Your first meeting with Neel is unlikely to leave any enduring impression on you. You will appreciate how odd this is only after you have heard his story.
If you were a middle-class person living in Delhi and owned the house you lived in, you would be considered extremely fortunate. If you rented from a landlord who made only a few unreasonable demands, or gave only occasional hints that he/she may want the house back soon, even then you would be considered quite lucky.
So how did Neel, a poor peon and a gofer in an office, become a proud homeowner in the capital city of Delhi? How did he become the owner of not just one but two properties in the heart of the city? What levers did he turn, what sources did he tap, what risks did he take and what hurdles did he navigate? Where did he start?
There is a backdrop to Neel’s story. Neel says he doesn’t know where he comes from; he’s probably from another state. He is not sure who his father is, but has heard that he died early when Neel was around five years old. From his mother, he also learnt that they had to run away from the state they once lived in.
Joint family kin who had once anchored their lives, felt the burden of non-earning dependents and claimants in their midst and turned on the young widow and her son to provoke their departure. Neel and his mother arrived in Delhi in the early 1980s and became a part of the burgeoning city with unprecedented decennial growth rates of population (53 per cent).
As definitively as Delhi was the beckoning city of opportunity and growth, it was, and still is, a city hard-pressed to meet the demands made on it. Even two decades past their arrival, over 56 per cent of the total population of Delhi lives in jhuggi jhopri clusters, unauthorised colonies, notified slum areas and shelterless spaces.
For the next three years, Neel trailed his mother from house to house, while she toiled at cleaning jobs to survive and to keep Neel close by.
However, there were many more unsettling things than finding stable shelter going on in their lives — things which Neel as a young anxious child had only a remote sense of. “She used to cry a lot,” Neel says of his mother. “And she used to be sick a lot,” he adds. Neel could see that things became progressively worse on these fronts. Then one day, quite out of the blue, and under odd circumstances, the young mother in her mid-20s, was mysteriously and inexplicably found dead. Nobody knew then or now about what happened.
Eleven-year-old Neel was an orphan, a destitute looking for shelter and livelihood in the big city. Neel, as a child, joined the ranks of forced adulthood.
As he grew to be a real adult he worked in a canteen where he served well and with great respect his entourage of customers — an assorted network of employees, constables, government clerks, local politicos and other lower rung office and business minions who wandered in and out.
Neel says in retrospect, “People saw me as a young, earnest, struggling soul, always willing to do odd jobs for them on the side, and that must have endeared me to many.” Through these networks he accumulated “social credits” which landed him a “real” office job, as the lowest rung gofer, which was to form the bedrock of his housing solutions years later.
The job was the critical transformation that millions in Indian wait for — a chance job in the formal/organised sector where only 14 per cent of the employed workforce of the country is. Neel was settled in a job, but shelter issues were far from settled, and were becoming a problem. The story of how Neel came to own a house begins here.
Circulating forces elsewhere were drawing Neel closer and faster to a solution.
The events at India Gate and its surroundings of colonial splendour were about to change the life circumstances of many people. That historical landmark, the showpiece of Delhi, had been in a constant state of maintenance upgrade for some years. Migrant daily wagers working on this had been rewarded (to facilitate their work) with temporary space for hutments nearby — but without electricity, water or sanitation. They had stayed here for so long that the space had developed the trimmings of permanency, so much so that it also had a name—everyone knew it as Dond basti (slum).
But the work at India Gate suddenly stopped and so came to an end their shanty living in the high property value centre of the metropolis. Under normal circumstances these workers would have been transposed to the outskirts for temporary relocation and construction jobs. But uncommon circumstances prevailed. The centrepiece of that uncommonality was rumoured to be political support. When the workers’ tenements were broken down they were given a passport for further relocation in another open space in the centre of the city that landed them right next to where Neel was — in an unsatisfactory and constantly rising rental arrangement in a small space (6’ x 10’) at the back of a government residential building.
Neel was watching. Over three days Neel watched the public land transform overnight into a slum settlement, where anyone and everyone seemed to be making a claim to the space. Neel noticed that capturing land and building on it had to be done together and in groups because as an individual you risked being dispossessed (of land).
Dispossessing an entire slum was a rarity.
In fact if there was a large enough number of such settlers, it could evolve into a vote bank of considerable force, then the opposite could also be true — you could land up possessed — possessed of land. There was incipient justice for some of the poor in the ambiguity of property rights.
This had not missed Neel’s consideration. Rents in the city were hitting the roof and with rumblings from his landlord, he had to act and act fast if he were to survive in his job. He joined the fray and through machinations cordoned off a site which cost him nothing. He even built on it for almost nothing by leasing the efforts of a Robin Hood like contractor, who used the debris (rubble, steel, fixtures, doors and windows and their frames) from rich people’s constructions to make buildings for the poor.
Being one of Neel’s “social credit” holders, the contractor did not charge for the debris and charged only for his labour. Neel’s house came up out of nothing — literally out of thin air. Neel had grandiose plans for this house of air, and he made four cells in the thirty square metre plot. He wanted to give away three keeping one for himself.
Neel was a novice in the “property rights” claiming arena.
He had assumed that the mayhem land grabbing in which he had participated was actually a free-for-all. It wasn’t.
For every piece of land grabbed there had been a hutment broken at Dond basti. For every hutment broken the workers had a right to an identity. For every identity given, there was the aluminium I-card. That together with a ration card was proof of “being”.
Neel had neither. This was going to be the shortest “possession” he had. Neel says in retrospect that he had been a greenhorn. He surrendered his “plot” and hut to the surveyors when they came around.
Two years down the line, with rental values still shooting up, Neel’s dislocation anxieties were growing again. Evolving in the background was a failed migrant worker (Madan) who was without work, lived in and owned a place in the temporary slum settlement that Neel had aspired to. Madan wanted “out” so that he could return to his village.
There was another actor in this rural/urban churning. Hitin was a youth from the same village as Madan and the workers living in the slum settlement but was a class apart, educated, and always looking to do things for the upliftment of his community back home. Neel liked Hitin and had accommodated him as a co-sharer of his small living space for free.
Hitin organized the next possession for Neel. Madan was dispossessed of his I-token and ration card (a common formality just so that the seller does not make claims on the “sold” property later). As Madan lost his identity Neel gained hold on his property, which still had only incomplete rights.
In 1994, Rs 8,000 for a 22 square metre plot of land without electricity, water or sanitation was a heavy price for Neel to pay.
But everyone knew that this temporary settlement could be a prelude to permanent house-ownership at some point. He borrowed from every informal source he knew and “settled” his friend Hitin there. He himself decided to continue in his built-up space till he was asked to leave.
The ambiguity in the status of ownership of slum settlers drew extortion and rent seeking agents every now and then, demanding to see Neel’s identity. Neel fielded such threats. There were frightening “middle-of-the-night moments”, “men-in-uniform moments” and “thumping thugs moments”. Neel particularly wanted to have a ration card with his name and address, which would legitimise his presence in his hutment. That was difficult to come by — but not impossible.
Delhi had matured as a metropolis and most things could be “fixed” here. Such fixing mostly happened on the sidelines of officialdom. Information was easily available about the fixed times and the fixed locales where this would be done, together with the fixed haath kharcha (speed money). Neel headed straight to one such place with Madan’s ration card. He was asked to leave the card and be back in two hours.
When Neel arrived after two hours, a card “customized” to his needs was ready.
Madan’s ration card with Madan, his wife and their two children’s names had undergone a transformation. The names of one of the children was gone and in its place was Neel’s name. Neel had become Madan’s son. Neel who had not so long ago been an orphan in the big city had acquired a family and a formal lineage and a ration card all in two hours.
Some years later the quiet basti where Neel had made his purchase was suddenly astir with good news. The slum settlers were going to be relocated again — this time permanently. This is what every settler hopes and dreads at the same time. The hope is about “certainty and permanency and ownership of space” with all facilities of water, electricity and sanitation at almost no cost. The dread is about multiple uncertainties on the way.
The land dealers drove the process and came before the authorities. No one asked who they really were. Offers (purchase of land) after relocation were flying fast and furious. “This is the best offer you can get,” they told Neel, which was probably true.
No one else would dare an alternative offer in the carefully demarcated informal monopolies of land dealers. There is official recognition and concern about repeat sales.The plots are given in lieu of shelter and selling for a profit is not considered appropriate. A 2009 government report laments this: “The plots are further sold for profit by one buyer to another thereby defeating the very concept of equity.”
Neel says, “Offers of Rs 10,000 and Rs 15,000 were floating for a 18 square metre plot on the fringes of the city, whose real value was reportedly Rs 50,000.”
Despite such low offers for the plot, there had nevertheless been few takers for these offers among the settlers in the basti. This was so because there was a receipted development charge of Rs 5,000 to be paid in advance for the new plot, which few of the basti dwellers could afford at such short notice. There were few takers because the move so far away would not be conducive to the continuity in their existing jobs and livelihoods, leave alone the possibility of acquiring new jobs on the desolate outskirts of relocation.
There were no takers because there were sometimes impossible stipulations to meet, like the one confronting Neel. People like Neel who were not original allottees were expected to come up with the original allotee at the point of takeover of the new plot.
*
“I was anxious,” Neel says. “Where was I going to find Madan, the original allottee, years after he had sold his land to me?” Neel asks. It was time to cash in on his “social credits”. Hitin, Neel’s space-mate, and Madan’s co-villager called Madan up. With expenses paid, Madan agreed to come and be present.
Neel and Madan reached the faraway and empty terrain of the relocations. “There was not a dog or crow there,” is how Neel described the desolation of the relocation area on the fringes of the city. Neel made the payment but the “possession” letter, I-card and ration card were all in Madan’s name.
One final check of the original allottee at the site of possession was to happen at night. Only after that would official transfer to Neel make him a real “owner”. Neel returned to work, leaving Madan behind that night with payment receipts and papers to do the formalities.
A few hours into work and Neel heard the news — Madan had disappeared.
The possession letter had disappeared and the I-card and ration card too had vanished with Madan. A treacherous deal had been struck in Neel’s absence. Madan had been persuaded by the same person who had come to check his identity that he (Madan) should sell to him instead.
Madan took Rs 10,000 in advance with a promise of Rs 30,000 to be paid in a few days after the identity cards and registration were completed. Madan left taking the first bus back to the village, having made a duplicate sale and betraying his original sale to Neel.
Neel and Hitin took a train and arrived in the village early in the morning. It was a contrasting backdrop to the bustle of the city with the smells of cow dung and the sweet scent of ripening mustard being carried on a lazy breeze. Madan, blissfully unaware of the events that were unfolding, had arrived by bus a few hours earlier. But he was not the immediate target of Neel and Hitin’s interest.
Hitin had a standing in the community; so he called a baithak (meeting) with the jaat panchayat (caste council), an informal institution running parallel to gram panchayats (constitutionally mandated village councils).
The jaat panchayat serves (more often than India would like to hear) as the final arbitrator, dispenser of justice and fairness.
They are also known to be implementers of honour killings and feudal laws and are the custodians of the moral code of the caste community. In any given year (including 2013) news about the jaat panchayats implementing the moral code (competing with formal systems of law based justice) spill in to national dailies and to horrified urban readers, who are a century removed from the reality in the villages.
Neel was conscious of his vulnerability.
Village elders do not look kindly on conflict with “outsiders”. “I put my life at risk by going there in front of the jaat panchayat,” Neel says. Neel made his case grovelling, scared and pleading with overtures for special considerations for him: he was family-less, an orphan, “brother” to Hitin (and thereby son to the village or only half an outsider).
Madan was summoned. The panchayat deliberated for a good part of the day.
They declared that Madan had to give the identity documents to Neel. Further, it was stipulated that Madan would be available any time that Neel needed him to go to reverse the transaction for the land which now, after Madan’s betrayal, had a good chance of going in favour of the land dealers.
But Madan would not have to repay Neel the costs incurred so far.
Considering Madan’s recent ill-gotten gains, this was considerably biased in Madan’s favour and in favour of the village-blood brotherhood.
Neel had many more buttons to press. “I reached out to one of the highest officers,” Neel says. That worked with the land dealers but only partly. Neel had to make an immediate payment of Rs 15,000 for their “troubles”. Neel built a shanty on the plot (his second shanty) to keep ownership.
Four years later the growth in the city had spilled over to the vicinity of Neel’s shanty.
Neel sold the plot for Rs 1,50,000. Other things had changed for Neel too.
His formal sector job was now permanent. He now had an expanded menu of more formal institutions to borrow from. He had his provident fund, a bank loan (albeit after much questionable negotiations), the workers’ thrift society, as also the existing sources of leveraging local finance innovations of committees using the money lender only on the margins.
In a judicious mix he borrowed from all and made the first payment on a “real flat” of 50 square metres, less than an hour away from his place of work. It was his third attempt at home ownership but not the last. As that became part of the city, he sold it and bought a better flat only slightly further away. Neel says he is “settled” now and wants to look no further.
Excerpted with permission from Breaking Through: India’s Stories Of Beating the Odds On Poverty, Meera Mitra, Rupa Publications.
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If you were a middle-class person living in Delhi and owned the house you lived in, you would be considered extremely fortunate. If you rented from a landlord who made only a few unreasonable demands, or gave only occasional hints that he/she may want the house back soon, even then you would be considered quite lucky.
So how did Neel, a poor peon and a gofer in an office, become a proud homeowner in the capital city of Delhi? How did he become the owner of not just one but two properties in the heart of the city? What levers did he turn, what sources did he tap, what risks did he take and what hurdles did he navigate? Where did he start?
There is a backdrop to Neel’s story. Neel says he doesn’t know where he comes from; he’s probably from another state. He is not sure who his father is, but has heard that he died early when Neel was around five years old. From his mother, he also learnt that they had to run away from the state they once lived in.
Joint family kin who had once anchored their lives, felt the burden of non-earning dependents and claimants in their midst and turned on the young widow and her son to provoke their departure. Neel and his mother arrived in Delhi in the early 1980s and became a part of the burgeoning city with unprecedented decennial growth rates of population (53 per cent).
As definitively as Delhi was the beckoning city of opportunity and growth, it was, and still is, a city hard-pressed to meet the demands made on it. Even two decades past their arrival, over 56 per cent of the total population of Delhi lives in jhuggi jhopri clusters, unauthorised colonies, notified slum areas and shelterless spaces.
For the next three years, Neel trailed his mother from house to house, while she toiled at cleaning jobs to survive and to keep Neel close by.
However, there were many more unsettling things than finding stable shelter going on in their lives — things which Neel as a young anxious child had only a remote sense of. “She used to cry a lot,” Neel says of his mother. “And she used to be sick a lot,” he adds. Neel could see that things became progressively worse on these fronts. Then one day, quite out of the blue, and under odd circumstances, the young mother in her mid-20s, was mysteriously and inexplicably found dead. Nobody knew then or now about what happened.
Eleven-year-old Neel was an orphan, a destitute looking for shelter and livelihood in the big city. Neel, as a child, joined the ranks of forced adulthood.
As he grew to be a real adult he worked in a canteen where he served well and with great respect his entourage of customers — an assorted network of employees, constables, government clerks, local politicos and other lower rung office and business minions who wandered in and out.
Neel says in retrospect, “People saw me as a young, earnest, struggling soul, always willing to do odd jobs for them on the side, and that must have endeared me to many.” Through these networks he accumulated “social credits” which landed him a “real” office job, as the lowest rung gofer, which was to form the bedrock of his housing solutions years later.
The job was the critical transformation that millions in Indian wait for — a chance job in the formal/organised sector where only 14 per cent of the employed workforce of the country is. Neel was settled in a job, but shelter issues were far from settled, and were becoming a problem. The story of how Neel came to own a house begins here.
Circulating forces elsewhere were drawing Neel closer and faster to a solution.
The events at India Gate and its surroundings of colonial splendour were about to change the life circumstances of many people. That historical landmark, the showpiece of Delhi, had been in a constant state of maintenance upgrade for some years. Migrant daily wagers working on this had been rewarded (to facilitate their work) with temporary space for hutments nearby — but without electricity, water or sanitation. They had stayed here for so long that the space had developed the trimmings of permanency, so much so that it also had a name—everyone knew it as Dond basti (slum).
But the work at India Gate suddenly stopped and so came to an end their shanty living in the high property value centre of the metropolis. Under normal circumstances these workers would have been transposed to the outskirts for temporary relocation and construction jobs. But uncommon circumstances prevailed. The centrepiece of that uncommonality was rumoured to be political support. When the workers’ tenements were broken down they were given a passport for further relocation in another open space in the centre of the city that landed them right next to where Neel was — in an unsatisfactory and constantly rising rental arrangement in a small space (6’ x 10’) at the back of a government residential building.
Neel was watching. Over three days Neel watched the public land transform overnight into a slum settlement, where anyone and everyone seemed to be making a claim to the space. Neel noticed that capturing land and building on it had to be done together and in groups because as an individual you risked being dispossessed (of land).
Dispossessing an entire slum was a rarity.
In fact if there was a large enough number of such settlers, it could evolve into a vote bank of considerable force, then the opposite could also be true — you could land up possessed — possessed of land. There was incipient justice for some of the poor in the ambiguity of property rights.
This had not missed Neel’s consideration. Rents in the city were hitting the roof and with rumblings from his landlord, he had to act and act fast if he were to survive in his job. He joined the fray and through machinations cordoned off a site which cost him nothing. He even built on it for almost nothing by leasing the efforts of a Robin Hood like contractor, who used the debris (rubble, steel, fixtures, doors and windows and their frames) from rich people’s constructions to make buildings for the poor.
Being one of Neel’s “social credit” holders, the contractor did not charge for the debris and charged only for his labour. Neel’s house came up out of nothing — literally out of thin air. Neel had grandiose plans for this house of air, and he made four cells in the thirty square metre plot. He wanted to give away three keeping one for himself.
~~~
Neel was a novice in the “property rights” claiming arena.
He had assumed that the mayhem land grabbing in which he had participated was actually a free-for-all. It wasn’t.
For every piece of land grabbed there had been a hutment broken at Dond basti. For every hutment broken the workers had a right to an identity. For every identity given, there was the aluminium I-card. That together with a ration card was proof of “being”.
Neel had neither. This was going to be the shortest “possession” he had. Neel says in retrospect that he had been a greenhorn. He surrendered his “plot” and hut to the surveyors when they came around.
Two years down the line, with rental values still shooting up, Neel’s dislocation anxieties were growing again. Evolving in the background was a failed migrant worker (Madan) who was without work, lived in and owned a place in the temporary slum settlement that Neel had aspired to. Madan wanted “out” so that he could return to his village.
There was another actor in this rural/urban churning. Hitin was a youth from the same village as Madan and the workers living in the slum settlement but was a class apart, educated, and always looking to do things for the upliftment of his community back home. Neel liked Hitin and had accommodated him as a co-sharer of his small living space for free.
Hitin organized the next possession for Neel. Madan was dispossessed of his I-token and ration card (a common formality just so that the seller does not make claims on the “sold” property later). As Madan lost his identity Neel gained hold on his property, which still had only incomplete rights.
~~~
In 1994, Rs 8,000 for a 22 square metre plot of land without electricity, water or sanitation was a heavy price for Neel to pay.
But everyone knew that this temporary settlement could be a prelude to permanent house-ownership at some point. He borrowed from every informal source he knew and “settled” his friend Hitin there. He himself decided to continue in his built-up space till he was asked to leave.
The ambiguity in the status of ownership of slum settlers drew extortion and rent seeking agents every now and then, demanding to see Neel’s identity. Neel fielded such threats. There were frightening “middle-of-the-night moments”, “men-in-uniform moments” and “thumping thugs moments”. Neel particularly wanted to have a ration card with his name and address, which would legitimise his presence in his hutment. That was difficult to come by — but not impossible.
~~~
Delhi had matured as a metropolis and most things could be “fixed” here. Such fixing mostly happened on the sidelines of officialdom. Information was easily available about the fixed times and the fixed locales where this would be done, together with the fixed haath kharcha (speed money). Neel headed straight to one such place with Madan’s ration card. He was asked to leave the card and be back in two hours.
When Neel arrived after two hours, a card “customized” to his needs was ready.
Madan’s ration card with Madan, his wife and their two children’s names had undergone a transformation. The names of one of the children was gone and in its place was Neel’s name. Neel had become Madan’s son. Neel who had not so long ago been an orphan in the big city had acquired a family and a formal lineage and a ration card all in two hours.
~~~
Some years later the quiet basti where Neel had made his purchase was suddenly astir with good news. The slum settlers were going to be relocated again — this time permanently. This is what every settler hopes and dreads at the same time. The hope is about “certainty and permanency and ownership of space” with all facilities of water, electricity and sanitation at almost no cost. The dread is about multiple uncertainties on the way.
~~~
The land dealers drove the process and came before the authorities. No one asked who they really were. Offers (purchase of land) after relocation were flying fast and furious. “This is the best offer you can get,” they told Neel, which was probably true.
No one else would dare an alternative offer in the carefully demarcated informal monopolies of land dealers. There is official recognition and concern about repeat sales.The plots are given in lieu of shelter and selling for a profit is not considered appropriate. A 2009 government report laments this: “The plots are further sold for profit by one buyer to another thereby defeating the very concept of equity.”
Neel says, “Offers of Rs 10,000 and Rs 15,000 were floating for a 18 square metre plot on the fringes of the city, whose real value was reportedly Rs 50,000.”
Despite such low offers for the plot, there had nevertheless been few takers for these offers among the settlers in the basti. This was so because there was a receipted development charge of Rs 5,000 to be paid in advance for the new plot, which few of the basti dwellers could afford at such short notice. There were few takers because the move so far away would not be conducive to the continuity in their existing jobs and livelihoods, leave alone the possibility of acquiring new jobs on the desolate outskirts of relocation.
There were no takers because there were sometimes impossible stipulations to meet, like the one confronting Neel. People like Neel who were not original allottees were expected to come up with the original allotee at the point of takeover of the new plot.
*
“I was anxious,” Neel says. “Where was I going to find Madan, the original allottee, years after he had sold his land to me?” Neel asks. It was time to cash in on his “social credits”. Hitin, Neel’s space-mate, and Madan’s co-villager called Madan up. With expenses paid, Madan agreed to come and be present.
~~~
Neel and Madan reached the faraway and empty terrain of the relocations. “There was not a dog or crow there,” is how Neel described the desolation of the relocation area on the fringes of the city. Neel made the payment but the “possession” letter, I-card and ration card were all in Madan’s name.
One final check of the original allottee at the site of possession was to happen at night. Only after that would official transfer to Neel make him a real “owner”. Neel returned to work, leaving Madan behind that night with payment receipts and papers to do the formalities.
A few hours into work and Neel heard the news — Madan had disappeared.
The possession letter had disappeared and the I-card and ration card too had vanished with Madan. A treacherous deal had been struck in Neel’s absence. Madan had been persuaded by the same person who had come to check his identity that he (Madan) should sell to him instead.
Madan took Rs 10,000 in advance with a promise of Rs 30,000 to be paid in a few days after the identity cards and registration were completed. Madan left taking the first bus back to the village, having made a duplicate sale and betraying his original sale to Neel.
Neel and Hitin took a train and arrived in the village early in the morning. It was a contrasting backdrop to the bustle of the city with the smells of cow dung and the sweet scent of ripening mustard being carried on a lazy breeze. Madan, blissfully unaware of the events that were unfolding, had arrived by bus a few hours earlier. But he was not the immediate target of Neel and Hitin’s interest.
Hitin had a standing in the community; so he called a baithak (meeting) with the jaat panchayat (caste council), an informal institution running parallel to gram panchayats (constitutionally mandated village councils).
The jaat panchayat serves (more often than India would like to hear) as the final arbitrator, dispenser of justice and fairness.
They are also known to be implementers of honour killings and feudal laws and are the custodians of the moral code of the caste community. In any given year (including 2013) news about the jaat panchayats implementing the moral code (competing with formal systems of law based justice) spill in to national dailies and to horrified urban readers, who are a century removed from the reality in the villages.
~~~
Neel was conscious of his vulnerability.
Village elders do not look kindly on conflict with “outsiders”. “I put my life at risk by going there in front of the jaat panchayat,” Neel says. Neel made his case grovelling, scared and pleading with overtures for special considerations for him: he was family-less, an orphan, “brother” to Hitin (and thereby son to the village or only half an outsider).
Madan was summoned. The panchayat deliberated for a good part of the day.
They declared that Madan had to give the identity documents to Neel. Further, it was stipulated that Madan would be available any time that Neel needed him to go to reverse the transaction for the land which now, after Madan’s betrayal, had a good chance of going in favour of the land dealers.
But Madan would not have to repay Neel the costs incurred so far.
Considering Madan’s recent ill-gotten gains, this was considerably biased in Madan’s favour and in favour of the village-blood brotherhood.
Neel had many more buttons to press. “I reached out to one of the highest officers,” Neel says. That worked with the land dealers but only partly. Neel had to make an immediate payment of Rs 15,000 for their “troubles”. Neel built a shanty on the plot (his second shanty) to keep ownership.
~~~
Four years later the growth in the city had spilled over to the vicinity of Neel’s shanty.
Neel sold the plot for Rs 1,50,000. Other things had changed for Neel too.
His formal sector job was now permanent. He now had an expanded menu of more formal institutions to borrow from. He had his provident fund, a bank loan (albeit after much questionable negotiations), the workers’ thrift society, as also the existing sources of leveraging local finance innovations of committees using the money lender only on the margins.
In a judicious mix he borrowed from all and made the first payment on a “real flat” of 50 square metres, less than an hour away from his place of work. It was his third attempt at home ownership but not the last. As that became part of the city, he sold it and bought a better flat only slightly further away. Neel says he is “settled” now and wants to look no further.
Excerpted with permission from Breaking Through: India’s Stories Of Beating the Odds On Poverty, Meera Mitra, Rupa Publications.
