The difference between Hadapsar and other resettlement colonies in the city is that the residents here had a role to play in designing these homes. These tenements were built five years ago.

Each of these is a two-room unit and its design lends it a spacious air. The owner paid Rs 85,000, with the Pune corporation paying Rs 60,000.

The Hadapsar colony was the result of a partnership between the Pune Municipal Corporation and the NGO Shelter Associates. The NGO was the brain-child of Pratima Joshi, an architect who studied in Chennai and England's Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning.

Pratima specialised in building designs for the developing world. The course comprised a module that spelt out the kind of community construction systems suited to slum resettlement.

A culmination of her thought process at Bartlett was Shelter Associates. This was  formed in Pune in 1992 along with two fellow students, Shreenanda Sen and Thomas Kerr.

Shelter Associates works with the local municipalities to offer design specifications that can work effectively for a redeveloped settlement.

"Planning for the development of slums and resettlement of slum dwellers requires a certain sensitivity, understanding and the willingness to make the beneficiaries a part of the entire process," says Joshi.

Shelter Associates involves the slum residents in all the four aspects of work it does-housing, sanitation, information gathering and research and documentation. The housing aspect is anchored by Joshi's functional expertise in architecture and materials.

Support also comes from Baandhani - meaning building together - another organisation whose members participate in the actual construction of buildings meant to house the slum dwellers.

Examples of this are homes in the resettlement projects for residents of Pune's Rajendra Nagar slums. The cost of construction was kept low by simplifying specifications. Instead of using the multi-storey format the height of each dwelling was kept at 14 feet to construct a loft at the 7 feet level in half of the tenement.

The volunteers of Baandhani mustered the participation of local men and women in building community toilets and now people have formed groups to maintain them regularly.

Planning for such projects requires accurate information about the settlements. Shelter Associates has developed a model for compiling this information using geographical information systems software.

This information is then fed to the GIS maps of the city. Thus, at the click of a mouse on a house number, all the information about its residents is thrown up by the system.