Apni Vya-va-stha (Our Own Arrangement)

We have taken the challenge of empowering the marginalized migrant communities in India to develop for themselves their solutions of dignified housing, and get services of energy, water, sanitation, and their stake in the low-carbon equitable circular economy.  

In 2020, 1/4th of urban dwellers globally lived in slums or informal settlements. Out of 1 billion people, 85% live in Central and Southern Asia (359 million), Eastern and South-Eastern Asia (306 million), sub-Saharan Africa (230 million). 

In India, 140 Million people annually migrate internally from rural to urban areas for work.  They live in informal settlements on disputed lands where landsharks seek rent for letting them put up their shacks.  Community does not have provision for reliable water, energy, sanitation, or security.  They face frequent eviction and demolitions.  Migrants from different regions, languages, and cultures in such high-density living situation experience exploitation, sexual assaults, thefts, disease, squalor.  Not having any address, many services are blocked to them.  

Informal labor market with hierarchy of subcontractors in between the employers and laborers result in exploitation of laborers.  

Migrant laborers are the back-bone of the economic development, and yet they remain essentially excluded from the economic, social, and legal access and benefits. They bear the cost of informality as they live in informal settlements and work in informal labor markets.  

 Underlying Factors Contributing to the Problem: LOCAL TO GLOBAL

• Disputes over the land prevents the municipality services to reach the informal settlements. And its capacity is anyways outpaced by the demand.
•  Risk of illegal encroachment feared by the urban development authorities make the potentially land parcels in the Town planning schemes  unavailable to the laborers.  
• When the government or employers 'provide' any housing at all, the migrants do not have any say or stake in the quality of dwellings.
• Government's housing schemes subsidize multi-story housing intended for this target population have failed -either these remain empty, or sold-off to middle-class people, or in disrepair, and den of illegal activities; caused due to flawed incentive structure, and flawed intervention model.
• Perception of 'poor' continues to perpetuate the innovation vacuum in housing structures.  The quality of housing offered by big employers has not evolved for decades.  Land used for labor colony is not well-leveraged.  
•  Transparent and trusted hiring, payment, renting system will need to respond to the changing work and living patterns, and they will have to overcome the barriers of digital-divide, trust and social acceptance.
• Global champions of SDGs, climate, and equity do not have direct pathways for individuals to participate in collective governance over the communities that they aim to build.  Thus far their channels in national, regional, and the local ecosystems of actors are entrenched in fossil-fueled, centralized development mode which has created the  legal/political/ economic/ social patterns among the local stakeholders in whose periphery live and work the informal settlement communities as marginalized people.    

The new models are possible for raising the economic power and the stake of the migrant workers in Low-carbon Circular Economy.

1. Our solution makes our target-community sustainable and investable.

Our organization  "Sah Karyam" Foundation (SKF)  (Collective Action in Hindi) iitself offers a pathway for solving for low-carbon housing for the informal settlements.  SKF's mission is to solve persistent social and ecological problems together as a collective.  

The problems have persisted because the outside parties have created the interventions (eg. government schemes, employers, funding entities) and made the target-community the last recipients without any stake.  

We are solving this issue at its core. We put the migrant workers in the center of the process of participating, decision-making and governance.  And if we do this right in terms of tokenized model, then we will improve the economic mobility and generational wealth building the of migrant workers individually and as a community.  

2. Solving for typologies needing different solutions: huge diversity among the inhabitants in informal settlements.  One-size fits all solution cannot work. To address this, we  partner with highly proximal stakeholders (union of construction workers, NGOs in this space) who know where to focus and how.

For examples:

a) Many day-wage earning low-skilled construction workers have lived on disputed lands for decades.  Now they need to travel very far to reach  the new construction around the far urban periphery.  They want to move closer to the regions where there is more development going on.  Solution will require land-lease by either the collective of builders in the area or by some other trusted intermediaries.  

b) Small  or medium construction projects hire different crew of workers only for some time (masonry, bar-bending, etc.).  The work requires temporary living units. 

c) For factories, for large industrial zones, or for small brickmaking kiln, or for salt-pan workers, their size, geography and situation require very different solutions.  

3. Solutions in housing design and affordability

Solutions require highly optimized for functionality, sustainability, adaptability (for users and site), portability, and affordability (for employers and for workers who will be paying rent sufficient to recover operational costs of services). We are working with architects and fabricators to create the innovations.  However, for scaling and best optimization, we want to reach out to global best practice experts.

The above are few scenarios to underscore the the solutions must be developed that are acceptable to the target- population and these must be solving the issues of the employers, as well as proximity issues of working/living/socializing.  

4. Solutions for connecting the SDGs, and Target communities

SKF is a right entity (it is neither a charity nor a for-profit company) in India.  It will allow us to engage and create governing and fractional ownership of all stakeholders.  

                                     TECHNOLOGIES

The target communities and the employers need to visualize new scenarios, deliberate what will work and be affordable. 

We have described in detail the technologies related to architecture, collective governance, sustainable building materials and design, tokenized prosocial behaviors, decentralized energy (solar/battery), water, sanitation and much more.  Tokenized models coupled with IoT devices can expand decentralized services of energy, water, sanitation and resource conservation incentives.

Our solution, when scaled, will directly impact an estimated 20 to 25 million (out of a total of 140 million) migrant workers and their families who move from their rural homes and livelihoods to urban areas, seeking temporary employment in various industries. This sub-set of the larger population of migrant workers are engaged in trades that are more transient than others. Construction industry, agriculture, brick kilns employers employing transient workers.

Frequent relocation and uncertain tenure are key characteristics.  Despite their significant contribution to the economy, migrant workers often face several challenges - poor working conditions, low wages, lack of job security, and limited access to basic amenities, like shelter, healthcare and education. 

In the coming decades, the well-being of migrant workers will be closely tied to the health of the Indian economy and yet Migrant workers seem to be no one’s employees, no one’s tenants, no one’s constituents, and no one’s welcomed neighbors.

Given the transient nature of their employment, one of the most debilitating constrain they face is secure and affordable housing. Neither the employers nor the municipalities or public agencies or the political system, or the private sector has invested in finding a solution. Arguably, none of these entities have the needed capacity to step-up to the challenge on their own. 

As a result, using meagre resources, these workers and their families including women, children and elders, fend for themselves. They create makeshift shelters by using tattered tarps, recycled building materials and foraged items from garbage dumps and even landfills. These shelter structures are not only grossly inadequate in space and security, but they are also often constructed on public land or on commons such pavements, parks and under bridges. 

This exposes them to highly unhygienic conditions, serious physical and sexual harassment, and frequent evictions. Absence of secure shelter also has serious secondary impacts. The children do not attend schools. The household is forced to buy groceries in small quantities, often at exorbitant prices. Frequent sickness not only results in lost wages but also medical expenses. A study conducted by the authors have found that almost 25% of the wage income goes towards expenses incurred while coping with these challenges.

Secure housing on negotiated land will bring about a transformative change for them. Secure housing will create an enabling situation where dividends from further investments in childcare, health services and upskilling will be exponentially higher. Coupled with a deliberate strategy to use climate friendly building materials from their agriculture residues and other sustainable source, this solution will demonstrate its strength in terms of improving equity and sustainability. It will also organically link the economies of the “source villages” of the migrant workers with the urban “destination cities”.

We are exploring how tokenized system can enable the target communities to be in the center of their own collective decision-making and governance of dignified homes and communities.  The decentralized systems of energy, water, and sanitation will be most significant in  improving the quality of life, health, and productivity.  

Because our organization is a collective builder, we engage to bring proximal and other stakeholders together.

In the past 1.5 years, we have built the following types of stakeholders:

A: Stakeholders for whom dignified shelters are significant priority -    

• Bandhkam Majdoor Sangathan- A labor union with 35,000 workers in Gujarat
•  Aajeevika Bureau- NGO with deep relationships with a large numbers of migrant workers in five states (at ‘source’ villages and at ‘destinations’ where the laborers work).    
• Manjari Foundation– NGO empowering 470,000 farming population in five states,West Ffrica, 90% of the farmers go to urban areas for migrant labor
• Enlightened builders, architect professionals who have championed the cause of better living conditions for the construction workers. 
• Bandhu – an ML-based Technology start up by MIT Alums that matches the laborers to existing low-income housing and to employers.

B:  Stakeholders who are interested to champion the cause.

• GIHED, CREDAI are two associations of real-estate developers
• Maskati Mahajan– A state-wide Textile owners’ association
• Gujarat Institutes of Engineers and Architects
• Various engineers, public health, government leaders, and individual factory owners, NGOs in Gujarat
• GIFT City – A new SMART city in Gandhinagar, Gujarat

C:  Stakeholders in pertinent professional disciplines – Urban space design and planners, architects, off-grid energy, water, waste water, sanitation specialists, construction engineering and management, building R&D experts, fabricators, technology firms.  

 It is important to underscore that the above stakeholders have varying degree of power to influence the actors in government, municipality, elected offices, legal and finance, and advocate policy reforms.

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A collective profile of the core-team: 

• Founders and leaders of several highly recognized NGOs in India ( Dr. Shashi Enarth and Sanjay Sharma), 
• Co-Founder of a non-profit Clean Energy and Water for All, and a clean energy start-up  for commercializing solar thermal concentrator  (Dr. Arati Shah-Yukich in USA)
• Large-scale community organizing for livelihood capacity building, irrigation project development, social enterprise platform development in India (Dr. Shashi Enarth and Sanjay Sharma)
• Construction Engineering and Management Engineer (Rajesh Jasoria),
• Participatory Design of Community Spaces and Architecture (John Moody in the USA, and Harshil Parekh in India),
• International recognition as Ford Foundation Fellow and Ashoka Fellow (Sanjay Sharma)
• Professor in Developmental Economics and Governance in Public Policy, Graduate program developer, Mid-career Professional Training Development in Forestry, Climate Change (Dr. Shashi Enarth)
• Consulting (Development in Global South) with diverse national and international organizations, such as world bank for development project assessments in India, various African countries, Canada, etc. (Dr. Shashi Enarth. Sanjay Sharma)
• Collaborative Performing Arts compositions and concerts for ecological and social justice in USA, India, France (Dr. Arati Shah-Yukich)

Currently SKF is steered by a team of young professionals based in Ahmedabad. As we scale up our activities, SKF will strengthen this team. 

ABOUT TO CHAGE - FROM THIS SHACK

TO THE LIVING UNIT BELOW

There will be six units housing six families, a child play area, a long shaded common community place, washrooms & toilets for textile factory workers.

Read more here.

1. Currently the executives of a large government-led development (a SMART city) has invited Co-Solve to propose innovative labor park solutions to their builders.  More than 5,000 laborers will be hired by a number of builders in the coming year.  We are exploring improved labor living units and shared spaces, community-led governance, and service aggregation.  

2. Ourpartner NGO Aajeevika Bureau in Ahmedabad advocates for 200,000 workers in nearly 2000 industrial factories of textile and chemical factories (small to medium).  The undocumented workers are from tribal areas live inside or nearby in tent-like or semi-brick walled shelters, and exposed to toxic and dangerous conditions.  The industries flout the laws and regulations with impunity.  "The contract chain is so complicatedthat sometimes there might be eight to nine levels of contractors between the manager and the worker."

We have gained interest from several factory owners who requested our support for suitable shelter designs.  Co-Solve engaged young socially-sensitive architects to work with the target-community.  Currently six units of workers are being implemented.  (see photos and more info in the link.) This year we will plan to motivate more factory owners - estimating 50 families.   We will reuse these designs for others suitable cases.

3. The labor union of 35,000 laborers throughout the state of Gujarat need some or the other kinds of improvements in the labor colonies. They are very ready but they will need negotiated lease to land and upfront capital costs these communities cannot be enabled. We anticipate about 50 to 60 families (200 people) this year to finally have a legitimate place to build their homes.

4.  We are at early stage of talking with two other NGOs - Atul Foundation in South Gujarat who is interested to support them with shelters in Brick-making kiln.  Another NGO Vikas Center for Development is working with Salt-pan workers in the desert of Kutch, Gujarat.

Our solutions will require two key resources: (a) Groundbreaking technologies (b) suitable governing structure through which non-Fungible funds can match the locally mobilized public funds (these are significant in quantum but highly inflexible and hard-to-access) and corporate funds. 

We  have now the right line-up of motivated local stakeholders in Gujarat, India with the ability and power to enable migrant community-centric housing and services innovations in their local contexts.  

We are now at the stage of expanding this "collective space"  where the best minds located globally can converge for solving the problem of extreme affordability and the raising of the stake of the target communities and low-carbon economy.   

MIT Solve will be a great enabler for us to  find these knowledge resources.  We also need help with how to structure business relationships with all such participants and the target communities so all participants have a piece of ownership, governing power, and incentives.  

 We are hopeful that MIT Solve will engage in this endeavor.  

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Overview on the key technology areas MIT SOLVE could consider facilitating.

1.  In Housing, Architecture, Urban Planning and Design we need very many different experts to weigh in and contribute in augmenting the supply-chain of low-carbon, low-resource, natural or recycled building materials, traditional building materials and designs (mud/thatch / lime plaster, bamboo etc.).  

2. Designs need innovations (that must work for the target communities)....Foldable walls, movable ceilings, interior double-backing for multiple uses,...structures for the target-communities in highly diverse typologies can engage the innovative MIT community (and others around the world).  

3. Best-practices of decentralized energy, water, sanitation systems as well as coupling with the IoT integrated.  These have to work in low-tech Indian contexts. This requires site-specific robustness.

4. Digital platforms including e-commerce to respond to the varied housing needs of millions of migrant families. This will require a well-developed and scalable supply-chain setup, a nimble and affordable service provider for participatory design, maintenance and regular modernization of solutions.

5.  While the SMART contracts, tokenized incentives, governance among all participants are all new, and we have very little appreciation we believe that we bring the much needed "counter weight" in making sure that the applications are most judiciously appointed for our target-community.  Our team leaders and stakeholders have seen many failed technology interventions and the 'target' communities have been the victims.

Our approach to addressing the problem is novel in the following ways:

• Our paradigm is unique and breaks new ground in the prevailing narrative of 'housing' and life in informal settlements.  For decades, massive amount of funding and efforts have been poured into informal settlement communities globally.  But this model is 'centralized supply oriented' (keeping all of the control within) and many intermediaries engage.  The target-community is reduced to being a mere last-end recipient of charity, or subsidized products and services that the community has not had much inputs or stake in or a position to negotiate from. Our model is to start with the community and enable them to step up as rent-paying consumers of housing and services through governing themselves in democratic process.  While we do not have experience in block-chain token system our life-long experiences in building community's democratic participatory governance of their collective resources has informed our strategy.  The lessons learned are critical and any technological interventions will need to be very carefully implemented.

• Solution creates diverse stakeholders to align and create a ‘trusted bridge’  from the global community to the target-community.  When we couple our solution with suitable tokenized platform, it will expand the opportunities for economic mobility and generational wealth-building of the communities we are serving. The global stakeholder community can invest in the solutions while community members can be still be the majority owners.

• Our solution does not depend on the conventional infrastructure. It is neither possible nor advisable to rely on the municipality to be the supplier.  We are seeking to implement decentralized technology services.  This also helps those labor communities who work at remote road or highway projects, or peri-urban areas where there is no provision.   When tokenized governance is feasible and implemented, it will create community-owned decentralized utilities construction, childcare, education, and cooking/feeding.  This will directly make transformative impacts to SDGs.

• Our solution aims to bring innovative, affordable, feasible, and sustainable designs of shelters, building materials, technologies, and expert guidance.  When feasible, we will also encourage the target communities to offer their own traditional dwelling designs and construct them as a community.

• With the right technology set-up of incentive tokens and blockchain, our solution will enable the funding agencies, governmental funds and services to directly fund the target communities. 
• When the solutions are scaled, a new supply chain of suitable temporary shelter products, kits, parts, and sustainable building materials will increase. 
• Our approach will greatly help the communities in many parts of India and the world currently living in informal settlements.  They will be able to leap-frog into a new way of living by being accountable to one another for a shared goal of peace, harmony, health, and vibrant community.

In summary, we put the right ‘fulcrum’ (consisting of core principles, and processes),  and build a collective of stakeholders as 'Archimedes’  and they find the long enough lever (consisting of resources, technologies, policy and other regulatory provisions, etc.) and apply their clout to lift the target-community onto a better plain.

 We will measure direct impacts on the target communities in Health, WASH, workers' productivity, income increases, education, etc.  

Moreover, we will measure stakeholders' behavior changes which also have significant yields for the SDG impacts in a sustained manner.  For example, by measuring how many new employers were incentivized by examples we shared, we can assess how our solutions are self-scaling.

1. Consistent reliable services of energy, water, and sanitation in the target communities
2. Improvements in health, well-being, safety, increased economic status, children’s care and education among the target communities.
3. Increasing numbers of migrants demand quality of shelters through their capacity and willingness to pay for them.
4. Improvements in the productivity of workers in each sector.  More workers will be working in a low-carbon economy over the years.
5. Increase in the employers’ self-motivation to support such solutions for better housing solutions for their employees, and increase in their compliance with the labor laws
6. Favorable reforms in funding policies, and land-leasing to migrant workers’ projects in the Town Planning schemes.
7. Increased capacity for continuous market innovation in shelter designs and the supply-chain of the products and services. 
8. Fair wages, documented labor contracts, improved accountability and transparency

We would like to get access to the following data mapping technology -  Radar Plot ( MIT Media Lab).  This tool will greatly enable us to track impacts.

Note that our plan to achieve the above impacts is directly linked to how well we implement the suite of technologies mentioned in the proposals.  We will use best-practice impact measuring tools and practices in the development field. 

                                        In the first year –

• Enable the Labor union’s 50 or 60 families (they are daily wage earners currently living informal settlements) to get access to leased land (for 5 to 7 years?) and support them with shelter designs and services.
• Conduct a needs assessment survey and engage a cohort of laborers and their employers in a large SMART city development project for shelter designs, and community governance. Note that a good portion of these laborers follow the same employer and stay in the labor colonies provided by the contractors) Impact in the 2nd year: 5000 laborers
• Currently, a 6-family dwelling project at a textile factory is underway (paid for by the factory owner).  Increase the advocacy similarly among other factory owners in that area of Ahmedabad by holding site visits and workshops.  Gain 3 or 4 more factory owners to similarly implement projects for their employees (typically these employees live inside the factory in a highly dangerous and toxic environment and work to keep the boiler going 24/7). Impact: 100 people including children

                                         In five years –

• Create pilots for diverse geographies and employer types: a) Red stoneworkers and Artisans of north Rajasthan.  b) salt-pan workers, c) shipbreaking yard (35,000 laborers), d) Brick-making Kilns

• Scaling of our model - in all of the above sectors and types

We will use the following indicators (in bullets) in diverse dimensions (numbered) to gauge our progress and success.  If we have a token system and a blockchain system in place we will have a fairly dynamic view of data.

1. Participation of and alignment with different stakeholders 

• How well is the active participation of the migrant workers in idea generation and decision-making?  

• How willing are the employers, government agencies, any CSR funding partners,  or loan agencies to engage and how well do they assess the cost-benefits, the scope and the overall plan and measures for the projects? 
• How well do all parties adopt the guiding principles in communication and follow-through? 

2. Shelter design and development 

• How well do the shelter design and implementation meet the needs of the community in diverse parameters - comfort, safety, space, services...
• How the experts in the fields validate the design and best practices suited for the projects, lasting performance, and affordability. 

3. Shelter usage and quality of experience 

• How well is the utilization of the implemented shelters and what are their reasons to not accept?

• Satisfactory experience of relationships among the residents with one another,  with the land owners, the employers, the municipality etc. 

• Quality of care and upkeep of the physical assets over time  

 • Indicators of a “buy-in” from the municipality, the nearby communities and industry. 

4. Well-being of the workers 

• Improvements in the indicators of health, well-being, and productivity • Improvements in the economic status of the workers/ residents 

5. Funding and finances

• Willingness of the migrants to pay the rent and a portion of the costs for services that are proposed with the shelters and services. 

• Willingness of the employers or the public entities involved to pay or facilitate funding for the project. 

Note that the list below are the technologies that will greatly accelerate the scaling of our solutions. We are seeking suitable partners in the following list. 

CATEGORY: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

• City Scope (MIT Media Lab's)
• RADAR PLOT (MIT Media Labs) for visualizing urban indicators
• Tokenized Pro-social Behavior, 
• Architectural Rendering for visualizing possibilities, 
• ML/AI based options for mass-custom shelter designs and 3D printing, 
• Block-chain SMART contracts, 
• e-commerce platform for the target-community relevant shelters, services market-place, 
• Job Training platforms 
• ML-based Worker- Employer match-making (eg. Bandhu Work).
• IoT for monitoring, regulating, and notifying regarding the quality, quantity of usage of biogas, electricity, water storage, etc.
• RFID for secure access

CATEGORY: ENERGY, WATER, SANITATION

The choices of technologies will depend on the given location's availability.  We will be pursuing primarily decentralized, renewable resource harvesting (rain, solar, ground heat and cooling), waste recovery (biogas, vermi-composting, constructed wetlands technology for waste water treatment)

CATEGORY: BIO-SERVICES, LAND, TRADITIONAL, SUSTAINABLITY

• Green living-walls and terrace gardens
• Vermi-compost of toilet waste, 
• Passive design techniques, 
• Storm water management,
• Permaculture, Mud/ Thatch / Natural Materials Building materials, straw-bale building constructioin, bamboo, Lime plaster etc.  Constructed wetlands waste water treatment, earth mounds structures, 
• Rreuse of demolished building debri, post-recycled building materials
• Ancient Traditional building techniques
• Animals - dairy, chicken, sheep, goats for food, manure amendments to biogas, land enrichment

Our core team is small but we have diverse lived experiences and professional careers. Diversity in gender, age, life-experiences and commonality of considering ourselves as global citizens joining with others.

We have in place a credo that we share with our team members, board members and partners.  The active participants sign and abide by. 

We also have  Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statements that all members and officers adopt.  

Our aims are to make the housing solutions that are created by a whole collective of stakeholders and keeping the user-community in the center and against the evolving local and global narratives in low carbon housing for this population.  We also require that our solutions are financially viable and while they may require viability gap funding, the operational costs are to be borne by the users themselves through affordable rent.  Only then can they scale.

The following assumes that land-issue is solved. Moreover, housing for this population in different typologies require highly different business models.  A large labor colony or a dozen some shelters require different models. Moreover, an integrated energy, water, sanitation solutions is not included in the following. 

The overall principles of how the financing for a given project will work are as follows:

The capital costs of the pilot projects are financed through grants from various stakeholder groups including the industry, government and philanthropy.  A cost-sharing approach with the community will be implemented based on a willingness-to-pay study.

100% of the operating costs of the housing units will be covered through user payments including rent for the housing units and service charges for add-on services such as childcare and health services.  

The post-pilot phase will adopt a completely bankable business model where capital expenses come through investment from the industry that employs the workers. Government schemes specifically intended to support the cause will also be tapped for reducing the capital cost burden.

Our first pilot project of 6 units in an industrial estate indicates that with the economy of scale, the capital cost of a family housing unit will be approximately USD $ 1500. Amortized over the life span of 10 years, at a capital discount rate of 5%, the annual outflow of approximately $170 can be recovered through rentals and service charges.

In summary, our business model strategy is to implement several judiciously located pilot demonstrations.  When the proximal stakeholders see what is possible, they are incentivized to put their own resources.

There are two additional strategy to augment the target-community's base.

1) Leveraging shared economy: The migrant communities can be enabled in creating tokenized system for investing in their own community through collectivizing of services, purchasing, reducing costs, and creating joint ownerships.  This enables the community to save and also apply their savings judiciously to leverage more economic, personal and social gains.  

2) Our long-term strategy is to give them a rightful equitable stake in the low-carbon circular economy where the construction workers are trained to use low-carbon building methods, own businesses, as well as leverage their rural assets - such as, becoming suppliers of post-harvest straw for building materials and various Agri-waste recovery uses. 

3) We will also explore how SKF social enterprise can be used as a vehicle for innovative housing products and services fractional ownerships by many parties.  

The success of the pilot project is tied to its ability to be market-resilient. 

As explained in the business model, the capital costs and the user's willingness to pay indicate that the mandate of providing secure housing to workers is feasible financially and economically.  

SKF will transition from a pilot implementation agency to a provider of knowledge. This service will be provided on a cost-recovery basis.  

However, innovative business ideas of fractional ownership of the migrant workers, employers, innovators, funders etc can be considered. 

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The following summarizes SKF's organizational Financial needs:

Build a core team of 5 professionals with skills including project management, planning and design, social mobilizers and advocacy/communication.  This is besides the human resources mobilized by our sister organization COSOLVE (USA) including significant time of Dr Arati Shah Yukich, Dr Shashidharan, Mr. Rajesh Jasoria, Mr Sanjay Sharma.

Establishment costs: To bring operational efficiency, a modestly equipped office is being set up in Ahmedabad which will also serve as a reception center for community and other stakeholder representatives.  

Project/activities costs: As a principle, SKF will seek cost-sharing by all stakeholders even for pilot projects. SKF will strive to contribute costs associated with architectural design and quality-determining components while costs of infrastructure and labor will be sought from other stakeholders including public agencies. This approach to financing allows rapid scaling of successful projects without philanthropic grants.

Advocacy Events: Advocacy initiatives aimed at mainstreaming tested systemic solutions through influencing public policies. This includes coalition building, dissemination workshops and AV documentation.

Summary of budget:
This is a three-year budget totaling USD $250,000.

Our first pilot project in the Narol Industrial estate was originally planned to be grant funded. However, it became clear early on that with diligent and transparent communication with the factory owner and the workers, they understood the economic and social benefits of the project and were forthcoming in sharing the capital costs. 

Out of a total project of $ 9000, the factory owner contributed $8000. Sahkaryam Foundation only paid $1000 to engage a design/architect team.

Subsequent conversations with other interest groups including construction companies indicate that with a robust housing solution they are willing to invest in worker housing.