>> Anoop Gupta: All right. Let's start. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Anoop Gupta
from Microsoft Research. We have a very interesting talk today by Doctor Kiran Martin on
inclusive cities transforming the lives of Delhi’s urban poor. As most of us know migration to
urban cities to cities is becoming a huge issue between 2000 and 2030. The population is
expected to double to around 5 billion people. Approximately a third of these people, around
1.6 billion, will be in slums, and how we address these problems are really, really important to
take care of. In fact, in 2012, there were around 863 million people who were living in slums
worldwide.
I myself am from Delhi, so it is something that is we deeply care about. In fact, when our
family visited Delhi just this last December we took a tour of the slums with Slum [inaudible]
Trust folks to get a deeper understanding because I think it's a problem for all of us to think
about and help solve. Now while some of us, and I'm mostly talking about people like myself,
look at the problem and think about the statistics there are a few amongst us who are really
doing actually something about the problem on the ground and making a real difference and
that is really people like our speaker, Doctor Kiran Martin.
Now Doctor Kiran Martin is a social entrepreneur and founder and director of the Asha
Community Health and Development Society. It was founded in 1988 when there was a cholera
outbreak in one of the Delhi slums, and now more than 25 years later she has brought dramatic
change to roughly half a million people in the slums of Delhi; and today we'll hear about her
story, the actions, and how with perseverance she has gone and addressed these major
challenges from dealing with health and financial inclusion and empowering the citizens of
these slums. So she was also awarded in 2002 the Padma Shri Award which is the highest
civilian honor in India by our President [inaudible] that particular point in time. She’s spoken
and lots of places, so it's a real honor to have her here.
So before I just hand the mike to her a couple of quick points if you're watching this on resnet
remotely welcome to the talk. You will also see there is a button on things so you can ask
questions. I will be monitoring that throughout the talk and I can repeat the questions to her.
One of the things that one of you already asked was about how can you, this is the Month of
Giving Campaign at Microsoft, how can you contribution to Asha? So if you go to the Giving
Campaign site, Give Now, and search for ASHA INDIA in all capital letters you will find the site to
go and give and please contribute. So with that let me welcome Doctor Kiran Martin to share
her thoughts with us.
>> Kiran Martin: Thank you, Anoop, thank you. It's a real pleasure being here. I'm a
pediatrician, and I went to Maulana Azad Medical College in the University of Delhi, and like
Anoop said, I started Asha in the year 1988.
This is a picture of affluent Delhi. We know that it is one of the most affluent cities in the
country. It has the highest per capita income and, no, I have my own mike and you won't be
able to hear my mike because the microphone is only for the purposes of recording. I’ve
already been told that.
Now this of course is a typical slum in the city of Delhi, and as you can see it's primarily made up
of discarded material, pieces of cardboard, anything heavy that can hold the roof together. And
this is actually representative of slums in all the major cities in India and many towns in India
and in fact developing countries the world over. We are expecting half the world’s population
to start living in cities by 2050. The issue of slum development and urban poverty is something
that the Millennium Development Goals have also recognized; and one of the MDG's clearly
states a target of 100 million slum dwellers that they hope to be able to reach out to for the
alleviation of poverty in these communities.
I also wanted to just say here that you'll be surprised that the annual slum growth rate is the
highest in South Asia. It's about three percent which is a very high figure. And 20 percent of
the whole world slum dwellers reside in India. So India becomes a very important country to
address the problems of people living in such kind of urban poverty.
Just to show you how people in slums can live in very dangerous situations the slum is right
there by a railway track and trains are passing by every few minutes. They could also be by the
side of dirty drains; they could also be located next to five-star hotels. It's very common to see
a slum from the window of a room in your five-star hotel, and there is no access to water and
sanitation, and there's a lot of filth and dirt and garbage everywhere around, lots of pigs as
well, huge rats running across the floor, and people, there’s a clothesline hanging from one end
of the house to the other with pots and pans everywhere. So everything happens in that little
slum hut, the cooking, the cleaning, the sleeping, everything.
Just to show you a little bit of what an inside street of a slum can look like it's really not a place
fit for human habitation. And these are some of the worst slums. I've seen slums in Nairobi,
I've seen them in Addis Ababa, I've seen them in Brazil, I've seen them in Argentina, I've gone to
lots of different countries. I've also seen them in Thailand, but I do have to say that some of the
slums in North India, particularly Delhi and Calcutta among the absolute worst in the whole
world.
Kids in slums grow up with severe malnutrition because of the inflation. I mean they come
here from the villages in search of work but when they come to the cities and they come and
start living in these shanty colonies the burden of disease is so great that a lot of their
disposable income is spent on battling illness. The infant mortality rate in the Delhi slums is
among the highest in the whole world. It's 100 for every thousand live births. The child
mortality rate is 146. That is also one of the highest in the whole world. And the infant
mortality rate for India as a whole is 66 which is still extremely high if you look at the table of
countries all over the world. It's about seven I think in the United States.
The maternal mortality of those is shockingly high in slums. It’s about 900 for every thousand
live births which is again among the highest in the whole world. So essentially all of the health
parameters and human development indicators are far worse in urban poor communities than
they are in rural communities, and these are UNICEF documented figures and today all world
bodies recognize that urban property in many ways is much worse because as far as health
goes, as far as education goes, as far as water goes, sanitation goes, things like land rights, all of
these problems are found greatly experienced and exasperated in slum communities as
opposed to villages.
And then to compound the big problem you have the presence of slumlords and you have the
presence of the Mafia, and I guess this picture is quite clear, right? I mean it tells you who the
slumlord is and also all the other people who help him in his work and activities. So India of
course is a democracy and not a democracy because in large sections of the population of our
country democracy doesn't really, really work and slums is typical. So you have large numbers
of people maybe ranging from 5000 to 50,000 in these kinds of communities where slumlords
are the people who are self-styled, they basically control the state of affairs in these
communities, they determine which party that whole community is going to vote for, the
power of exercising franchise does not lie with the slum guerrillas themselves. And so this
environment of tremendous exploitation and tremendous oppression results in a sense of
fatalism; it results in a sense of apathy; it results in suspicion because they've lived at the
bottom of the ladder for so long and the meaning of the word entitlement or the meaning of
the words citizenship does not exist as far as they are concerned.
And to top it you also have the problem of various sub castes like in a village where it's
homogenous and you have gone one caste whereas in slums you have people migrating from
all over the country and they bring with them their own subcultures, their social barriers, their
religious barriers, and so it's such a mix and heterogeneous population. And there is such a
huge scarcity of resources that the conflict then becomes an even bigger issue because as it is
the resources are so scarce and so it’s an environment where you can immediately when you
walk in you can experience a great deal of hostility, a great deal of alienation, you can literally
sense the resentment. It's quite palpable. And also there you can sense the atmosphere of
intimidation and fear which is created by the presence of the slumlords and other elements in
the communities who basically rule communities in a self-styled manner.
>>: Isn’t there also a sense of social support because everybody is so desperate and poor and
things like that? So there are complications, but is there a good side to being in a slum?
>> Kiran Martin: To some extent you might find it. Among communities that are like one
another, so for example if there is a group of richer [inaudible] for Bihar and they all happen to
be living in the same geographical location in the community there might be some sense of
community among them. But if you have them literally living neck to neck all from the
[inaudible] communities then there's more alienation than a sense of togetherness or a desire
to work together for the common good of the community. That's how it is in urban poor
communities unlike rural communities where of course things are very different. Yes.
>>: I don't want to distract things too much, but you mentioned disenfranchisement, and I just
wonder the mechanics of how a slumlord is able to force a population to vote a certain way.
>> Kiran Martin: Yeah. So basically since we are a democracy all adults have a voting right
including slum dwellers. So in a particular constituency say a counselor or a legislator who's a
local level, state-level politician you might have about 200,000 people living in that
constituency which if say there are 20,000 in a slum or 50,000 in a slum then the words of the
slum dwellers become extremely important to that particular politician.
So what they typically do is cultivate slumlords whom they will look after quite well in many
different ways, so typically the slumlord’s house will be much bigger and nicer than all the little
shacks around, so they will take a care of them financially, they will give them lots of other
benefits, and also just that sense of power by what you have being a particular party worker,
having access to the political nexus makes the slumlord feel extremely important. And in return
they expect the slumlord to make sure that all the entire population votes for that party that
has taken care of the slumlord. And he basically does it through intimidation. And sometimes
they also have this thing about distributing some alcohol, a little bit of money just on the eve of
the election, two or three days before the election, and somehow then people are propelled
into this whole thing of going in and following the slumlord because they have never, ever
before rather before I shared this work I think, they had never understood the power of their
franchise ever. They had been so marginalized and they had been so accustomed to being
ruled that there was a sense of tremendous passivity and fatalism that existed in the minds of
people living in these communities.
>>: So my understanding was that it was a particularly strong emphasis on privacy in the poll
sites using [inaudible]. But if the residents don't understand what they're doing and they're
being told by the slumlord, even if there's no mechanical enforcement, if they're just doing
what they're told, they would realize that they can choose.
>> Kiran Martin: Yes. That's exactly the way it happens. So essentially they have these huge
trucks that stand outside the slum and people are asked to sit in those trucks so they can very
easily take them to the polling booth and they don't have the incentive to have to walk and all
that. And then they go there and then of course in the peace and quiet of a polling booth
where they can exercise their franchise but they just do it according to what they've been told.
And because they're so afraid, and they need the slumlord, where else are they, there's no
other alternative system or structure that they can turn to, and they know that tomorrow if a
policeman tries to frighten them and intimidate them they'll go running to the slumlord.
There's no one else they can go to. So it's a vicious cycle.
So my work began when there was a cholera epidemic going on in the city, and I actually just
started seeing patients out in the open. And from then I have evolved a whole lot of different
programs in the slums to bring about transformation of these communities in order to be able
to completely lift them out of property and for them to become middle-class citizens. That's
been the aim of the organization. And my health care programs look rather different from a
conventional health program. So the woman that you see here on your left is a community
health of volunteer. I have trained hundreds of such women who live in the slums and who
might be either completely illiterate or they might be semi-literate. But they have been able to
transform health in their communities by the training that they have received and by being
available 24 hours around the clock.
Now there is one thing to be noted here and that is that urban community health volunteers
are very different from rural community volunteers. The concept of community health
volunteers had been established many years ago in rural India but not in urban India because
urban community health volunteers it was a very different story, they were from different
castes and different religions and also because the city offers you economic opportunities it
was hard to be able to recruit urban community health volunteers, so there were lots of
different things that we learned. And ours was the first organization that ever trained urban
community health volunteers in our country and then were able to demonstrate how
successfully they can transform health care in their own communities in a highly cost-effective
way.
Now the government of India was extremely excited when they saw this model because if they
were able to see it in those days among 200,000 people that was a fairly large number. So they
then decided to replicate and to scale up this particular style of primary health care, and they
also called their urban community health volunteers as Ashas just after, so if you Google them
you will see that they’ll come up and then you'll know the story behind it.
But I'm not just talking about scaling up. You can scale up either with expansion, which we
have done to some extent, so we are now looking after 500,000 slum dwellers; and you need to
have a certain size so that governments don't say that these are not replicable programs and
you're too small. But then the other way to scale up is by replication, and we decided that we
would expand but to a certain limit afterward we would choose the route of replication
particularly because the government has far more resources and far more infrastructure to be
able to do large scale replication of things that they get excited about. And so this is one
example of how government of Delhi decided to replicate and then of course it went to many
different states in the country.
>>: Tell us a little bit more detail, so for the 500,000, how many volunteers do you have? How
do you train them? What kinds of things does the community volunteer handle versus how
does it escalate to a doctor? What happens?
>> Kiran Martin: So basically, we've got a three tier system of healthcare. The very first tier is
the community health volunteer and she is responsible roughly for 200-300 families. So in a
whole slum, depending on the population, the slum is divided up and there is a community
health volunteer for each segment and she's responsible for that segment. And she is given
training by Asha both in curative care as well as in preventative and promotive health care.
Now she, of course, has a set of responsibilities that she carries out, and those responsibilities
are carried out with every single family in her segment. So she is accessible; and in all likelihood
her segment is where she lives. Her house is probably going to be in that location.
So she can treat common ailments such as [inaudible] illness, such as respiratory infections,
such as a boil, skin infections, eye infections, ear infections, make sure children don't get
dehydrated, she also knows how to examine pregnant women and also detect high-risk
pregnancies. They can also give injections, they can take blood pressures, they can do all sorts
of things. And it’s remarkable the kind of healthcare that they are able to provide, and I've
noticed that they have very highly developed communication skills, and they’re actually
sometimes much better communicators than a lot of our doctors are because they speak the
same dialect and they speak the same language and they’re within the community. They're
very effective communicators, and they been able to convince large populations of the
importance of family planning, for example. Yes.
>>: So what is a typical educational background for one of these volunteers?
>> Kiran Martin: The community health volunteers could either be completely illiterate or at
best they might have gone up to class 6, 7, or 8 but not beyond class 8 generally is what we've
seen, and those are a little bit on the rarer side. And with all the method of training whereby
someone who can't read or write can also be trained, and that of course is available for the
discussion if you would like to know what our methods of training are.
>>: So that's tier 1. What's tier 2?
>> Kiran Martin: Tier 2 is the Asha Health Centers in the different slum areas. So we’ve got 65
slums in which we are working. So we’ve got a center and the community center is staffed by
our, like you can see over here our visiting doctor and nurses and paramedics and so on, that's
just the health part. Of course, we’ve got lots of other things we do, and so most of our
patients will be referred by the community health volunteers to the doctors so that the doctors
don't unnecessarily wasted time on coughs and colds when they should be seeing things like
tuberculosis or pneumonia or typhoid or hepatitis or complicated diseases that really require
the attention of a doctor. If we didn't have a community health volunteer the doctor in
[inaudible] would be seeing, I mean she would hardly get through the 25 or 30 patients and she
would be wasting a great deal of time and her professional skills wouldn’t be put the best use at
all.
And then in the third tier we have a refer system that we've established because we don't have
our own hospital. So we decided to use the existing services in the hospital so that we didn't
get diverted from our goals of community development and upliftment of poverty into running
a hospital. So we've got links with various hospitals in the city, both public and private, and our
community health volunteers actually are the ones who act as advocates and as champions for
the families. So whoever is sick in their segment of the community, because in a public hospital
it's very hard, so the community health volunteers will accompany them and make sure that
they see the doctor and get everything done.
Now comes the whole strand of women's empowerment which is possibly one of the most
challenging strands in the years of work that I've had. So these are all women from like I said
different castes and different religions and different subcultures, and there were times in the
early years when I began the process of empowerment where they weren’t even able to talk to
me properly because they always had their heads covered with veils, they were always looking
down, and the moment I would talk to them about even getting together they would be very
intimidated by the whole idea because they felt that their husbands would disapprove and the
opinion makers in the slums would disapprove and that’s because they were always given
messages that their own intrinsic worth was not there, they always lived on the margins of the
slum society, they had no voice really neither at the family living or at the community level, so
they were not at all even accustomed to the whole idea of sitting together perhaps looking at
the community's problems and perhaps looking for solutions even though they were the ones
bearing the brunt of most of the problems because if you have to fill water in a slum it is a
woman who will go with her bucket and stand in a queue and get that water. The husband will
be off in the morning to work.
So it was really hard, and I went through a lot of difficulties establishing these groups including
threats to my life and things like my cart has been punctured and my screens smashed and
things like that. I was even once locked into my own clinic and not allowed to go home. So
that's just to give you an idea of the extent of the threat and intimidation that is experienced
when you’re trying to overstate turned the status quo even though I had a very nonconfrontational way of working and a nonviolent way of working with the slumlords and all the
other important opinion makers and powers in the slums. Nevertheless, because it was so
countercultural I faced a lot of problems.
Having said that, now women have at this point in time after 26 years, they have taken charge
of what goes on in these communities and the momentum has been built to such a wonderful
extent that they've cleaned up their slum. This is something that would have never happened
had we not created a democracy in the slums. Never. I mean the slums, there are government
sweepers, but who’s to hold them to hold them accountable? You don't want to do that, they
sign their attendance in the municipal offices and they go and work privately and they get two
salaries, one from the municipal office and one from private work.
>> Kiran Martin: So basically I used to in the beginning was [inaudible] take them with me to all
the government offices because I used to say they go they’re never going to have the
confidence to do this and they sort of shy away from the very idea. And by and by as I went
they wouldn’t even, they would always want to stand or sit on the ground because they were
unaccustomed to sitting on a chair. So those and the lifting of the veil was a huge issue, to talk
to an official that was very major issue, and their husbands permitting them to go was another
major issue, so there were so many obstacles. But we would take them always with us, and I
also introduced them to the local legislators of the area in a very respectful manner and tried to
have the local legislators build bridges with them so that they could work with the women.
And so as time went on the women got more and more confident. A little bit of success at the
start helps a lot. If there's even a one do well or one hand pump that they are successful in
installing of all of a sudden their confidence levels go up and they think oh, if I can do this, so
you just go bit by bit. But you know what I'm telling you has happened over a long time. So all
through the 90s there was a lot of excitement. As you can see here what a dirty pond over
there and then the women were very successful in working with the local counselor to be able
to get clean water. So women used to take water from the dirty pond to wash their clothes
because there wasn't any clean water at all. That's the toilet. So the whole idea that okay, you
want to get the government to spend all this money on public toilets.
Now we also knew how much budget the government has for public toilets for slums. We had
studied everything and I also told everybody in the slums look this is the amount of the money
that's available for this. But the thing is that they like spending it because they always get
something out of it, some kickback like constructing a large toilet complex. But they use highly
substandard material and then after that there's no one to really take responsibility for it. So
within a few months this is the condition of the toilet. And so the women said no, we are
requesting you to give us a toilet but we will maintain it ourselves. So they've hired somebody
to man the toilet and the persons who use it are paying money, a small amount of money, one
rupee or something like that to use it, and that's how they pay the salary of the cleaners and
the supervisors and they run the toilet and it's not ideal, but it's a far, far cleaner than what was
there before. They weren’t even using these toilets.
Some of course have individual ones, and the mid-90s we had this wonderful drive because by
then we had thousands of women in the different Asha communities who had been
transformed and who were leading this whole process on the front. So they legislated for
electric city meters and they were able to get those. And then when they got bolder and
bolder. After all these initiatives they decided to embark upon this whole land rights program
because the bulldozer, as you see in this picture, this is a picture that we took in 2006 where
the common [inaudible] were going to happen and then all of a sudden the whole slum was
bulldozed because they wanted that area for some urban renewal work. So they were very
clear-cut laws in place about these things but slum dwellers are always really, really scared
about the bulldozer and that's why the sense of temporariness prevents them greatly from
progressing in life.
So on their behalf’s and at their request and at their insistence we worked with the government
of Delhi to do a land rights program, and you can see the before and after, the picture says
everything. They gradually became lower middle-class citizens. They were granted land rights.
They got telephones, they got two wheelers, they got, as you can see carpets and the TVs and it
was such a remarkable transformation that the Delhi government decided that the slum
housing, it was time for the slum housing policy to be formulated because there wasn't any.
The policy was to basically relocate them, just take them away somewhere. That's it. But this
project was a tremendous success.
Now of course there were lots of elements that went into the project that ensured that it would
be a success, but then subsequently the policy it very clearly stated which slums would be
treated in this manner, which slums would be relocated to the benefit of the city and which
slums would be helped on an as is, where is basis. And by default they were legal occupiers of
the land because the actual owners did not make any claims for the past 30 or 35 years that
they had been there. So this legislation took place in the 90s subsequent to which there was so
much enthusiasm in the country about the whole idea of slum housing that that Ministry of
Urban Development approached me to ask whether we would be able to sit together and think
about a national slum policy. So they used Asha, the Asha prototype for that, and then that was
formulated around 1999. And it very, very clearly addresses the whole issue of land rights and
the whole issue of slum housing which is one of the cornerstones of slum development. It's
the, yes.
>>: So when you get a legal title for your land in the slum I'm guessing that this is a bigger land
area than before, then how do you address the problem of, because there’s always a flow of
new people coming in.
>> Kiran Martin: Yeah. So the policy stated very clearly that to address exactly this issue, the
policy stated that before 1990 if there was proof of residence then they would be able to take
advantage of this law, and if they came after 1990 they had no entitlements of any sort. So that
was a measure to dissuaded new people from coming into the city and claiming, staking a claim
to land. That is something that they did; and, at this point in time, it's really hard to find even
an inch of space in Delhi where you can actually start occupying land and create a slum. Gone
are those days.
>>: [inaudible] statistics show lots of people migrate into Delhi. So what about all these new
people that are going to come? And so what’s the best thinking there so far?
>> Kiran Martin: So basically what the recent terms are that they tend to migrate to smaller
towns, not so much the city of Delhi, they might migrate but there really find it hard their feet
in a slum at this point in time. I mean, if you want to buy a slum hut it’s purchasable because it
has value. I mean, if you move tomorrow that slum hut needs to be demolished then there are
entitlement entitlements in lieu of that, so it has value. And so a slum hut in South Delhi might
go for 40,000 or 50,000 rupees. A slum hut in some other remote part of Delhi might be a little
cheaper. And if it's bigger it would be a bit more expensive. So it has value, and so people are
coming from villages, if they have no cash there's no way. Or they might rent a slum hut for like
200 rupees or something like that, or 300 rupees. So they pay a little bit of money to find a
slum hut on rent. That's how they would manage. Or they would just go into the [inaudible]
like Noida and Gurgaon and areas like that where they might to try and find a place to stay. But
certainly Delhi is very hard at this point in time.
>>: What sort of proof were slum residents able to provide to ensure that they had been living
there?
>> Kiran Martin: They have two types of proof. One is the election card. So every resident has
an election card and it’s dated and everything with an address; the other one is nowadays not
used that commonly but probably you know in your time they had a ration card. It's like a food
subsidy card where you can go to a food subsidy store which a public ration store and you can
get rice and all the other grocery items that are highly subsidized rate because of your financial
condition. So those are the two pieces of evidence and they are very crucial if you need to
prove that you, yes.
>>: Are there like statistics around like the homeless population in Delhi that kind of have
increased [inaudible]?
>> Kiran Martin: So as of now the pavement dwellers number around 200,000. That is the
most recent figure I have. This does not include people living in night shelters. There is
something called night shelters and people live, these are government built shelters and you
can just for 10 rupees or 20 rupees you can just a hire a little sleeping space with a blanket and
people in large rows just sleep on the ground. So that doesn't include that number, but
200,000 roughly is the number of people living on the pavements of the city.
So this project, this is stopping in the kitchen of the woman, as you can see the transformation
is so remarkable that the United Nations invited us to apply for the Best Practices Project that
they have and this slum housing project was then declared as the Best Practice by the United
Nations; and then of course it acted as the prototype for a slum housing policy at the national
level which then helped 60,000 people just a few years later when the Commonwealth Games
demolition took place that we had this policy to fall back on. And then of course as a result of
that 60,000 people who would've otherwise got nothing were able to be relocated in another
part of the city.
The next strand of our work is financial inclusion, and this comes from the whole fact that slum
dwellers by and large in the whole country have been financially untouchables forever. They've
also been financially excluded from the banking services of our country. And of course you
know in rural areas you have NABARD and you have so many other agricultural and cooperative
banks. You have farmer’s cooperatives for animal husbandry, so many things, farmer’s loans,
you must have heard of the 50,000 grower loan that was sanctioned by [inaudible] to farmers
because of Congress Party wanted to become popular with the farmers living in rural India.
But there was no counterpart for the urban poor. And they were primarily dependent on loan
sharks, they were primarily dependent on just borrowing money from relatives or whoever, and
they just kept their money in their homes. They didn't have any place where they could keep it
safely; there was no concept of credit cards or anything like that. So then this is [inaudible] in
this picture, and then the long and short of it is that I invited him to Asha and he then invited
me because he was very moved by the transformation that he saw in the Asha communities at
every level but wanted to make the whole thing financially, he wanted to introduce financial
inclusion programs, so he requested ten very large public sector banks to work with Asha to
formulate a particular project for the urban poor which meant making them bankable, what
would be the kind of bank accounts that they would have, what would be the quantum of loan,
what would be the purposes of the loan, what would be the rates of interest for them, would
there be any rebates? There was all this discussion that went on and he gave them six months
to work with Asha to come up with a pilot.
And this is him launching the scheme in June of 2008 that same year. No, this is a later picture,
but he launched it in June of 2008 the same year. And then suddenly there was this huge
frenzy, and you can see how after the launch the different banks started setting up tables and
chairs in the difference on the areas and opening up bank accounts whereas in the past they
would have never even allowed a slum dweller to enter the bank let alone open up an account.
And then they started getting ATM cards and all these women with their veils over their faces
learning how to use ATM cards. It was very exciting, and then of course loans became
available. I won't go into the details because we've already have talked for quite a bit now, but
the loans were available for all sorts of different activities. Along with the whole, yes, were you
going to ask me a question?
>>: Yeah. I was wondering if like micro-finance, micro-insurance, those kinds of things have
also been tried? How’s been the success?
>> Kiran Martin: So this is micro-finance, the only difference is that this is basically microfinance being provided by the public sector banks of the country. The quantity of loan that is,
quantum of loan that is available is much higher than any other nonprofit micro-finance
institution. Usually their quantums will range from 5,000 to 50,000. If you look at even the
Grameen bank model it's a small amount of loan. And in Delhi such small loans don’t do much
because you need a fairly sizable sum of money in order to, for economic activity to make sense
in the city of Delhi. So this scheme is a micro-finance scheme, but every individual has a direct
relationship with the bank. If they can prove to the bank that they’re credit-worthy then their
own relationship with the bank kicks in and then Asha is not required anymore which is exactly
what we want, right? We want it to be a sustainable relationship with banks which is
independent of any NGO so they can become financially inclusive.
>>: But like things like certified groups that are group lending, those kind of practices.
>> Kiran Martin: You see that was something that a lot of NGOs would do in the past, but here
we are trying to get away from that because we are saying here that when you're having
[inaudible] you're actually saying that you can't trust individual slum dwellers.
>>: But you don't have collateral for the bank to give them a loan?
>> Kiran Martin: Yeah. It depends. Like, for example, if this woman wants a loan for house
building she's got property papers so she can keep them at the bank. If someone buys a
motorcycle they can deposit the papers of the vehicle with the bank. So yes, it's not that every
single situation has a very clear collateral, but because the organization has worked with slum
dwellers to create a situation where they have been primed to the extent that they are
dependable and reliable, and also there's a lot of other things that go into it. I'm just skimming
the surface, like there's training on financial accountability and financial discipline and all those
things, there's a lot of training that goes on that the bank officials themselves come and do
because they're mandated to do it.
There is a differential rate of interest scheme also which gives you only four percent, at four
percent interest 15,000, the banks are willing to literally give it as a free gift so that they can
show in their books that they're being able to do the DRI loans. And here we are constantly
saying no, no we don't want any free gifts because our primary focus is on ensuring that every
single human being acts as a good citizen and we are building citizenship here. We are building
democracy here. So no free gifts. And the repayment rate has been 99 percent. It's
remarkable. So after all this happened then banks started rolling it out. There's so many other
NGOs in Delhi, so many places where they felt that this is wonderful. Those who are working in
the slums they can go directly, NGOs can go on their own, but they have to be able to
demonstrate that they are trustworthy.
>>: Sorry. You're running out of time.
>> Kiran Martin: Yes. That's why I'm saying.
>>: Let's [inaudible]. I think we'll have opportunity after the talk to ask questions too.
>> Kiran Martin: So basically the education program is what I want to touch upon. This is
exactly the way I saw children when I entered in 1988. This is a child right inside the garbage,
and you can see he’s got a little plastic bag in his right hand what he's trying to do is rummaging
for bits of metal and plastic in this garbage. And I used to see these kind of children every day
all the time. And if they weren’t doing this then they were polishing shoes or they were just
selling newspapers at traffic lights or working in roadside stores cleaning utensils. You must
have seen all this when you are in big cities in India. It's a very common sight.
And so without going into all the details it was a community that decided we've had enough of
this. We are going to now start sending our children to school. Now it was all because of the
empowerment processes that had already gathered such a lot of momentum that the
community itself came to the decision that they didn't want any more of this child labor and
they wanted to send their kids to school, and so all these women and the men and various
volunteers in the community started approaching all the state schools in the area forming
pressure groups and working with the school authorities to get these kids admitted to school.
And then Asha of course then established computer labs and English teaching and so on to
complement and supplement the education that was already being provided by the state
schools which had a lot of gaps it was necessary to fill those gaps in order for the children to be
able to express their best potential to the finest degree and prepare them for the national level
examination.
So literally thousands of children, if we had a school of [inaudible] how many could we have
get? Just a few hundred. But here we were using the state system which was quite good and
you know [inaudible] all these [inaudible] number one and [inaudible] number two and all
these schools. They're very good. I mean some of them may not be as good as others, but on
the whole there is an excellent system there. And so we felt it was important for us to be able
to build those bridges. And these kids there was so much enthusiasm in the communities
because the kids were going to school. It was remarkable. And going up to secondary school
and this research [inaudible] blessings meant that all of a sudden these banks were desperate
to give out loans and were literally setting targets and saying can we have like 1000 loans by
December? Can we have 5000 loans by March or whatever? There was no difficulty with
getting bank loans essentially. The difficulty just vanished because of the way in which it all
turned out.
So we started encouraging our slum children to think about the whole possibility of university
which again opened up. So we sent the first cohort of slum children, and we've done quite a lot
of research on this, and we've done research, governments have also been able to feed in
information, various other organizations have been able to feed in information. If we are
talking about slums in India this is the very first such program where we been able to send 1100
kids from slum communities into [inaudible] education at a university such as Delhi University.
And really it is a tribute to the triumph of the human spirit I think. Of course it has meant that
we've done a lot to make it happen from counseling the parents to encouraging the children
with the resources, giving them all the resources they could possibly need to do well, so it's
been a very long and arduous journaling actually getting into university but it's just been
wonderful.
And again we felt okay, scaling up is important. Here we go again, scaling up. So we called the
Education Minister of India to an event so that he could understand what was going on and you
see him right here giving out scholarships to these wonderful kids while their parents looked on
and it was amazing. The parents, the fathers of these daughters had tears in their eyes. They
couldn't believe that oh my goodness, my daughter is receiving a scholarship from the
Education Minister of India. She's a slum child and today she's going to study at a University. I
mean it's too emotional sometimes for a parent to even imagine that their children could even
dare to even become like this.
So there was wonderful revolution and we had so many kids going to university and the whole
news spread like wildfire in the city that these kids were going in and started getting requests
from everyone. They wanted to come and see what's going on. So here you see that all the
embassies and high commissions, big corporates in Delhi started joining hands, big Australian
companies, banks, British companies, the American ambassador who's now of course gone, but
Nancy [inaudible] she was there; so all of those people got so excited about this initiative that
they just wanted to do their very best for these kids. So they started opening their doors. The
person you see here is the British high commissioner to India, Sir James Bevan under his own
leadership these kids are learning skills in the workplace. Similarly you see over there>>: The nature of things is people getting excited and things happen for a short time but then
goes out of tension it fades away. So I’m curious in terms of how is it continuing on, the
momentum, after the big splashes go away.
>> Kiran Martin: I think, well so far we haven't experienced it because we launched this in 2008
and at that time we hardly had a very tiny group go. And year on year the excitement levels
have gone on building. So basically the various stakeholders in the city, because it’s a relatively
new program, have taken great notice of it. But obviously I do understand that the excitement
and the enthusiasm has to continue to stay maintained and that will stem from the leadership,
that will stem from the way in which you can empower others, that will stem from how you can
decentralize, that will stem from>>: That's what I was thinking eventually it’s the community and the empowerment that they
themselves feel because the external things will be>> Kiran Martin: They will all go away.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Kiran Martin: Yeah. So there are two things here which is you made a very important and
very exciting point actually. We launched this thing called the Asha Ambassadors Program
where students who are bright, who are brilliant, who are very highly motivated, who are
committed to their communities, who really want to give back, of course almost all of them do,
but we choose based on certain criteria and then they take on the responsibility of this whole
program. And so we we’ve already been training them. Like this here we had a host of
admissions and most of the work was done by the volunteer students themselves.
The other thing that, I've forgotten what it was, something else that was in my mind that will
probably come back. It was something to do with sustainability but I'll come back to it when I
remember.
And then of course the next step is employment. So we've got this wonderful relationship with
a whole lot of different companies; and the whole idea is that we don't go to the companies
such as Pepsi or such as any other one or such as even yours and say that we want your money.
What we would say is we want a relationship. And we see that relationship as having many
different elements to it. So somebody who interned at Pepsi and is now good enough and
Pepsi wants to hire them well, that's wonderful. Now what happens is that all the other
companies get highly motivated and they also begin to look for students whom they wish to
hire. And then company employs start listing Asha. There’s a culture of philanthropy that
becomes even stronger in the company. There's a sense of pride in the company employees
that they've actually spend individual time with students helping them with their resumes,
helping them with their CVs, helping them, mentor them, helping them to get jobs. So it’s just
brings such a wonderful element into the company culture that there is a high level of
excitement in the company environment also.
So what I'm saying to the companies in India is also that let this be a two-way process. And in
the beginning I didn't even ask them for any money. And they themselves came up, like
Macquarie Bank said we have a foundation, did you know that? I said no, I wasn't aware. They
said well, since we know you so well and since we’ve worked together so well we want you to
apply to our foundation. Just giving an example of how the two-way process works wonders in
terms of being able to add so much value both to people living in the community as well to the
company.
And I've seen the same thing happen with the government, that two-way process because it's
very easy, government hates the [inaudible] approach and this is what I've done and so you
ought to be doing this as your policy. But when they work so closely with you, and when
they've done things with you, and when they are active participants in the success then they
really get very excited, and then they want to talk to you more about how a policy can be
formulated because they worked very closely.
Then I'm just quickly going to talk about the educative approaches. So the idea is to replicate in
many different ways through diffusion. So call this replication by diffusion where I lecture
regularly at various universities in the United States. So that's of course, Australia, University of
Melbourne, that's [inaudible] public health and I've constantly lecturing at Columbia and lots of
different places. And we also have lots of classes that these schools of public health and other
schools like to have Asha as part of their curriculum and they have the same students on
practicum. There is quite a strong emphasis on the educative approaches so that this model
can be widely available for people all over the world.
That's just a quick glimpse of the relationships with the United States and that have been there
for the past many years. As you can see, Jim McDermott and I have been friends for a long
time, but somehow I never got to Seattle before this, and I really had a wonderful week out
here that I shall never, never forget thanks to KK and [inaudible] who introduced me to such
fine, fine people as Anoop and so many others here. And then of course this is Congressman
Mike Thompson [inaudible] Napa Valley. So we've had fundraisers in Washington DC, Dale
Gebhardt, Nancy Pelosi did a fundraiser for us in a restaurant called Bombay Palace I think it's
called. Have you heard of Bombay Palace?
>>: Right next to the White House.
>> Kiran Martin: Is it near the White House? I don't even remember. It was in 2002 and there
was all these different congressmen whom the invited and they raised 100,000 dollars; I still
remember that. So Asha USA is a separately registered entity with a 501 C3 status, and this is
Professor David Hampton. He is a professor, the dean of Howard Divinity School. And he and
his wife together, on a completely voluntary basis along with a lot of other trustees, run Asha
USA out of the Howard campus.
Just to give you a quick glimpse of the international interest in the Asha model as well as a
national interest, so obviously when parties keep switching as you know and it's very important
for us to be seen as neutral. It's also very important for us to have world's tallest leaders come
into slums because he can sit at a distance and go on reading all the documents til you go blue
in the face, but it doesn't really happen unless you actually walk into a slum, touch and feel it,
and sense it and be able to understand what transformation and change is all about. And that's
my aim and goal as part of the whole replication by diffusion strategy to constantly expose
people to slum transformation. That's John Key. He's the Prime Minister of New Zealand and
he came and also had a wonderful, wonderful time at Asha and then he took back the message.
That’s Julia Gillard; she was the Australian Prime Minister. She just has been replaced by Tony
Abbott in the past eight months or so, and actually she was so excited about this model that
she invited me to Australia; and they have huge problems with the Aboriginal communities over
there, and she was very interested in the principles and the strategies that Asha uses because
they also felt that they were putting in a lot of Australian dollars into the problem and they
were not really seeing major solutions.
And today is the second of October so I’m going to end my talk because it talks about, I mean
we have this wonderful birthday of Mahatma Gandhi that we are celebrating today, I was
greatly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi even growing up and I continue too to this day. And we
have a whole lot of different values that underpin all this work that you've heard about and
nonviolence is one of the very important values and that certainly comes from the message of
Gandhi.
So in my approach I would say that whether it be a ruthless slumlord, whether it be a very
apathetic bureaucrat, whether they build a lot of complex machinery around the systems and
structures, whether it be well-to-do neighbors who are unsympathetic towards slum dwellers,
whether it be people from the slums themselves who are part of a futile structure and who are
not interested in change, there could be so many stakeholders and so many other groups and
individuals whose cooperation and support is important to enlist if one wants slum
development. If one wants to offer [inaudible] if one wants to offer a small service, you don't
need anyone's help maybe.
But if you really want to bring about radical transformation then the only way is to work with all
these people. And I’ve found peacemaking and nonviolence to be an absolutely wonderful
approach. It has never failed me. Even the most difficult of people I've been able to win over. I
find that it is a very highly effective method of building bridges and being able to create and
foster goodwill to create an environment of inspiration and motivation, an environment of
great enthusiasm where nobody is an enemy. I have got rid of the word enemy. I call them
opponents. I don't call them enemies because they have a different viewpoint and it's
important to understand where they're coming from, and I've also noticed that when your
opponent understands you better then he or she is listening to build bridges and move from
their original position.
>>: So how are you willing, how are you able to work with slumlords? I would think they would
be very much against empowerment.
>> Kiran Martin: Yeah. So again, I always try to understand what makes a slumlord who he is,
what is his history, with what lens is he viewing the slum, why is he behaving the way he's
behaving? And so I call a separation of the antagonism from the antagonist. And I say that I
don't have any problem with the slumlord per se. I have a problem with his deeds. And
therefore I would sit down with a slumlord and I would try to reason with the slumlord and so
that he doesn't feel threatened, he doesn't feel as though all his power is going to be snatched
away from him in an instant. And the idea is to befriend him and to include him in the
development process rather than marginalize him.
So I found that the slumlords extremely receptive. In fact, I have seen that no one has ever said
a single kind word to a slumlord. They've always been used and feared but they've never been
spoken to with compassion, they've never been spoken to with acceptance, they've never been
spoken to in a nonjudgmental way. And it's a very powerful tool to be able to speak to
somebody in a nonjudgmental way so that they can then open up and experience the comfort
of being able to create where there's a space that's created between you and the person and
the person then can say what they feel without fear.
So there have been lots of different strategies and so I'm not going to go into them. But this is
just to say again, I'm here at Microsoft and I don't, of course we all need resources to do our
work and the aim of Asha is to reach out to hundreds of thousands of kids and be able to create
a critical mass and produce a higher education movement; and Delhi being the capital of India
we think there are many great opportunities under the current leadership to be able to do a lot
with what we are doing.
But at the same time we wish to give back to the Microsoft volunteers. So if you do wish to
come back to Asha there are opportunities to for you to teach English as you can see here.
There are opportunities for you to work in the computer labs or do building work, get your
hands dirty. There are so many things you can do. And even if you don't wish to volunteer you
could just come and visit. You could just come for a day or half a day and just to see what's
going on and maybe it will change your perspective. I can make you the offer of bringing your
families to interact and meet with these wonderful people and hear the stories first-hand. And
therefore I very much see this as a two-way relationship, and the doors of Asha and the doors
of Delhi will always be open.
Now this is just quickly talking about the Matching Program. I know a lot of you will be able to
explain it even better, but it's being registered on the Microsoft>>: Remember what I said in the beginning would suffice for us Microsoft teams. They know
how to go Give Now and locate Asha and give. Let's thank Karen so much.
>> Kiran Martin: Thank you. Thank you very much.
>>: Now we have[inaudible] Batal and his father was the Appointment Secretary for Mahatma
Gandhi and he was to say a few words to us, and so we should end in the next five minutes. So
please, if you hold on a minute, we can take it from there.
>>: It's tough to follow the act of Kiran, at least I'm inspired just as much by her as Mahatma
Gandhi, and it's really Gandhi’s work in action that I've noticed. So I will talk very briefly about
a couple things. First, how I got in touch with Mahatma Gandhi’s work and all that.
My father when he was 17 grew up in a small town in [inaudible] called Padron. He was, it was
a new wave in teens Gandhi had come and established [inaudible] in 1915. He was just
probably six years old then and the next 10 years he was growing up in the enthusiasm to
change the society and help Indian and all that. And suddenly his father must have asked him if
he was met father, another friend and he is a daughter, and then agreed to get the two
married. And so he was facing a dilemma of a very, very major level. So he ultimately said no,
and grandfather being what he was he said then you realize the consequences. He says if you
don't marry you can't live here. I'll disown you. You’ll not have a penny in your pocket. Father
was adamant. So he walked from his ancestral home and one thing led to another and an uncle
then advised him to go join this [inaudible] and that was in 1926-27.
And there of course Bapu had just invited all young people to come and join and work towards,
learn about nonviolence, become his satyagraha, his train just like Martin Luther King had done
here during civil rights movement and come and live with him. And so he did, and there he was
given the responsibility of fetching water from [inaudible] for the whole camp. So he'll get up
at 3:30 in the morning, get ready, four o'clock he would start with a couple buckets on a staff,
go down all the way to [inaudible] which was, didn't have much water in those years. He would
pick up, walk up, dump the buckets in the tank and go back again for eight hours straight. Then
he would clean up and get ready, get some rest, get some lunch and then he would go to a
library of [inaudible] who lived at the Ashram too and read and this was noticed by [inaudible]
and so he brought this young man under his wings and made him his personal assistant. And he
was known in the Ashramites as [inaudible]. Balu was his name. And so that's how he came to
be [inaudible] secretary and whenever [inaudible] was meeting with Bapu then he would sit
outside with an appointment secretary, and let me just show you a couple slides.
This will give you a visibility into Gandhi’s, how you related to the lowest level individual. This is
a letter to my father. It says [inaudible] etc., he received your letter. Why did you allow
yourself to get sick? I mean he is in jail, Bapu is in jail, my father had written some letter and
sent him some newsletters. So he says why did you allow yourself to get sick? Now you must
be better. Don't send the newsletter in the mail. My father must have felt as a 20-year-old
very clever that he's getting news in personal letter to Bapu so he can and know what's going
on.
But on the other hand Bapu reprimanded him saying don't send it. What would I do with all
this news sitting in jail? Then he says that we are satyagrahas. We insist on truth. And we
don't give up our commitment to it. So even if we know, it is easy to violate the rule, we don't
do that. I accepted the prison’s rules otherwise Britain can rather run, the British government
could not run the prisons. I willing accepted that. So I would live by those rules. So don't send
it. And if you're not familiar with the rule, go meet somebody else and get that. And that's very
succinct.
Here is my favorite letter after that. This is to [inaudible]. It again shows the character of
Gandhi as a leader. It says [inaudible] your letter I kept for the last. It's 8:30 night and some of
the, [inaudible], one of the inner circle people is also sitting here counting my threads of cotton
that he had spun that day and so on and then he says it must be Bapu is still in the prison and
[inaudible] was in the prison but had just been released. So he says your tears at the time of
departure became contagious. So he must've gotten some red eyes too. And he says how can I
repay your beautiful service all this time? And so he says we'll name, and I'm just getting the
fragrance of your service every step I walk. And then he says a certain day we'll call it a day of
service in your honor.
I mean this is the character of a true leader who so tenderly and lovingly conveys his
appreciation to his subordinates and people who work with him. I felt that that is so important.
We are so lucky to have this kind of legacy in our family. And here is another benefit of being
an appointment secretary. This is a card that, a Christmas card Rabinanath Tagore himself
sketched and sent to Mahatma Gandhi, to Mahatmaji, my namaskar, Founders Day, 22
December, 1929. And then it says my salutation is to him who knows me imperfect and loves
me. What a beautiful thing. And Bapu who never kept anything, total non-possession. So you
must have responded and discarded and my father got it and it has been in the family. And I'm
going to send an exact replica of it to Shanti Nacathan[phontic] because it should belong there
actually. It's a national treasure.
So anyway, and this shows where the dialogue between two great personalities too,
Rabinanathji and Mahatmaji they actually had loggerheads where Rabinanath did not want
Mahatma Gandhi to bring religion into the public life. He was against that, and he believed in
one world not a nation. He was against nation-hoods and so on. But they both respected each
other and had a public dialogue. There’s a wonderful book of their letters and dialogs that I
have. He was a great man.
So let me conclude with a few thoughts. I was asked once to give a lecture on Gandhi
[inaudible] just like this right after 9-11. And I asked myself the question, how can I talk about
nonviolence in the shadow of the World Trade Center being bombed? And same issue today is
ISIS. And how can we think about nonviolence in this kind of thing? But then again, we have to
think because these are the times where nonviolence really shows the way.
In the speech I had given I'll share some few thoughts as I closed. Can nonviolence prevent
future events like World Trade Center or can it dissuade bin Laden? Probably not. But that
doesn't mean the opposite that we should go after violence violently. Violence begets violence.
That we know.
So what was Gandhi's core message? He says truth is the foundation, truth is the goal,
nonviolence is the means. Willingness to take on suffering is the hidden doorway to all paths,
an indomitable will, the sole force invoking the guarding the heart of an evil doer is what drives
you. So that's what we should do. And I extracted these principles from him, his writings, that
my appeal is refrained from demonizing the enemy on both sides. Just as Kiran said separate
the doer from the deed so that evil deed doesn't mean the doer is evil, to the public ask for a
sustained effort to eradicate terrorism but not revenge, to Islamic voice of moderation speak
out and denounce efforts to turn every political issue into a jihad, and to ourselves develop
strength to move from violence to nonviolence except suffering is a legitimate way and to our
children have the faith in nonviolence. Separate the deed from the doer because violence only
begets violence and we can see proof of it throughout.
There is a quote from Theodore Rosex[phonetic] has quoted, people try nonviolence for a week
and when it doesn't work they go back to violence which hasn't work for centuries. So on that
I’ll end. I thank Kiranji for coming into my life. I accidentally met her and I saw her work and
here I have found somebody who has actually put all these principles, compassion with the love
of Christ, Gandhi’s nonviolence, Martin Luther King’s social justice and Mandela’s forgiveness,
all this she has rolled into one and shown how to change half a million lives. And I'm asking the
question now had we scale it up to 5 million in five years? Or 100 million in 10? So that's the
challenge. I've taken on, and thank you for coming into my life.
>>: Thank you. I think it's been a pretty unusual talk for our community, but I hope many of you
have found it inspiring. So thank you so much.