The study makes part of action research on urban poverty alleviation program in India and Kenya, undertaken jointly by the Society for Development Studies (SDS) and the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) in the UK. The research aims to test the feasibility of establishing sustainable livelihoods for the urban poor through interventions in income and housing in an integrated fashion, a hypothesis, which was being propagated by housing experts in different parts of the world for the last two decades and subsequently recognized by UN-Habitat in the early 90s.The common approach to the upliftment of the poor and marginalized groups in India in the late seventies, was to address the gap areas in terms of certain basic entitlements, a kind of slot filling. The majority of poverty interventions, therefore, has been highly activity/ sector specific. Most probably, the assumptions were that different aspects of poverty needed different treatment and that they were neutral to the impact of other poverty aspects. The issue of sustainable livelihoods as a solution to poverty did not surface in policy and planning in India till the mid-eighties, as the recognition of the concern of poverty was of recent origin and therefore it was not seen as a long-term phenomenon by Indian planners. In the majority of programmes, the performance charts in terms of numerical achievements have been impressive as the criterion of performance was the number of interventions made and not their post programme status.