Initiatives

Hasiru Mane

The disastrous floods of 2017 and 2018 destroyed the homes of many waste pickers in Bengaluru. The affected waste pickers’ approached Hasiru Dala requesting for the provision of loans and help to rebuild their homes. This led to an urgent demand to reconstruct those houses in an affordable way. To address this need Hasiru Dala’s housing vertical “Hasiru Mane Project” was conceived in 2018.

‘Hasiru Mane’ literally means a Green home. The housing vertical works towards supporting the waste pickers to realise their dream of a home in an affordable and sustainable way.  Today Hasiru Mane works in the cities of Bengaluru, Mangaluru, Chikkaballapura, Mysuru, Chamarajanagar, Tumakuru, Davanagere, Hubli, Chitradurga and Dharwad.

Our Approach

Hasiru Mane Project undertakes work under five main themes

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Challenges

Our experience of almost ten years has shown that stability of family and access to social security schemes come when people have permanent housing. Hasiru Dala believes in affordable and sustainable housing.

Documentation

The urban poor and the waste pickers often do not have their documents or proof of residence in place. This is a big challenge in getting them recognised as local residents. In such a scenario, the work often begins with helping the residents secure the most important documents necessary for availing any of the social security schemes. Once in place, the process of applications under relevant schemes can begin.

Land ownership

Most public housing schemes have a strict eligibility criteria of land ownership even for upgradation projects. Eg: the Beneficiary led construction/Beneficiary led extension (BLC/BLE) scheme within the PMAY-U, among other schemes. The waste picker communities, like other urban poor, do not own the land they live on. Hence, they do not have land titles. This makes them ineligible to apply for some of these schemes. Historically, the marginalised groups did not have land rights. The Public housing schemes need to be designed to be responsive to these conditions. The Hasiru Mane project believes awarding land rights ought to be part of a good housing scheme to make affordable housing for all possible.

Access to formal finance

The traditional financing systems only operate with the cost considerations of virgin construction materials. The formal finance system does not grant assistance to the kind of projects we work on. Since there exist no standardised market costs for all kinds of materials we use like recycled construction materials or second hand materials. Using second hand materials or recycled C&D waste for non-structural applications in our projects have proven to reduce the overall cost of the project. It is one of the easiest ways to reduce the ecological footprint of the buildings while also keeping it affordable. This is one of the biggest challenges we face in financing and scaling up our projects. So, we have had to depend on low or zero interest loans from other partners and work on a limited number of projects.

Storage facility

Presently we do not have any storage facility in the city to store the sourced second hand materials for undertaking any of our projects of new construction or upgradation. In its absence we usually depend on makeshift storage shelters created near the project site. Since, our construction or design projects are few, the creation of a permanent storage facility would incur additional operation cost to the team.

Problems in accessing Public housing schemes

Getting a public housing project application approved under any government scheme is a time consuming process. After the submission of the documents along with proofs, the follow ups begin.

In some cases if any of the schemes are discontinued like the Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) or the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Urban (PMAY-U) whose plan period did end in March 2022. The applications and the follow ups all go in vain. Then  we need to wait for the relaunch of the scheme or until a new scheme is launched, for the process to begin again.

Once, in 2018 we received an in-principle approval from the government of Karnataka that it shall build 500 houses for the waste picker community. With the change in the government, no concrete action was taken on it.

 

In some of the public housing schemes, the financial burden is shared between the state and the centre. In such cases, the application gets approval at the state level but gets rejected at the central level. The entire process had to be restarted with more follow ups under a different scheme then. Considering the fact that there are only a handful of such schemes, we often end up with no more choices left to approach.

We have also had to face setbacks in instances when the submitted applications or documents got misplaced or lost.

Adequacy of public housing units

The EWS and LIG households that experience housing shortage in India very often have large family sizes. They utilise their living space for their livelihoods as a workplace or for storage purposes. The affordable public housing projects do not account for these spatial needs of the people who live in it. The standard size for an affordable housing unit is 30 sq mt and 60 sq mt for EWS households and LIG households respectively. These homes are clearly inadequate to accommodate the standard of living and spatial needs of these families. It is one of the huge roadblocks in making adequate and affordable housing available to the people who need it the most.

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