Page 57

# **Lessons for Moving to Scale: Creating Momentum with Robust and Reliable Procedures**

Those implementing the SNP found that the pace of community organization and community financial contributions followed a simple, compelling logic. **Seeing is believing** . Once one slum had been upgraded, CBOs formed more quickly in neighboring areas. Communities made their cost contributions readily once they saw work crews in the neighborhood. Tangible results offer more credibility than the most finely crafted incentive schemes or communications strategies.

This suggests the following measures for accelerating the pace of a reinvigorated upgradation program in Ahmedabad. The proposed measures could reduce the time needed to improve one neighborhood from 24 to 15 months.

- Start working in priority neighborhoods quickly to demonstrate commitment to the program rather than mapping a process for the entire city up front. Working neighborhood by neighborhood offers natural project risk management. Any mistakes made in early upgradation projects can be corrected in later projects. Gains from learning on the job can easily be applied in later neighborhood upgradations.

- **Unlike large projects with major interdependencies across different components, such as a metro or airport, neighborhood upgrading does not need intricate advance planning, or socio economic surveys of the entire population living in substandard neighborhoods.** The overall cost and financing envelope should be understood with some accuracy to ensure that project can be sustained to completion. The basic principles of beneficiary contributions and responsibilities as well as commitments from the government should be understood up front.  But beyond that, it is unlikely that detailed project planning is worth the cost of the delays inherent in obtaining more precise knowledge. Informal housing in slums, chawls and pavements is the solution when all else fails. These solutions are inherently dynamic and subject to rapid change. Precise advance engineering of city-wide solutions for populations such as these is an illusion—and a very costly one for the households in these areas who remain chronically underserved while the global problem is studied in unnecessary detail. Neighborhood by neighborhood, these questions should be studied as upgradation subprojects are prepared and implemented. Initial conditions need to be documented and frameworks for assessing the impact of the project after completion should be put in place. Full station surveys and detailed engineering designs are required. But the frame of reference for such study is a neighborhood to be improved in the near future—not the city level. Thus all this important information for policy makers and program designers eventually can emerge during execution, rather than in a prolonged planning stage.

- **On tenure and security—the perfect should not be in the way of the good** .  The scope of neighborhood upgrading should be expanded by setting aside the contentious question of tenure, No Objection Certificates (NOCs) or no eviction guarantees— **prior to upgrading the neighborhood** . The SNP included a 10 year no eviction guarantee. This guarantee could only be offered easily on lands owned by the AMC, and thus excluded slums on any other public lands. Unfortunately, even for those limited cases, the AMC was not always able to live up to the guarantee because new infrastructure projects necessitated some relocations in upgraded neighborhoods. Due to subsequent lawsuits and complaints, this guarantee has become controversial. The AMC may be understandably concerned about using it further. Using a no eviction guarantee precluded any upgradation in neighborhoods on public lands owned by other entities such as the State, the center and government enterprises like the railways. Private land