The Mumbai Municipal Corporation launched the Slum Sanitation Programme (SSP) in 1997 with funding from the World Bank. This project addressed four areas: providing sustainable sanitation facilities in slums and connecting them to wider sewerage networks; reversing the client-patron relationship between local politicians and slum residents by instituting a demand based model; encouraging community participation through mediation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and formation of community based organisations (CBOs); and lastly, developing a sense of ownership amongst communities through a financial model that involved minimum upfront contributions by households towards the project and monthly fees. Since the launch, several articles, reports and stories have highlighted various problems of SSP, such as: monopolisation of projects by NGOs, associated construction companies and/or politicians; exclusionary nature of CBOs; lack of financial sustainability; conflation of NGOs and state bodies; and devolution of state’s responsibilities onto slum communities.
Set against this backdrop, fieldwork by the presenter focussed on three SSP toilets in a slum locality of Mumbai. This paper will draw onto this fieldwork and focuses on the figure of the Kamina (translated as Scoundrel) and his/her relationship to community development through the object of SSP toilets. Historically, the scoundrel resonates with the figure of the trickster in folk tales of West Africa (Anansi, a spider-human) and amongst First Nations communities (Nanabozho, a shape-shifting rabbit). The tricksters, like the scoundrel, are in-between figures, who refuse to get contained or contain others within categories of good / evil, selfish / selfless or smart / foolish. Rather, they move across these categories to re/create worlds and avoid violence within the community. Using the folk tales and the Hindi film Kaminey (2009) as a theoretical frame, this paper will look at the relation between developmental objects (toilets), individuals (kaminey) and community to understand the form of politics that (re)create urban worlds in slums.
Prasad Khanolkar is a PhD student in Planning and South Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is also a member of Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT), Mumbai. Presently, he is associated with the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi, as a visiting junior researcher. His ongoing doctoral research describes the relationship between individuals, everyday spaces and politics in an urban slum of Mumbai. He can be reached at p.khanolkar@gmail.com.
This is the fifty eighth in a series of Urban Workshops planned by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi and Centre for Policy Research (CPR). These workshops seek to provoke public discussion on issues relating to the development of the city and try to address all its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society and politics. For further information, please contact: Jayani Bonnerjee at jayani.bonnerjee@csh-delhi.com, Partha Mukhopadhyay at partha@cprindia.org or Marie-Hélène Zerah at marie-helene.zerah@ird.fr
