Building Until You’re No Longer Needed: Lessons from Mahila Housing Trust
- Centre for Systems Practice
- Jul 14
- 10 min read
On 9th April 2026, Bijal Brahmbhatt, Director of Mahila Housing Trust (MHT), spoke at the Platform for Collective Wisdom in a candid, wide-ranging conversation covering three decades of work on housing and habitat rights for poor urban women in India. The talk moved through earthquake reconstruction, legalising electricity in slums, and living heritage projects in Ahmedabad. It also tackled some difficult questions: what scaling actually requires, what credentials mean in communities built on trust, and what it looks like to learn from the people you serve.
The talk was specific and honest in a way that policy conversations rarely are. And, from different angles, it kept returning to a single underlying question: what does it actually take for a system to change?
Walk through a low-income settlement in Ahmedabad, and you’ll meet women who can tell you exactly how their city works. Which officials have discretion and which don’t. Which forms to file and in what order. Which arguments land with the municipal corporation and which don’t. This is the expertise that has been built carefully over years of collective action and institutional engagement.
Mahila Housing Trust has spent thirty years working with women to build the kind of agency and analytical power that makes change stick long after an organisation steps back.
How Do You Actually Build From The Ground Up
“What is a house without a water and electricity connection?”
It’s a question that sits underneath everything Bijalben described in the talk, and it points to a foundational MHT belief: housing was never only about land rights. It is a bundle of rights to basic services, to legal recognition, and to a voice in the decisions that shape your life.
In much of the social sector, systemic work happens at the top: policy advocacy, awareness campaigns, and a fair amount of frustration when governments fail to execute well-designed policy well. As Bijalben described it, the real work is ground-up - not just making sure policy reaches people, but ensuring people learn to negotiate skillfully enough that an organisation like MHT eventually becomes unnecessary.
She moved through the post-2001 earthquake reconstruction work, the years spent legalising electricity connections in settlements the city had deemed ineligible, and the heritage projects that insisted on community authorship. What connected each story was a single, insistent question: who decides what a community needs, and on what basis?
MHT began in 1994, focused only on housing. It didn’t take long to see that the gap went well beyond land titles or building materials. Women in low-income settlements lacked water, electricity, and sewage connections, and had no real say in who decided what they got, or on what terms. Infrastructure and more fundamentally, power, were missing. What started as housing work evolved into something broader: building women’s agency and constructing the community institutions needed to hold and exercise that agency over time.
MHT worked with women from the ground up to build agency, understanding early that unless there was genuine representation from each household, solutions would not be owned or carried forward by the whole community. By making sure the women who would live with the solutions were the ones shaping them from the start, MHT demonstrated real “co-designing.”
The 2001 Gujarat earthquake devastated parts of Ahmedabad and left many low-income homes structurally unsound. Reconstruction required earthquake-proofing, and the architect MHT brought in suggested marine ply, a relatively expensive, technically sophisticated material. Meanwhile, the government’s compensation scheme was based on damage assessment: the less a house had been damaged, the less money its owner received, even though the actual cost of rebuilding safely didn’t track that logic at all. MHT had to raise donor funds to close the resulting gap.
But the more telling moment was about something else entirely. The architect’s design solved an engineering problem, but it wasn’t what the community had actually asked for. Women from the affected families simply wanted a working kitchen. Bijalben’s response became something of an organisational principle: you don’t need a complicated solution to do something simple. If people are asking for a kitchen, give them a kitchen, while still making sure the house can withstand an earthquake. The two goals weren’t really in tension. They only looked that way from the architect’s vantage point, not the resident’s.
That logic has held since. Bijalben was candid that the same discipline now applies to climate change, very much a live concern across the development sector. MHT doesn’t treat it as a separate problem to introduce to communities who haven’t named it as their own. If a household’s most pressing concern is something more immediate and survival-based - clean water, a functioning toilet, a stable income - that is where the work starts. Climate resilience gets built in. It does not get imposed.
At MHT, this translates into an operating rule Bijalben returned to throughout the talk: the end-user is the most important person in the room; not the funder, not the architect, not MHT itself.
From this foundation came the co-creation of a tripartite partnership between slum residents, the municipal corporation, and financial institutions, to deliver seven civic services to settlements the city had written off.
The systems insight that Bijalben kept returning to: the goal was never just to fix the problem. It was to give voice to the people best positioned to define what needed fixing and to carry those solutions forward.
When Good Systems Make Themselves Unnecessary
Observations from a field visit with MHT in May 2026 make one thing clear: MHT builds the scaffolding until the community no longer needs it to hold things up.
Most institutions - government agencies, NGOs, development programmes - are structurally rewarded for being needed. Their budgets, headcounts, and legitimacy depend on the problem staying partially unsolved.
MHT inverts this logic. Their explicit aim is to become redundant to the communities they work with. The CBOs feed into Community Action Groups (CAGs). The CAGs feed into Vikasini, a city-level platform of women leaders who are no longer petitioners but sit across the table from municipal corporations as negotiators and decision-makers.
From a systems view, this is what it means to shift a feedback loop. MHT doesn’t just solve problems within existing systems; it changes the structure of the system so that the community becomes its own corrective force.
Nowhere is this shift more visible than in how MHT got electricity legalised across Ahmedabad’s slums - a story worth telling in full, because the mechanics of it show exactly how this kind of systemic change actually gets built.
Trust as Infrastructure
In 2002, electricity in Ahmedabad’s slums was supplied privately, and it was both inconsistent and illegal. Residents paid a flat rate per electrical fitting, however much they used, but getting connected at all meant dealing with local enforcers operating alongside the utility’s own staff - a system that delivered power, but left residents with no legal standing and no protection.
MHT’s opening, as it happened, came through an unrelated programme. It had been running a water and sanitation project in the same settlements, and residents noticed something: when they paid for water and sanitation services, those services held. They couldn’t be cut off, because the connections were municipal and the payments were on record. MHT also helped residents see a second, less obvious benefit: paying official charges - water bills, local taxes - created a paper trail that functioned as informal proof of residence, making eviction harder to justify. None of this was about electricity. But it built the foundation electricity would later depend on: residents now believed legal access was worth paying for, and they wanted the same legitimacy applied to power.
When MHT approached Ahmedabad Electricity Company (AEC) on residents’ behalf, the response was sceptical. AEC didn’t believe slum residents would actually pay. MHT’s case rested entirely on the water and sanitation track record, and it held, because the municipal corporation official who had overseen that programme was willing to confirm, on record, that residents had paid reliably and that MHT could mobilise them again.
What followed was a lesson in the limits of goodwill without paperwork. Bijalben was young at the time, and MHT hadn’t secured a formal, non-financial memorandum of understanding with AEC. Nothing progressed until the Gujarat government, which was offering a 30% subsidy to electrify slums statewide, gave AEC a reason to move. AEC asked the municipal corporation for a letter confirming residents’ track record. One official, who could simply have declined, instead issued a letter on the corporation’s own letterhead, vouching for the programme and giving AEC the policy basis it needed to act. It was a small piece of paper, and a significant act of process innovation. AEC moved quickly once it existed.
Scaling the programme surfaced two further obstacles, and MHT designed around both. First-time electricity connections were too expensive for most households to afford outright, so MHT designed a microfinance scheme to spread the cost. Then residents discovered they had no formal proof of residence to even apply, so MHT acted as a guarantor and vouched for them directly, putting its own letterhead behind individual households. AEC’s final hesitation was about liability: what would happen if residents paid for legal connections and were then evicted? MHT’s answer was an indemnity bond, signed by every participating household, stating that they understood the risk and would not hold AEC liable if eviction occurred. Every household signed, because years of MHT’s track record had made the organisation’s word worth trusting.
What’s notable about this entire sequence is how little of it was about electricity, technically speaking. The mechanism throughout was trust, translated into paperwork: a water programme that proved residents would pay, a municipal letter that gave a private utility political cover, a microfinance product that closed an affordability gap, and an indemnity bond that absorbed a risk no one else would carry. Residents got connected and learned how institutions actually move, and what it takes to make them move - which, more than the electricity itself, is what later allowed MHT to push for 50% women’s representation in public housing governance: the same instinct, applied to a different table.
This is the distinction between service delivery and systemic change. Services fix outputs. Systems change fixes the rules that produce the outputs.
Moving Towards Demystification
One of the most practical dimensions of MHT’s work is what Bijalben calls “demystifying science” - knowledge upskilling and capacity building that has to happen before communities can meaningfully engage with the systems around them.
Grassroots community workers need to understand not just that heat-resilient housing materials exist, but why they work: what makes a roof reflective, how thermal mass affects indoor temperatures, why ventilation placement matters. Without that foundation, they cannot effectively advocate for better standards, push back on a contractor who cuts corners, or explain to a sceptical household why an unfamiliar material is worth the investment.
Bijalben was specific about why this matters at the point of negotiation, not just in theory. MHT facilitates conversations with city officials, but insists that women speak for themselves in those rooms about the science involved. Officials may show up because MHT is present. They listen, genuinely listen, when they believe the women across the table understand the technical substance themselves. Without that understanding, equity erodes quietly: the conversation continues, but the power within it doesn’t actually shift.
In this context, capacity building is not only about mastering a subject. It is just as much about learning to speak without hesitation - what Bijalben called talking fearlessly. The technical knowledge and the confidence to use it in a room full of officials aren’t separable skills; MHT treats them as one and the same capacity.
Knowledge doesn’t flow once from engineer to worker to resident and stop there. It gets applied, questioned, and refined. Over time, communities become technically literate about their own built environment, resulting in insiders owning the expertise.
Information asymmetry is one of the most durable sources of unequal power. When only some people can read the blueprints, literal or metaphorical, those people set the terms of every negotiation. MHT’s insistence on demystification is, at its core, an insistence on levelling that asymmetry before anything else can change.
It is also, necessarily, a long-term bet. You don’t build this kind of knowledge in a six-month programme. It takes years of relationship, trust, and working through real problems together.
Reflections From The Field
A visit to MHT’s work in Ahmedabad puts Bijalben’s framing into immediate relief. The women she described - capable of navigating institutional systems, building coalitions, holding technical knowledge - are present in the room, in the community, demonstrating precisely the kind of agency MHT was designed to build.
What strikes you is how they use what they know. Their understanding of the system, its pressure points, its gaps, its occasional moments of responsiveness has been turned into strategic action. Communities with the capacity to negotiate on their own terms, backed by organised power and technical literacy is exactly what ground-up policy-making actually looks like. In the end, it is also what allows an organisation like MHT to step back.
It also makes clear just how much is at stake when this capacity doesn’t exist, and how much has been built where it does.
The How of it All
MHT’s thirty-year track record raises a question worth sitting with: how did the systems they were operating in - municipal corporations, utilities, financial institutions - actually allow this to happen?
Part of the answer is time. Bijal was honest about this: the trust that makes ground-up change possible isn’t something you fast-track. It accumulates through repeated presence, real problem-solving, and a consistent refusal to treat communities as data points.
Bijalben was equally candid about a tension that doesn’t resolve neatly. Staying close to the grassroots makes scale difficult, almost by definition. But failing to reach a certain scale threatens an organisation’s survival just as directly. MHT’s answer wasn’t to choose one over the other. It hired staff from the communities it worked in, which kept grassroots relationships intact even as the organisation grew. And it sought long-horizon funding - commitments of at least seven to ten years rather than project cycles - that gave it room to stay patient locally while still building toward scale.
Part of it is strategy. MHT’s approach was never purely confrontational. Creating a department inside an institution, securing representation within governance structures, designing an indemnity bond instead of demanding a guarantee - these are moves that work with systems while changing their internal logic. They are less about demanding entry, more about redesigning the door.
And part of it is the women themselves, who brought the knowledge, the persistence, and the social fabric without which none of the technical or institutional work would have held together.
Bijalben added, “Be open to learning.” The scaffolding, eventually, comes down. What’s left standing is something the community built.
Which raises a question for you: if you were working on a problem like this, where the people with the most relevant knowledge are systematically excluded from decisions, how would you have approached it differently? We’d like to hear your thoughts.
If Bijalben's insights resonated with you or you'd like to continue the conversation on community-led systems change, we'd love to hear from you at info@centreforsystemspractice.org
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