The 1999  Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service

BIOGRAPHY of Tasneem Ahmed Siddiqui

Tasneem Ahmad Siddiqui was born in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, India on 12 October 1939 to a middle class family that lived comfortably under the British Raj. His father, Zamir Ahmad, was one of the first in his family to be matriculated and had a good position in government service. He worked in the Irrigation Department of India, being posted to several different places over a period of sixteen or seventeen years. His mother, Khurshid Zamani Begum came from an affluent family of Meerut. She did not attend school but could read in Urdu and Arabic, recite poetry, and manage the family's large household. Siddiqui was third to the eldest, out of a brood of four brothers and three sisters. The family had a comfortable life and did not have to worry about financial difficulties. Even the grandparents on both sides were "grand figures." All was well until the politics of Hindu-Muslim communalism shattered the family's peaceful life shortly after World War II.

Indian nationalism had surged in the early twentieth century under the leadership of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, both prominent figures of the Indian National Congress. Britain was now prepared to recognize an independent India. The Muslim League led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah also promoted independence, but it sought not one state but two. In his vision, Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations and could not co-exist.

Britain acceded to Jinnah's plan. During its turbulent execution, known as the Partition of India, deep-seated religious tensions welled to the surface. Stirred to a frenzy by opportunistic politicians, multitudes of Hindus and Muslims rushed to find their proper places on one side of the border or the other. Thousands of people died in communal riots. The nation of Pakistan became a reality with its grant of independence from Britain on August 14, 1947. India won its independence the next day.

For millions of Muslims in India there was no choice but to flee. Tasneem had spent the first seven years of his life living in mixed communities of Hindus and Muslims in Meerut and the small towns of Uttar Pradesh where his father was posted. Prior to Partition, he says that in such towns and rural areas inter-religious relationships were good. Within the family there were discussions about the idea of Pakistan but the family was not active in politics except for one maternal grandfather, who attended public meetings regularly. Generally, it did not favor a dismembered India since it was already secure. But when Pakistan became a reality, the main concern was whether to migrate or not. The Siddiqui clan decided to leave when Hindu gangs began attacking Muslim communities and killed some members of their family. Through family connections they managed to get to Delhi and, from there, following a harrowing taxi ride to the airport at 3:00am (to avoid marauding Hindu and Sikh gangs), they flew on to Lahore in Pakistan-sitting atop piles of luggage in a crowded airplane from which the seats had been removed. Other family members found their way to Pakistan by ship, train, and automobile.

As a newly independent state, Pakistan inherited some of the poorest and least developed regions of British India. In West Pakistan, Sindh Province was one such area, while the Northwest Frontier Province and Balochistan were populated by tribal groups still ruled by feudal chiefs. West Pakistan was separated from East Pakistan, formerly East Bengal, by one thousand miles. With a population of 40 million, East Pakistan hosted one of the subcontinent's poorest peasantries.
In Pakistan, the Siddiqui family first rented a house in Muzang, Lahore and then shifted to the walled city and finally to Sukkur in Sindh Province. Uncertain conditions and the rush of immigrants made it difficult to find a suitable house. They moved several times before finally settling down. Meanwhile, Siddiqui's father and grandfather went into the cloth business and lost their money. Finally, his father's good education landed him the lowly job of cashier in a bank; he accepted it for the sake of the family's survival.

Siddiqui received his earliest education not from a school but from his mother. It was a tradition in Urdu-speaking families for mothers to teach their children how to read the Qur'an. For some middle class families tutors were hired. The children did regular classes in the morning while the afternoon was spent learning the Qur'an. Emphasis was placed on fluency in reading the Qur'an since, on occasions, it was read in public places. As for formal education, Siddiqui had just begun elementary school in India when Partition turned his life topsy-turvy. Once resettled in Sukkur, Pakistan, he attended Islamia schools. These private schools had been founded by public-spirited muhajirs (migrants) through an organization called the Muslim Educational Society using school buildings left behind by departing Hindus. There were separate schools for boys and girls and the fees were low-an important fact since one of Siddiqui's brothers had to leave school because the family could no longer afford it. Siddiqui attended Islamia Primary School Sukkur (1949-1952) and Islamia High School Wallace Gunj (1952-1958) in turn. Siddiqui remembers Old Sukkur, his primary school, for its committed teachers, calling them "philanthropic" because their approach was to help and talk to the students. At Islamia High School, however, the religion teachers were very stern and punished students for small mistakes. Some mathematics and English teachers were strict as well and were disliked for giving a lot of homework. The atmosphere was generally adversarial, he recalls. Siddiqui confesses to being a naughty student and not very bright. But he was good in certain subjects like English. Out of class, he and his friends played field hockey and cricket despite the absence of proper playing fields.

During high school Siddiqui's interests developed in the direction of history and politics. He loved to read newspapers in the public library and became engaged in political questions. He began writing "letters to the editor" to newspapers in Karachi, in both Urdu and English. Among the personalities he wrote about were the leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami (Islamic Party) and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Although he was neither a reformist nor a radical idealist, Siddiqui became eager for engagement. Through his older brother, who was a Jamaat-e-Islami leader, Siddiqui was drawn into the conservative stance of the Jamaat which was agitating for an Islamic constitution. He joined the student wing, the Islami Jamiat-e-Tulba. Its ideology was conservative, paying attention to ritualistic Islam, keeping an account of prayers, having a diary, going to weekly meetings, and avoiding "bad things" like cinemas. Siddiqui soon drifted away from the group, however. He found its leaders duplicitous and hypocritical. Moreover, for him, ritualism was not enough. He had concluded that, to be a good Muslim, one had to be a good person first.

At Islamia College in Sukkur between 1958 and 1962 Siddiqui majored in political science and also studied economics, history, and English. In his second year, he joined student politics and became the winning candidate for general secretary of the Students Union. It was the task of the Union: (1) to highlight the problems of the students; (2) to talk to the government and college administration about student issues; (3) to organize cultural activities; and (4) to arrange talks by eminent scholars and other similar events. At the Union, Siddiqui became an effective and popular leader. After a gap of one year, he was elected vice president as well. His emergence as a student leader paralleled the early years of military dictatorship in Pakistan under General Ayub Khan, who seized power through a coup d'etat in 1958. Military rule was at first welcomed in the country; the military had established itself as an honest and efficient institution. Although this image rapidly tarnished, Ayub Khan was able to stay in power until 1969, ruling by decree but legitimizing himself under a new constitution that he promulgated in 1962. Among students, anti-dictatorship feelings were strong.

A group of displaced students from Karachi who had been shifted involuntarily to Sukkur because of their opposition to the government's education policies became the catalyst for Siddiqui's activism. As Siddiqui and the Students Union helped these activists wage a hunger strike, they were drawn into larger issues such as civil rights and Pakistan's pro-Western foreign policy. (Pakistan was a member of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, SEATO, and the Central Treaty Organization, CENTO.) Other strikes followed when Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of Congo, was murdered in 1961 and when Muslims were killed in Jabalpur (India).

In Sukkur, Siddiqui led the students to challenge national educational policies that stifled the independence of universities and the right to stage rallies and publish freely. Closely aligned to these issues was the fight to strengthen trade unions and their bargaining rights, in which students became the active allies of trade union leaders. Siddiqui threw himself into these issues and led a busy life attending meetings, strategizing, making speeches at public rallies. Because he was supporting himself, remarkably, Siddiqui also held several jobs during this period. He worked as a part-time stenotypist, gave lessons, and held a post at an insurance company. All of this prevented him from attending his courses regularly. But he had the knack of cramming information two or three months before the examinations and reading the textbooks at the end of the course. The easy going style of the teachers, and their generous grading system, made it easy for him to pass the courses.

As a college student, Siddiqui enjoyed making friends with Islamia College's young faculty members, who welcomed his views and company. He also indulged his love for writing articles and for attending poetry readings and music soirees. From a distance, he admired the young American president John F. Kennedy.

Upon graduation, Siddiqui embarked on a masters degree in political science at Sindh University, Hyderabad. Under a new educational ruling, his B.A. Honors degree was counted as graduate work, allowing him to finish the master's in one year. He concentrated on political thought and studied the ideas of the social contract-theorists like Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes. Life in Hyderabad was difficult. It was his first time away from home and he had extra expenses for lodgings, transportation, and food. Despite a small scholarship (for having graduated with high honors), to get by he had to borrow money, sell his books, and ask for credit at the hostel mess.

A year later, degree in hand, Siddiqui was offered a college teaching job in Nawabshah, north of Hyderabad. But he deferred this opportunity in order to prepare for the upcoming competitive examinations to enter Pakistan's elite civil service; due to his age, this was the last round of examinations for which he qualified; he was already twenty-five. Siddiqui started a second masters degree in English Literature during the one-year wait for the results. The good news finally arrived and he joined the civil service in November 1965. (He finished the masters degree in 1968.)

Siddiqui now entered the Civil Service Academy in Lahore for an obligatory training course. For him, the Academy was high life; many of his batchmates came from Pakistan's prestigious schools and well-to-do feudal families. Considering himself to be of the lower-middle class, he felt inferior to most of them and awkward wearing formal suits, making formal speeches, and going horseback riding. In fact, the selection process had been designed to account for the country's class structure. The thirty neophyte officials could be classified according to family background: ten from the rich; ten from the middle class; and another ten from the lower-middle class.

Nevertheless, the Civil Service Academy was an elite school that maintained the British tradition and the status quo-at least this is how Siddiqui himself came to view it in hindsight. While the Academy maintained strict discipline and hired good teachers, it did not keep pace with changing conditions. Dubbed as a "finishing school" for people who would hold important positions in the bureaucracy, it taught irrelevant subjects and avoided training "the boys" to become agents of change. There was no sociology or good economics, for example. In fact, training was geared toward collecting taxes and maintaining law and order (with subjects such as criminal justice). On the positive side, there were field trips and "exposure" assignments all over the country, including East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), this because West Pakistani officials were required to serve in East Pakistan and vice versa.

For his "exposure," Siddiqui was assigned to Comilla in East Pakistan where for several weeks he worked under the tutelage of Akhtar Hameed Khan, a former member of the esteemed Indian Civil Service (ICS). As director of the Comilla Academy for Rural Development, Khan was engaged in an innovative pilot project to introduce disciplined cooperative societies to villages around Comilla in an effort to discover how best to relieve crushing rural poverty by assisting villagers to become, themselves, the agents of their own improvement. All around Comilla villagers were forming cooperative societies and joining together to save money, improve village infrastructure, introduce new farming technologies, and share useful knowledge in weekly meetings. In activities such as these, Khan was patiently and scientifically planting the seeds of rural development in East Pakistan. Siddiqui observed all of this without wholly understanding its significance. This he would learn later.

After his stint at the Academy, Siddiqui's first posting was as assistant commissioner in "undertraining" in Nawabshah, Sindh. In this capacity, he accompanied the deputy commissioner as he conducted the business of the district. He learned how to conduct cases in the courts and, for one year, took charge of different departments on a monthly basis. In addition he attended two field trainings. One was on surveying and land records in Balochistan. In the other, he was attached to an army battalion, an experience he did not enjoy. From his student days, Siddiqui had been anti-martial law. He was disturbed by the fact that, under General Ayub Khan, military officers were being inducted into the civil service and making a mockery of the merit system.

Siddiqui's first regular post was as assistant commissioner in Quetta, Balochistan Province, where he served for a year and a half. It was here that he first understood how the power structure functioned. His earlier assumption that Pakistan's officials were generally upright and honest changed. He now began to see how bureaucrats sought and controlled power in alliance with the military. This power-seeking was the source not only of corruption but of the people's resentment, especially in East Pakistan. The creation of Pakistan, with its unequal east and west wings, was a balancing act for the country's leaders from the outset. Measured by population and foreign-exchange-earning capacity, East Pakistan was the greater of the two. Yet power lay in the hands of West Pakistanis who made every effort to hold on to their power. In Siddiqui's view, this state of affairs led to the dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971.

The precursor to the civil war that saw the birth of Bangladesh was the short but turbulent regime of General Yahya Khan (1969-1971), the successor of Ayub Khan. Yahya Khan declared martial law and purged the civil bureaucracy, creating a rift between military and civilian leaders. But he wanted a return to parliamentary democracy and also accepted parity between West and East Pakistan in the soon-to-be-formed national assembly. Under the Legal Framework Order issued on March 30, 1970, the assembly of three hundred members was to be elected directly by the people, with 162 to be chosen by the East Pakistanis and 138 by West Pakistanis. After some delay caused by a horrendous cyclone in East Pakistan, the elections were held in December 1970. They resulted in the victory of two leaders with opposing goals: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the West, promising Islamic socialism, and Mujibur Rahman in the East, seeking provincial autonomy.

In the ensuing stand-off, General Khan launched Operation Searchlight against Mujibur Rahman's Awami League. Rahman was arrested but his close associates fled to India and established a government-in-exile. After East Pakistan declared independence in March 1971, the Pakistani army went on a rampage, killing hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. Millions fled to India. When the Indian Government intervened and defeated the West Pakistani Army in December 1971, Bangladesh was born.

Siddiqui witnessed this entire process from within East Pakistan. In 1969, he was posted to Gopalganj, Faridpur District. Gopalganj was a poor community with a population of about a million people. A hundred miles from Dhaka, it was reachable only by launch since there was no road connecting Gopalganj to the district capital at Faridpur. In this low-lying area, low-caste Hindus (the Shadulkas) comprised the majority. Mostly illiterate, they lived by farming and fishing. In some areas only the basic necessities of fish, rice, salt, and kerosene were available. Gopalganj, however, was the birthplace of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

As sub-divisional officer Siddiqui was in charge of virtually everything: "education, health, irrigation, agriculture, law and order." He relished the work and drew satisfaction from the "respect, power, and responsibility" it brought him. In return, the people brought him small gifts of gratitude. He made it a point to speak in Bengali, a little of which he had learned in the Academy. A staff of about two hundred people helped Siddiqui run the subdivision. There was a Second Officer who took charge when he was away. There were development officers, revenue officers, magistrates, and police, irrigation, communication, public works, education, property, and agriculture officers. All these officers were local men, making him quite a spectacle as a West Pakistani.

Gopalganj's remoteness and poverty encouraged crime. Vigilante groups sometimes took the law into their own hands, catching thieves and gouging out their eyes. Moreover, two political factions were locked in a power struggle, one associated with the Awami Party of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the other with the ruling Pakistan Muslim League. Both tried to pressure Siddiqui but he stubbornly held his ground.

As Siddiqui toured his district and visited its schools and union councils and health clinics he learned that Pakistani independence in 1947 had brought no discernable improvements to the lives of the people there. He also realized that West Pakistanis were almost wholly unaware of this fact and of the passionate feelings of injustice that East Pakistanis harbored vis-à-vis their relationship to West Pakistan.

Siddiqui was still in Gopalganj during the run-up to the national assembly elections of December 1970. Many national leaders visited the district, including Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan and Commerce Minister Waheeduzzaman, who pressured Siddiqui to delimit the constituencies and place government-friendly officers in the voting districts. He refused. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman also came and delivered anti-West Pakistan speeches.

After the elections, trouble broke out in Gopalganj. But by this time Siddiqui was in Mymensingh, East Pakistan, to which he had been transferred as Additional Deputy Commissioner (Revenue) and designated Returning Officer for the elections. In the latter role he was in charge of distributing ballots to the polling agents, supervising the tally, and announcing the results. As expected, Mujibur Rahman's party won overwhelmingly. When Yahya Khan reneged on a promised meeting of the National Assembly, Rahman launched a civil disobedience movement in East Pakistan. Not long afterwards, Khan unleashed the army.

What followed in Mymensingh was total anarchy; there was no military cantonment there and the army, based in Dhaka, was several-weeks' march away. Siddiqui could not do anything to stop it. As Additional Deputy Commissioner (Revenue), he had neither the tools nor the authority to do so. Indeed, his own life was in jeopardy. Conditions turned for the worse when the East Pakistan Rifles, who had mutinied against their West Pakistani commanders, took control of the town and engaged in a three-day killing spree of non-Bengalis. When the Pakistani army arrived, Siddiqui was asked to stay on and restore civil administration in the district. He remained for two more months and completed his mandatory two-year tenure in June 1971. Returning to West Pakistan, he became Deputy Secretary of the Labor Department based in Karachi. This new assignment was a respite and Siddiqui was again in touch with his family.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto assumed power in Pakistan on 20 December 1971 following the country's defeat to India and loss of East Pakistan. Bhutto started his political career as member of Ayub Khan's team and rose to become foreign minister of Pakistan. He became popular as leader of the Pakistan Peoples' Party (PPP). The coup against Yahya Khan assured his ascendancy as president and chief administrator of martial law.

With the secession of Bangladesh and new leadership, there were high hopes for better times to come in Pakistan. But after two years, says Siddiqui, Bhutto changed his style of government. He removed independent-minded people from his party, began "hobnobbing with the feudals and the military," denied civil servants security of tenure through a constitutional change, and nationalized the banks, insurance companies, and educational institutions. Bhutto demoralized the professional civil service by appointing unqualified people with political connections; he annoyed the mujahirs by denying them influence in government; and his cousin in Sindh threatened Urdu-speakers by introducing legislation requiring everyone to learn Sindhi, his own language. As these distressing developments unfolded, Siddiqui decided to study the law to find an alternative career. He did so at Sindh Muslim Law College beginning in 1973 and earning the degree of Bachelor of Laws the following year.

On 20 December 1974, Siddiqui married his longtime acquaintance Kishwar Sultana. He first met Kishwar during his senior year in college. She was a science student. They became friends but no serious relationship was in the offing; Siddiqui had in fact been promised in marriage to his cousin. He broke with tradition by not marrying her and, during his long stay in East Pakistan, renewed his friendship with Kishwar through an exchange of letters. By this time she had completed a masters degree in biochemistry. Their marriage produced three children: Ahmad Arsalan, Ahmad Jabran, and Sara Ahmad.

Following the normal career pattern in the civil service, Sidddiqui's next position should have been as deputy commissioner. But due to his new responsibilities as a married man, he took a "side job" as administrator of a trust property for two to three years. It was a better paying job, with an official vehicle for his use, and was considered a good slot well within the civil service. In 1979, Siddiqui got his promotion and was assigned to the Karachi Development Authority (KDA) as Director of Land Management.

His stint at KDA was a short three months. It was a corrupt organization and hotbed of intrigue and politics. His integrity as a disciplining officer drew the ire of the officials. To get him out of the way, they connived to get him posted as deputy commissioner. Siddiqui was assigned to his home town of Sukkur and worked there for some twenty months before being brought back to KDA. Because of his reputation for integrity, he was named inquiry officer and prosecutor and, concurrently, director general of excise and taxation. Siddiqui proved to be a vigorous and scrupulously honest investigator and his inquiries led to several prosecutions. He also succeeded in increasing the revenue of the government of Sindh Province. For a job well done, he was nominated for a fellowship at the Kennedy School of Government (Harvard) in 1983.

It was an old practice in Pakistan to send newly minted civil servants to Cambridge or Oxford in England after attending the Academy, but this practice was stopped in 1958 when martial law was imposed. Siddiqui's opportunity arose through the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which sponsored promising young officials for a year of study abroad. The process was competitive and he remembers being interviewed by two visiting professors. Going to the United States was Siddiqui's first major travel abroad and truly a luxury considering the family's relatively straitened [Sunny: Does Chicago prefer straightened or straitened?] circumstances. He made a brief stopover in England and, at the conclusion of the course, the whole family traveled extensively in the United States.

What impressed Siddiqui about Harvard was the environment of freedom: freedom of movement, of dress, of asking and raising questions. Going back to student life and being momentarily freed from the bureaucratic routines and constraints exhilarated him. Since he was taking part in a program aimed at mid-career professionals, he met many international students and exchanged views with Indians and South Americans and many others. He found some subjects too technical and irrelevant-econometrics, for example. But he was impressed with the courses taught by John W. Thomas and John Cohen on the development process and the importance of reaching target groups and focusing on sustainability-an approach that guided him in his subsequent work. There was also a seminar in social anthropology taught by David Mayberry-Lewis involving long discussions on comparative development strategies. It was open to cross registrants from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Tufts), and Boston University. Siddiqui found the discussions valuable and enlightening.

Upon his return to Pakistan in 1984, Siddiqui was appointed secretary of industry. He clashed with his boss and martial-law administrator, however, and after only four months was transferred to a service tribunal. With only a few cases to handle and perks including a government vehicle, he started enjoying life again. One year later he was appointed director general of the Hyderabad Development Authority.

Siddiqui had been proposed for this position by Hyderabad's mayor, a friend of his. But he was not altogether happy about the appointment. Vexing problems awaited him, he knew. Indeed, his predecessor had left the job after only three months. But Siddiqui also saw the Authority as a place where he could make a lasting contribution. Of particular interest was the Gulshan-e-Shabaz project, a large housing scheme that, having got off to a good start, was now lying idle. The site was a good one with favorable topography; infrastructure was being added; water was available; and plots had already been parceled out. Yet most of the site remained vacant while squatter huts proliferated on the periphery. With a team of young colleagues, Siddiqui set out to find out why.

What they discovered was that land speculators and investors had surreptitiously moved in and purchased the plots; these "land grabbers" were now holding out for higher prices-an outcome that placed the plots beyond the reach of the intended recipients. To learn more about the micro-economics of the situation, and related social issues, Siddiqui and his team enlisted the help of a locally trusted community leaders and conducted a thorough study of the squatter settlement and its needs. Hoping to avoid the inflexibility and centralization that had stymied other projects, they began testing a new approach.

The conventional government procedure for public housing schemes was to purchase land, develop the infrastructure, build housing, and then bring in residents. Siddiqui concluded that it might be better to let the community grow organically, with settlers themselves taking more of the initiative. So he changed the sequence. In Siddiqui's approach, undeveloped plots were allotted to recipients who promised to build structures, even crude huts, within a prescribed period of time and who agreed not to resell their new land to speculators. (For a modest fee, each recipient who agreed to these terms was given registration papers, in effect, a title; if the land remained vacant the title was cancelled.) Rudimentary services were provided at the outset: a community water tank and latrine and transportation to and from workplaces. The settlers then built houses at their own pace as the Authority gradually introduced advanced services such as underground sewerage, electricity, and a reservoir for water. Each step involved the direct participation of the residents, who helped pay for the services. In this way, families become stakeholders in the development of the community. As it grew, Siddiqui collaborated with community-welfare-oriented NGOs to introduce health, education, and family planning. (One of these was the Karachi-based Orangi Pilot Project of Akhtar Hameed Khan, who Siddiqui had met in East Pakistan.) Thus was born the khuda ki basti, Siddiqui's incremental development scheme.

Under Siddiqui's plan, the settlement flourished and grew to a community of some 2,500 families by 1990.

Realizing that the successful projects of public servants are often neglected or abandoned when they are transferred, Siddiqui formed an organization called Saiban to sustain Khuda ki basti. Saiban drew together members of Siddiqui's local team with NGO collaborators and other supporters and served as the project's lobbyist and trouble-shooter-intervening to resolve problems involving the water supply, electricity, and other public services, for example. The organization had some twelve active members who volunteered their time.

Siddiqui stayed with HDA for almost five years, until 1990. His achievements there were not appreciated by everyone. By shifting to an incremental, recipient-centered approach-and, in the process, reducing opportunities for engineers, architects, and builders who competed for government contracts-Siddiqui had also crimped the incomes of certain people within the Authority who had been taking under-the-table commissions and kickbacks from favored contractors. Towards the end of his term, this group struck back by staging a public campaign to embroil him in a conflict between Urdu speakers and Sindhi speakers-a conflict that had become highly politicized during the 1980s. The group alleged that Siddiqui was party to an insiders' deal to help Urdu-speaking mujahirs acquire a huge parcel of land; a faked letter that circulated in the press also implied that he supported the nascent anti-Sindhi Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM). Sindhi-speaking officers fomented public demonstrations against him. A discreet high-level inquiry cleared Siddiqui of the charges but the brouhaha cost him his position at HDA. He was transferred back to the Sindh Services Tribunal, where he served for six months before being named director general of the Sindh Katchi Abadi Authority in Karachi, or SKAA.

[Note: The many appointments of Siddiqui from 1977 to his posting as director general of SKAA in March 1990 covered the regimes of Zia ul Haq (July 1977-August 1988) and Benazir Bhutto (1988-1990). His stint as director general of SKAA, to be discussed below, witnessed the administrations of Nawaz Sharif (November 1990-July 1993) and the second terms of both Benazir Bhutto (1993-1997) and Nawaz Sharif (1997-1999) respectively, with two caretaker regimes in between.]

Siddiqui's 1990 appointment to SKAA was immediately stymied by another political gale, this time from government-linked MQM officials who succeeded in forcing him out. So, for the next eighteen months he joined Akhtar Hameed Khan in the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP). Katchi abadis are informal urban settlements or squatter communities. Orangi was the largest katchi abadi in Pakistan. The OPP had been established there by Khan in 1980 to find practical, low-cost solutions to a host of urgent problems, beginning with sanitation. Khan eschewed foreign-aid-funded projects, which were too expensive for poor slum dwellers. A believer in self reliance, in Orangi he pioneered in sewerage and sanitation systems that were financed and managed by the people themselves and then introduced innovative approaches to low-cost housing, micro-credit, health and family-planning services, schools, women's livelihood enterprises, and rural development. All of these programs complemented Siddiqui's own khuda ki basti philosophy.

In July 1993, Siddiqui rejoined SKAA as director general. As such, Siddiqui reported to the secretary of local government of Sindh Province, who chaired its board. Officially speaking the board managed SKAA in accordance with legislation. But because of frequent political changes the board rarely met. In practice, Siddiqui ran the Authority.

The Sindh Katchi Abadis Authority had been formed in 1987 as part of the government's response to the problem of burgeoning squatter communities. This was a result of the mass migration of Muslims from India and the influx of rural people to Karachi to work in factories. As early as 1979 the government had declared that squatter communities (katchi abadis) with at least forty houses-and not built on private lands, parks, playgrounds and hazard zones-should be legally recognized and provided with infrastructure and services. But not much had been accomplished in the meantime. One reason was inept handling on the part of the country's urban councils. Another was a failure on the part of government planners and foreign aid-givers to understand the culture and sociology of the poor. Development schemes executed through private developers prejudiced the poor as the cost of plots became prohibitive.

SKAA had three primary functions or goals: (1) to regularize or legalize illegal squatter settlements; (2) to register the occupants of these settlements as home owners; and (3) to upgrade services in the settlements.

SKAA began regularizing the katchi abadis in 1991. This was an enormously complicated and time-consuming process that involved, in the first stage, sorting through all the province's squatter communities and identifying the ones that qualified for legalization. After this, the Authority notified the selected communities and arranged for them to be officially surveyed and demarcated. It then conducted a detailed survey of each household (area occupied, length of stay, and so on) and of the extant physical infrastructure such as water pipes and sewerage facilities. Finally, SKAA issued a lease contract equivalent to ownership to each householder, who could then register with the Registration Office.

To give some idea of the scale of the work, as of December 1998, 1,157 katchi abadis had been identified as regularizable; 927 of those had been notified; and the work of surveying, household registration, and infrastructure improvement had begun in 450 of those.

As for infrastructure improvement, SKAA concentrated on sewerage, water, electricity, and roads. The priority was sewerage. Siddiqui conducted a survey of 150 katchi abadis that revealed that 80 percent of the houses had some sort of underground sewer or drain. This was a considerable health hazard since, in most cases, there was no place for the accumulating sewerage to go. The settlements badly needed some sort of disposal system. Under Siddiqui, SKAA approached this problem in dialog with community members. It helped them identify an appropriate, easy-to-maintain design and to estimate the cost. A committee of residents then purchased the needed pipes and other materials directly, recruited a local mason to do the work, and monitored the project until it was completed. Siddiqui then contracted the Orangi Pilot Project to inspect the work and to certify to SKAA that it had been done properly. (OPP earned a fee for this service.)

This procedure exemplifies SKAA's approach to upgrading community services under Siddiqui: first identify the need; next identify an appropriate design; then estimate the cost and form a committee of residents to supervise the project; finally, verify the quality of the results. The fact that the community was involved from the "planning stage to execution, maintenance, and cost recovery," says Siddiqui, made this process sustainable. And it ably demonstrated the capacity and capability of the poor to pay for needed services provided they knew where the money was going. All of this proved Siddiqui's contention, contrary to popular stereotypes, that the katchi abadis "were centers of dynamism whose occupants were both industrious and resourceful".

Siddiqui also endeavored to make SKAA self-reliant, avoiding grants from outside donors such as the Asian Development Bank and relying instead on prudent management of its government appropriations and, significantly, income from leases. i.e. land ownership documents. He was thus able to meet the Authority's overhead costs and assure its sustainability in a period of political turbulence. (Siddiqui himself continued to be buffeted and, depending on the political winds, was sometimes shifted to other posts on a short-term basis, although often working as SKAA's director general concurrently.)

Siddiqui also established welfare measures for SKAA employees including low-interest home, automobile, and motorcycle loans and interest-free loans for the needy.

To complement SKAA's work of regularization and infrastructure improvement, Siddiqui also focused on other aspects of community building. One example is health. Pakistan lacked an immunization program, for example. With the help of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the Rotary Club and the Sindh state health department, Siddiqui developed a model program in which katchi abadi residents were trained as local vaccinators to work under supervision of the SKAA, with vaccines provided by the health department. In collaboration with OPP, he introduced income-generating schemes, community-based savings-and-loan societies, primary health care, and family planning programs. With the help of NGOs and the government, he expanded and improved neighborhood schools.

Even so, Siddiqui remained critical of many NGOs for being dependent on foreign assistance, over-centralized, and inflexible in their approach-since this is often dictated by donors. He preferred to work directly with poor communities, to let them articulate their needs themselves, and to encourage them to generate solutions of their own-offering practical assistance where he could. His housing projects for the urban poor in Hyderabad and Karachi are examples of this philosophy. They succeeded in cutting through red tape, making use of practical low-cost technologies for infrastructure projects, and cutting costs. Most importantly, they demonstrated the importance of including the community in the decision-making process.


Oscar Evangelista


REFERENCES


Many of the short quotations are taken from the interview of James Rush with Tasneem Siddiqui in 1999 at the Ramon Magsaysay Center in Manila, and a few from the citation for Siddiqui. The history portions are taken from books on Pakistan properly cited in the references.

Amin, Shahid M. Pakistan's Foreign Policy, A Reappraisal. Oxford University Press, Great Clarion St., Oxford, 2002.

Bose, Sugata and Jalal, Ayesha, Modern South Asia, History, Culture, Political Economy, Routhledge: London and New York, 2002.

Burki, Shahid Javed. Pakistan, The Continuing Search for Nationhood. Westview Press, Boulder/Pak Book Corporation, Lahore,1991.

Chaudhury G.W. The Last Days of United India. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1979.

Jafri, Hassan Iqbal. "I am no Revolutionary-Tasneem Siddiqui", The Herald, October 1995. (photo-copy).

Jahan, Rounaq. Pakistan, Failure in National Integration. Columbia University Press, New York and London, 1972.

Rahman, Shamim-ur. "The Home Maker", Asiaweek, 6 August 1999. (photocopy).

Siddiqui, Tasneem A. Interview by James Rush 1999, Ramon Magsaysay Awardee For Government Service, Ravenholt Room, Ramon Magsaysay Center.

______. "Making Partnership Work Towards Sustainable Housing for the Poor in Pakistan". Presented at the Ramon Magsaysay Awards Forum, Ramon Magsaysay Center, Manila.

Ziring, Lawrence. Pakistan at the Crosscurrent of History. Vanguard Books (Pvt) Ltd., Lahore, Pakistan, 2004.