Mahila Milan-Byculla, India

We, the women and men of Mahila Milan-Byculla have to make our homes on the pavement of Bombay out of necessity, not out of choice. The city wants our labour. But it wants it as cheaply as possible. So we make our homes where we can, to be near our work, to earn enough to feed ourselves and raise our kids.

Now, the middle and upper classes say Why can`t you be like everyone else and go live in a proper house on the outskirts of the city and commute in to your work like everyone else? With all due respect, and many of you mean well, you don`t know what you`re talking about!

If we go to live out there you`ll have to pay us a lot more so we can: (i) afford our new homes, and (ii) afford the commute. We don`t think you`re really prepared to do this, especially when there are hundreds, no thousands of men and women only too willing to jump in and offer their services for less pay.

You see, that`s the reality of life in big cities in places like India. We aren`t living on the pavement because we want to. Good lord! We want to live in pucca homes of our own like all of you! But you`re not prepared to pay the cost in terms of higher wages and less servants.

We in Mahila Milan have spent the last ten years learning to work together, to overcome our fears and our feelings of helplessness, to do something to change this situation. We`ve been helped by our menfolk, and especially by two other groups, SPARC and The National Slum Dwellers Federation. Everything we`ve been able to do is thanks to them. They`ve taught us, led us, argued with us, stood alongside us, and been our friends. We want to put that on the record.

But we know we`ve done a lot of it ourselves. We`ve learnt that it doesn`t matter how you dress, where you live. It`s what is inside you that counts. We`ve been very lucky. We`ve been helped to learn to change our minds, to overcome the fear within, to learn to sit across the table from the politician or the policeman or the ration officer and face them as equals.

We`ve learnt that formal literacy is no bar. That differences of religion or race or ethnicity or gender need not get in the way of coming together to solve common problems. But above all, we`ve learnt that poor people really can take charge of their own lives and change them. They can`t do it alone. They need help. But they can do a lot more than some of you give us credit for. And that`s what we try to tell others, in India and in other parts of the South.