In Pakistan, real estate is a thriving and lucrative business. As Tasneem Ahmed Siddiqui, the brains behind Khuda-ki-basti says, “Land here is not for habitation but speculation.” This was the case with Gulshan-e-Shahbaz, a 5,550 acres housing scheme on the highway from Karachi to Hyderabad. In 1982-83, the scheme had a total number of 70,000 plots, of which 10,000 had been balloted away, but remained vacant. On the other hand, near the scheme is an industrial area and railway tracks where workers had built around four katchi abadis. “The workers need a place to stay which is not provided by either the government or the factory owners,” explains Siddiqui. “So they occupy whatever empty space is available.” Thus while acres of land were lying empty at Gulshan-e-Shahbaz, a crowded basti was growing right next to it.

But all that was to change with the posting of Tasneem Siddiqui, a government servant, to the Hyderabad Development Authority (HDA) in 1985. Tall, white haired and in his sixties, Siddiqui has spent a lifetime working in different cities, both within and outside Pakistan. He knows about the housing crisis in Pakistan. Says the soft-spoken Siddiqui in his immaculate Urdu, “I remembered a time when there were parks, playgrounds in my home town of Sukkur, but all of them had been encroached by settlements.”

Coming from Sukkur, where his family had migrated from North India after 1947, Tasneem Siddiqui did his Master’s from Sindh University, Hyderabad, in 1963-64. He joined the civil services in 1965 and was soon posted to East Pakistan for two years. There he served as a Sub Divisional Officer at Gopalganj, a very poor area, which was also Mujib-ur-Rehman’s constituency. “It was so inaccessible that it would take me 22 hours to get there from Dhaka,” he remembers. It was these images of poverty and urban squalor, which were to stay with him for the rest of his life.

After coming back to Pakistan he steadily rose in his career, becoming the Deputy Commissioner, Sukkur in 1979. Then in 1983-84 he went for a year’s study for a Master’s degree at Harvard University, coming back to serve as Government Secretary in different departments. This story begins when Siddiqui was posted to Hyderabad Development Authority (HDA), because “The government was not pleased with me.” It was during this time that he developed an interest in housing, something ‘Very unusual for a civil servant but I had seen a lot of poverty in East Pakistan. I started thinking about developmental issues, I wondered why there is so much poverty, why money is being wasted and why people’s problems are not being solved.’

At the HDA he decided to improve conditions in the housing sector. He discovered that although the main purpose of the HDA was to provide housing, they were doing so not for the lower income groups, which needed them, but for the middle or higher income groups. A good example of this was Gulshan-e-Shahbaz. With the assistance of a few interested government officers within the department, Siddiqui started researching and looking at the functioning of the informal sector and pinpointing the weaknesses of the formal sector. The informal sector is created when the mainstream government activities are unable to cater to the public’s needs. Realising this Siddiqui came up with the innovative idea of combining the two by using the informal sector’s approach and incorporating it in the formal sector. This was the commencement of Khuda-ki-basti, which went on to win the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1995.

Siddiqui realised that since most people belonging to the middle-income level were educated, they were better able to take care of their community’s needs for education, health and recreation. People of the lower income group need guidance and help but government does not have that concept. The government’s failure to provide housing for the poor had created the ‘land grabbing mafia’ that illegally occupies land, giving birth to katchi abadis. But the mechanism of this informal sector appealed to Siddiqui. According to him, “We saw that the informal sector’s approach kept in mind the sociology and economics of the poor. The government, on the other hand, doesn’t see people’s needs, their paying capacity or their role. That is why most of our programmes in the social sector go haywire. Though the government spends huge amounts of money on the social sector, there is a lot of mismanagement and misallocation of funds. Our whole development budget is wasted, we are not providing the services,”

Using four sectors of the unused land of Gulshan-e-Shahbaz, they called it Khuda-ki-basti (Allah’s settlement). Remembering those early days Siddiqui says, “It was a new experiment for us and in the beginning we faced difficulties as people would not come to us. There is a communication gap between the government and the people, so it was difficult for the people to accept the scheme. They could not believe that they would be able to get all the services. Also our targeting was not right.” Gradually after much campaigning, they were able to win over the public trust.

The method adopted by Siddiqui in developing the land is incremental or bringing about gradual change. It is based on the idea that people should occupy the land first and build their houses themselves on a self-financing basis. To ensure that the land is given only to the homeless poor, the occupants are thoroughly screened. For this purpose a reception area is set up where interested people first come and stay for around fifteen days. Unlike the government schemes, where the land is given away through balloting, Siddiqui adopted the private sector’s approach, where land is handed over as soon as the payment is made. Though the cost of the land is the same as that charged by the government (rupees 10,000 per plot), the mode of payment is different. Instead of an initial down payment of 25 per cent, the buyers are charged 1,000 rupees, with the rest of the money paid in seven installments.

After the initial payments have been made, the occupants are encouraged to build their houses themselves. Most start off as jhugees (make-shift shelters), growing into brick houses as soon as the occupants are able to afford it. “This is what happens in katchi abadis, unlike the planned areas where you have to get your map and design approved before undertaking construction. We have adopted the informal approach in the formal sector,” says Siddiqui. Technical assistance is provided to the settlers in building their houses.

External services such as water and transport are provided after the occupants are settled, another approach adopted from the informal sector. This differs from the usual government approach, where water and sewage lines and roads have to be installed before settlement. The problem with this approach was that there was no population, therefore the facilities were not being used. The sewage lines would get blocked, the water lines and roads would fall into disuse. “There is a lot of waste for though the services are provided, there is no habitation. Based on our research, we believe that services should be linked with habitation.”

Following the OPP’s approach of self-help, the community is encouraged to donate money to improve local conditions. People give around five to ten rupees per month to carry out self-financing projects. “It was difficult but we finally managed to convince people that this was for their own benefit,” says Siddiqui. “Groups of self interested people did put up hurdles, but now people’s attitudes have changed and 80 per cent of them cooperate and willingly take on responsibility.”

While all this work was going on under the guidance of Siddiqui, there was always the fear of his being transferred somewhere else. That would have meant the end of the work. “Though the people working with us were motivated but there was always this anxiety that a new government might come and put an end to our work,” says Siddiqui. That fear gave rise to Saiban, a registered NGO that includes professionals and trainees who had been working on Khuda-ki-basti.

Saiban provided technical, educational and moral support to the settlers as well as creating a bridge between the people and the government. “The government believes that after giving the plots, they can wash their hands off all responsibility,” says Siddiqui. Wanting to change that attitude, he came up with the new concept of NGO and government participation. “We had evolved a new system in which we said we will provide the presence of an NGO (Saiban) and drew up an agreement with the HDA.” Under that memorandum of understanding, Saiban took some responsibility for the area. Though the land control is in the hands of the HDA, records, maintenance, transfers of land are all done through Saiban.

One of the problems faced by Siddiqui was in getting facilities for the area. “In the government sector it is necessary for the area to be located near some local council, who will look after it and maintain it,” explains Siddiqui. “This was almost no man’s land since it is outside Hyderabad so technically it is under the union council. But then it’s also a part of the urban area, so though the HDA was providing the housing yet it would not take the responsibility for its maintenance.”

Following the incremental approach, efforts were made to involve the community in improving local conditions, one step at a time. So to solve local sewage problems, a solid waste management and environmental protection programme was started in 1995. Funded by UNDP/LIFE, its main purpose was to improve the current waste disposal systems and to create awareness amongst the community of the importance of the environment. Although the area had a network of sewage lines, they were not functioning properly. Due to incomplete work at certain points the gutters were open, causing streets to be inundated with sewage water.

Under this project, sweepers were hired to dispose of solid waste by using donkey carts to transport it to marked landfills and cover them up for composting. The community members repaired broken gutters and a mobile pumping station was bought to get rid of sewage water. Engineers of the HDA and Saiban also came up with the idea of laying out new main sewerage lines, which would cater to the needs of the whole community by disposing of the sewage at a local watering hole. All this was done with the full cooperation and help of the community. Some of the sewage water was used to develop green belts in the area. Since the settlement is located in an arid area, the settlers were encouraged from the beginning to plant at least one tree in their new homes.

To improve the economic conditions of the settlement, Saiban has helped arrange loans for people wanting to set up their own business. Says Siddiqui, “Lower income people have to do more than one job to survive, so every family knows some sort of a skill, like candle-making, embroidery, stitching, carpet-weaving. We counted at least 25 skills in just one abadi.” Schools were set up by encouraging educated girls to set up home schools. ‘We linked the girls with UNICEF, which gave them mats, black boards, chalk, books.’ Over the years some of the schools have expanded to become high schools. Now there are 11 schools in the basti. In the same way links were created between the community and the health sector. “We got in touch with organisations like Red Crescent whom we asked to send a mobile dispensary and the Family Planning Association who opened an office here.” But along with approaching the private sector, they also contacted the government who opened Basic Health Units in Khuda-ki-basti.

Just when things seemed to be looking up, Siddiqui’s fears came true and he was again transferred from Hyderabad. Though he started thinking about leaving the government service, his friend and mentor Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan convinced him otherwise. He asked Siddiqui to put his experience and knowledge to good use by working at the Sindh Katchi Abadi Authority (SKAA), as its Director General. The SKAA was established in 1987 by the government to help regularise the katchi abadis. “That was a difficult decision,” recalls Siddiqui. “I was too senior for the post and the government did not accept me there.” In 1991 the government finally relented, but soon after six months Siddiqui was posted out again.

In the meanwhile Siddiqui had started doing research and had written a paper on the problems of the katchi abadis. “For 18 months I was jobless and worked a little at the OPP with Akhtar Hameed Khan,” he says. With a change in the government he was posted back to the SKAA in 1992. “Ever since then I’ve been moved a couple of times,” he says. “They even sent me to a couple of interesting places but I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay at SKAA as long as possible.”

Siddiqui’s persistence and dedication has paid off. “We have seen a gradual change in government attitude and in some areas it is now starting to do such work itself. There are many off-shoots from our work, for example our methods have been applied in private development works,” he says. Though there was resistance from government servants in the beginning, Khuda-ki-basti proved them wrong. “We showed everyone that NGOs could work with the government.” UNDP has also helped in promoting the work of the NGO, assisting in advocacy that has contributed to the approval of a national shelter policy by the Chief Executive of Pakistan in January 2001.

His ideas concerning government and private sector co-operation have changed attitudes of people within the SKAA, who now adopt active and constructive role in the improvement and development of katchi abadis. Praising the work of SKAA, Arif Hasan in his book Understanding Karachi writes that, “The SKAA programme has created trust between communities and government agencies and introduced transparency and accountability in the development process.”

Another positive development is that the government has been convinced to pass an ordinance, so that the incremental approach and procedure has become a part of its policy. This has ensured an improvement in the working of government departments. “Now the development authorities will not work like before. What more change can you ask for?”

Tasneem Siddiqui’s work has also earned him international recognition. He won the prestigious Magsaysay Award, known as Asia’s Nobel Prize, in 1999. Today the example of Khuda-ki-basti is often quoted in international development circles.

“Without people’s participation not much can be done but equally important is government’s participation. Without government participation, the work will remain incomplete,” wrote Dr. Akhtar Hameed Khan in Development Lessons Learnt by Experience. Tasneem Siddiqui has proved his words true. He has shown how the government and the private sector can both work together for the benefit of the people.

– Written by Faiza Hasan