Am I just imagining it or are residents’ welfare associations really becoming savvier, better organised and gaining importance as India’s urban sprawl captures new territories?
The upcoming municipal elections in Delhi have ensured a spike in the importance of RWAs, as gangs of officious young men canvass neighbourhoods and existing councillors visit their wards in a flurry of marigold garlands. But that’s not really the sort of fleeting importance I’m talking about. It’s the more enduring trends and changes in urban resident communities that I find interesting.
As more professional and salaried people begin to own their own homes at a young age, “people like us” are getting increasingly involved in the running of RWAs, especially in gated apartment complexes — with the unlikeliest of residents turning administrators.
Even RWAs in some old-fashioned colonies with regular, low-rise homes are beginning to take greater pride in neighbourhood parks and surroundings, stepping beyond merely keeping their own homes clean and safe or limiting themselves to installing those ubiquitous large iron gates. My own typical New Delhi neighbourhood’s thriving RWA always maintained its parks well, but it has also recently installed traffic mirrors at blind corners, closed-circuit televisions and several speedbreakers within colony roads. Residents are increasingly realising that they have to help themselves for tasks that civic bodies used to perform for them previously.
This almost generational shift in home ownership, especially in suburban gated communities filled with young professionals, brings with it more modern management techniques for home-owners. Web-based software with accounting, facilitation and collaborative tools such as ApnaComplex now manage housing societies. And community web portals like JustMyNeighbour go beyond management to creating a sense of belonging through resource-sharing, activities and entertainment — “redefining community living”. As a result, many home-buying decisions now have new parameters that revolve around neighbours and communities as people look to self-select themselves into their preferred socioeconomic class with similar values.
Recent public protests by owner-residents of the World Spa complex in Gurgaon against their builder and developer, Unitech, clearly demonstrate the strong bonds that particular community shares. Newspapers and television channels reported that top officials of prominent multinationals as well as retired bureaucrats, armed forces personnel, doctors and bankers organised a well-attended protest outside the Unitech office against the absence of facilities that the builder had promised them when they took possession of their apartments four years ago.
Residents had stopped paying maintenance dues from December, saying Unitech was collecting money but not paying vendors for services. And in March this year, owner-residents practically engineered a coup against the developer, wresting management and development control of the complex (for which they initially ran nightly vigils, fearing retaliation), according to the owners’ association president Gautam Gulati. (Disclosure: I am joint owner of a World Spa flat.)
But it’s not not just demos and protests — the Spartans, as they call themselves, organise lively community parties (Holi, Diwali and New Year’s Eve are the big ones), have their own performing choir (the Spa Singers), run book clubs, bridge clubs and bhajan mandalis and, last week, organised a concert by rock group Indian Ocean that was a smash hit. Of course, at most of these events, residents continue to swap stories about whose apartment has the biggest problems, but no one has actually moved out because of these issues. They’re having too good a time — and clearly, it’s this sense of community that’s holding prices up.
What’s interesting is that this community was created by Unitech itself when it targeted successful, salaried professionals and signed them up “by invitation only”, promising them top-quality, high-priced apartments paid for in that rare currency — cheques. And it’s these same “like-minded people” who have now banded against the developer. Unitech will now have to fight the power of an intelligent and thinking community, its own Frankenstein.
Jyoti Pande Lavakare is a Delhi-based writer
