an intense ecological pressure on it, and then it generates enormous quantities of wastes and pollutants, making urban life a living hell.

Therefore, the process of urbanisation has to be carefully managed in our part of the world to ensure that the process becomes as socially - and environmentally - friendly as possible. But urban systems, even in so-called democratic countries, are managed through mega-institutions with elected representatives at their helm at best. Instead of the urban institutional base being built on the principles of "participatory democracy," it is built on the rule of "representative democracy" which, unfortunately, in the absence of strong accountability, has invariably led to corruption, incompetence and elitism.

Over the last 25 years, there have emerged several outstanding efforts in the rural areas of India where villagers have got together to manage their degraded natural resource base and undertake cooperative measures to restore it, which in turn has changed their economic landscape as well. The rural economy is built around the sustainable use of natural resources like land, water and biodiversity. Restoring the natural resource base also restores the rural economy. We have seen this process take place in villages like Ralegan Siddhi in Maharashtra, Sukhomajri in Haryana, and several hundred villages of Alwar district. Most of these participatory efforts in Indian villages have happened not because of the government but in spite of the government.

This struggle has, however, been much easier in rural areas because of the weak reach of the State into the interland. Urban areas, on the other hand, are heavily dominated by State institutions and, as a result, there is very little political space for participatory efforts to grow. Not surprisingly, there are few examples of participatory urban environmental management in India or in other developing countries.

But Khansaheb's work - the Orangi Pilot Project, in particular - has clearly shown that participatory institutions are needed even in our cities. Mahatma Gandhi had argued that India should become a federation of 5,60,000 village republics after Independence. Khansaheb's work has taught us that our towns and cities too, have to be managed as tens of thousands of Mohalla and Gali (lane) republics. For that reason, we believe that Khansaheb was the greatest Gandhian of the entire sub-continent in the post- Independence period. A remarkably simple and outspoken person who believed that caring and sharing are critical for the growth of any society.

Orangi is Karachi's biggest katchi abadi (illegal squatter settlement). Spread over 3,240 hectares, its 8,00,000 population is larger than that of Oslo or Edinburgh. In 1980, Khansaheb visited Orangi to assess the residents' problems. He found that sanitation was their biggest worry with excreta and waste-waters from bucket latrines all over the streets. Khansaheb decided to organise the people to improve their surroundings and this led to the birth of the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP). By the end of 1991, the OPP was a world-renowned endeavour. Nearly 73 per cent of the 6,347 lanes had sewer lines and 75 per cent of the 94,122 houses had indoor sanitary latrines. What was remarkable about OPP was that Khansaheb and his enthusiastic team provided no money to the slumdwellers for this exercise - all the money for this massive exercise - came from the residents of Orangi. Over 5,000 lanes financed and constructed their own sewer lines. Since then OPP has moved on housing improvement, health, family planning, employment and education programmes and efforts are being made to replicate the strategy in other towns of Pakistan.

Under Khansaheb's leadership, OPP never tried to be a development project. It was conceived of as a research institution which tried to analyse the people's problems and understand the solutions that they themselves proposed for those problems. All that OPP did was to promote community organisations and cooperative work and give them any technical advice they needed. For instance, OPP worked with the residents of Orangi to explain to them how poor sanitation affected their health and their purse in the form of medicines and doctor's fees. In order to deal with the problem, OPP suggested that the residents organise lane committees to work together. And when these committees said that they did not want any sanitary pits but only underground sewers and flush toilets like the rich, the OPP tried to see how this was technically possible. OPP's investigations revealed that the cost of such works quoted by government agencies was four times higher than what was needed because of corruption, profiteering, inefficiency and inappropriate design. The UN Centre for Human Settlements disagreed with the OPP team but Khansaheb went ahead to help the people meet their aspirations. Each lane committee selected a lane manager who collected the money from the lane residents and oversaw the construction work with the help of OPP's technical advice. It was a truly unprecedented and outstanding achievement.

When Down to Earth, the environment newsmagazine, interviewed him in 1992 about this achievement, all that he did was to quote Michelangelo. When the great sculptor was asked how did he make such beautiful statues, he remarked, "The statue is right there in the stone - it is my job to remove the extra stone." Said Khansaheb, "This is true in the case of Orangi as well. The solution is there. I merely removed the obstacles to it." One of us had pointed out in the 1987 Gandhi Memorial Lecture organised by the Gandhi Peace Foundation that Indian Gandhians have generally shied away from applying Gandhian principles to the development of our cities. But Khansaheb has shown so remarkably well how they are the answer not just to our rural problems but also our urban problems.

Khansaheb, a poet and a follower of the Sufi tradition, was a remarkable person himself in every way possible. In 1936, he joined the prestigious Indian Civil Service and served in Bengal. But by 1945 the war and the famine had left him so disillusioned that he resigned from the ICS. He could not understand why so many people came to him with petitions. He could not bear the "carelessness, indifference, non-comprehension" of his colleagues either. He became a labourer and locksmith in Aligarh to learn first hand the mindset and the way of life of the poor. Later he taught at Jamia Millia in New Delhi. By the 1960s, he had become the director of the well-known Comilla Academy of Rural Development and then moved to Pakistan to head the Orangi Pilot Project in the 1980s. All through his life he had to struggle. In 1992, when Down to Earth had interviewed him, he was being harassed by fundamentalists who had filed court cases against him in several cities arguing that a children's story-book he had written was blasphemous. But Khansaheb was never one to know fear. He unhesitatingly told Down to Earth, "... if I was hanged, I would get a wonderful funeral with one million people (of Orangi) attending it. I am safe in Orangi, but not safe in Pakistan."

Akhtar Hameed Khan's death is a loss not just for Pakistan but for everyone in the subcontinent. But like Gandhi he will remain immortal because of the inevitability of his ideas. Whenever countries like India and Pakistan begin to govern themselves better, they will be forced to remember what people like Gandhi and Khansaheb had taught them.

The writers are noted environmentalists with the Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Annual ritual
Next     : Retreat in the Himalayas