Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation to upgrade 3,000 shanties

The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC), which had in its 2010-2011 budget set the goal of making Ahmedabad a slum-free city, has started work to upgrade civic amenities in the slums.
AMC officials said they were in the process of finalisingthe details to upgrade 3000 units in slums across the city, under the corporation's Slum Networking Project.

The AMC officials had made it clear while presenting the budget that they intended to provide basic civic amenities in the city, as part of Swarnim Gujarat celebrations. Under the project, the AMC has so far developed more than 3,000 households in 44 places in the city.

"In the coming years, we want to see Ahmedabad free of slums," said a senior AMC official.

"The state government is also giving the civic body a special grant under the Swarnim Gujarat initiative. So we have considered faster implementation."

The 2001 census of the city showed that about 40% of the population lives in slums, which are in the form of hutments and chawls (semi-slums). The slums are situated in 710 locations and the chawls in 958 locations; about 1.6 million people live in these slums, in about 3,26,000 households.

The upgrade of the households under the Slum Network Project aims to secure 33% share of the total cost from the slum-dwellers and a small contribution from them towards creating a corpus for the maintenance of these services.

The slum-dwellers are required to contribute a fixed amount of Rs2000 per dwelling unit towards Physical Services and Rs100 towards a corpus for the maintenance of the services in future.
The project also aims to involve industries and institutions who wish to help the urban poor in improving their quality of life.

A contribution of Rs2000 per dwelling unit in the slums is expected from every industry which wants to become a partner in the project. NGOs are being involved as partners in the project to play an important role in community development.

They will have to make a contribution of Rs300 per dwelling unit for the slums they wish to serve. The rest of the cost will be borne by the AMC.