Women\'s Rights and Access to WATSAN

The working class in Delhi have been subject to a systematic process of dispossession and impoverishment since the last three to four decades through forcible eviction from slums in Delhi and relocated to the periphery of Delhi. It is found that these resettlement colonies where the urban poor are relocated lack the basic amenities including that of Water and Sanitation.

Lack of water and sanitation facilities in the resettlement colonies emerged as one of the key problems faced by the community women. The WATSAN facilities and services in most of these resettlement colonies are found to be both insufficient and inappropriate especially for women. It came up as their felt need for a better living. Hence, the Action Research project was undertaken with vulnerabilities and rights of women being the focal point.

The two year project funded by IDRC and Women in Cities International, Canada was initiated in June 2009 in partnership with JAGORI. Bhalswa and Bawana Resettlement Colonies of New Delhi were selected as project field sites where Action India and JAGORI would carry out the research respectively.

The project focus and main guiding principles are:

• To engage with communities for appropriate, affordable and effective basic services, there is a need to focus on mechanisms for better governance.
• To address the ‘gender service gap’. The initial step would be to adapt and test the Women’s Safety Audit Methodology (WSA) to generate a concrete model for engaging resettled women with their local government agencies and other representatives in their communities, and other partners.
• The Project has a strong participatory element, community women will be part of the core team which will identify the problems, discuss the action research methods, monitoring, documentation and action plans. Decisions will be taken with women from the sites as part of the Core Team with emphasis on transparency. This includes discussions on action research methods, monitoring and documentation, action plans, etc.
•    Another guiding principle of participation is to give a voice to the women and their inclusiveness – including women across castes, religions and any other minority groups such as differently-abled women.
• To work with local government, service providers and women on the ground to explore, discuss and evolve a mechanism that can also be ‘used’ or ‘tested’ in this action research project.

With these principals guiding our work, Research tools were designed to gather detailed information about the gendered effects of the existing water and sanitation facilities in these resettlement colonies to come up with an effective action for the second phase of the Action Research.