* The water and environmental sanitation infrastructure in turn stimulates massive community investment in its own shelter. We have demonstrated that the `poor’ can, in conducive circumstances, mobilise huge resources, especially when coupled with constructive partnerships with the government and the private sector. This latent strength is tapped to remove aid dependency. The knock on impact on health, education and incomes is substantial and rapid.

The recent work attempts to extend the “Networking” from urban to rural to reach this larger population. Byrraju Foundation, the partner NGO is at present implementing the work in two villages of Andhra Pradesh covering 5,000 people.

The major goals in the coming years are:
* To upscale infrastructure development from the present two villages to 150 villages covering a population of about half a million. Byrraju Foundation, an NGO associated with a leading software house of India, has already established organizational structure in these villages for their health, education and livelihood activities.
* To develop a bankable model and delivery structure for upscaling. Dialogue has already started with the banking and financial institutions.

The community’s role is that of a client, consumer and a capital partner, not a “beneficiary”. It also subsequently manages local maintenance within the settlements.

The government partner channels its development budgets into the project. However, as much as the resources, its partnership helps to develop policy framework and address issues of tenure.

Apart from funds, businesses bring planning, implementation and management skills to the project. In Baroda this was done by United Way set up by the Federation of Baroda Industries. In Ahmedabad pilot slums, Arvind Mills, a city textile group, ran the project on behalf of the community and the municipality through its own NGO Sharda Trust, supported by Saath. The Vice President of Arvind Mill sees this as “enlightened self interest” and not philanthropy.

The Andhra villages are managed by Byrraju Foundation, set up by Satyam Computers, and supported by Royal Society of Arts and Manufacturing (RSA) in UK.

More recently, we are replicating the same concepts in rural areas starting with two villages in Andhra Pradesh with an objective to eventually expand to 145 villages.

Equally striking, the infant mortality has dropped from 6% to 1%, working days lost to illness reducing from 64 to 9 per year per person and medical expenses almost halving. The number of children attending school has jumped from 41% to 72%. The monthly expendable income has increased by 50%, the greatest rise being in female

Currently the infrastructure development costs are shared almost equally by the community, government and business, sometimes augmented by additional partners such as UNICEF or RSA. However, the subsequent costs of shelter improvement are met exclusively by the communities from their own sources, thus contributing a lion share of the total ultimate investment.

The community also then pays taxes to the civic authorities for the maintenance of their infrastructure.

In the 35 years of the Practice, whilst most of the fees were earned on structural engineering design projects, some professional fees in the earlier years were earned on infrastructure development assignments such as the Indore Slum Networking Project. However, in the later years, as we moved away from the established aid models, the fees from funding agencies dried up. We thus had to fund our ideologies of development with our own resources, cross-subsidised from the profits from structural engineering work.

We are constantly amazed that we have managed to reach such a large poor population with scanty resources by bringing together partnerships between community, governments and business. Imagine what can be done if the huge resources available with international development agencies and bilateral aid were at our disposal instead of being frittered away!

As such funding is beyond government budgets and aid, cost effective technical innovations and catalytic partnerships are better alternatives.

Similarly, the formal banking sector is still learning to finance the poor with their small borrowings, seasonal earnings, absence of land title collaterals and using peer pressure with community underwriting to recover loans.

Wherever water and sanitation infrastructure was implemented, I noted a quantum jump in the investment made by the slum-dwellers on improving their shelter from shacks to pucca houses. This investment was several fold larger than the initial capital outlay and revealed a latent resource capacity of the so called “poor” to overcome aid dependency.

Over time, we embraced the associated social and economic issues and worked at putting partnerships together for upscaling. My daughter Priti Parikh, an engineer planner, has been my mainstay throughout and has currently taken up doctoral research at Cambridge University to validate the hypothesis that water and sanitation radically stimulate housing, health, literacy and incomes of the poor.

He had been in the Planning Commission Urban Poverty Group and on the Governing Council of Department of Science and Technology, India. He received United Nations World Habitat Award in 1993, Aga Khan Award in 1998 and a Government of India Citation the same year. In 2005 he was invited as a Fellow to Royal Society of Arts.