“Sanitation and Shelter for Everyone” Says SDI President Jockin

**Cross posted from The Hindu**
By Aparna Karthikeyan
Sanitation and shelter are for everyone, says Jockin Arputham, the Mumbai-based activist who has been nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
“Jockin, Slum Dweller.” That is how, Jockin Arputham, from Dharavi, Mumbai, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, introduces himself in any public forum. All his life Jockin has been fighting for dignity, for the ‘weakest of the poorest person’. Except that when he chanced into his line of work, in 1969, he had ‘no theory, philosophy, nor a political compulsion.’
Like the great majority that lives in Dharavi, Arputham is a migrant, who came to Mumbai looking for work. But the city appalled the young man. “It was a culture shock,” he says. He had come expecting a rich city. Instead, it had the worst slums.
He lived in one such slum, Janata Colony. In the first few difficult days, when he felt he had ‘fallen into the pit’, he contemplated taking his own life. So he climbed up a nearby hill, and stayed there for three days, but then he decided he wouldn’t die. Nor go back.
The next morning, he put his carpentry skills to good use, made some money and, in a few days, began sub-contracting work at the nearby Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). He learnt to give orders in Hindi; and soon the 21-year-old settled down in his new life in Mumbai.
Arputham, now 68, knows what he wants. He wants shelter, sanitation and water for every slum-dweller in Mumbai, in India, in the world. He wants every pavement-dweller relocated. He wants to see change — redevelopment — happening with people’s participation.
It was mosquitoes that made him aware of his potential as a change-maker. Arputham was conducting a coaching class for slum kids when he found the kids unable to focus because they were being bitten. The problem was mounting piles of garbage. To show the municipality the magnitude of the problem, Jockin made the kids carry a newspaper parcel of rubbish and dump it outside the municipal office in Chembur. When the police came to arrest him, Arputham said he would repeat his act until the garbage was cleared. The municipality was shamed into doing its work, for the first time in 22 years in that settlement.
Having tasted the power of protest, he decided to do more. He cleaned the filthy community toilet, again with children’s help. “By that evening, it was a beautiful new toilet!” After that, he was summarily adopted by the people who sought him to sort out civic issues. He learnt English, became an activist, a ‘self-built leader’, led huge demonstrations against the proposed eviction of Janata Colony. In 1974, when he got married, he finally rented a small house.
Arputham still lives in a rented house. He has no property, no assets. His immediate family is small — he has two grandchildren, one from each of his daughters. But his extended family is very large — the urban poor from 33 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. They are all members of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), an organisation founded in 1999, to provide alternatives to eviction. SDI’s headquarters is in Cape Town, South Africa, and Arputham is its president.
But the path to fame was not smooth. In the 1970s, there were many attempts to arrest him. Each time, people, especially thousands of women from the slum, surrounded him and hid him.
When Emergency was declared in India in 1975, Arputham found that he would be put away; so he fled to the Philippines and stayed there until the new government was elected. But he carried on with his work. He set up the Bombay Slum Dwellers Federation in 1975. Slowly, the movement grew and became the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF). “The organisation is a very huge one,” he says. “I work in around 70 cities in India.”
While Arputham never wavered in his ideals, his approach changed over the years. In the early 1980s, he swapped the ‘shirt of militancy’ for one of negotiation. He moved from Janata Colony — the slum made way for BARC — to Dharavi.
Dharavi alone has 89 slum pockets, he says, sitting in his office. The walls are painted in jewel colours. But the real jewels in the room are Jockin’s awards — the Ramon Magsaysay in 2000; Padma Shri in 2011; and an honorary Ph.D. from KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, in 2009.
As the founder, and now reluctant president of NSDF (he wishes to resign, but nobody will hear of it), he’s especially keen to include women in the organisation’s activities. “I’m running this organisation because of the strength of the women. In India itself, more than 10-12 lakh women are members. Men are good bullies; they tend to take the credit, even if women run the show.”
In the slums where NSDF functions, migrations from rural to urban India are touching new highs, and sleepy little towns are today being transformed into bustling shanty towns.
‘Achche din’ has to reach out to these people too, argues Arputham. “Show me one budget that is talking about the other citizen of the city. You look at the city corporation agenda, which I look at every week. Three per cent of the agenda is connected with the slum-dwellers whereas their population is 60 per cent. The rest of the city hogs the whole agenda.”
“I’m known world over as ‘Toilet Man’. In South Africa, where it’s a stigma to say toilet, I made them talk about it. In the United Nations, I built a demonstration toilet in the UN plaza.” And demonstrated to Kofi Annan how Indians squat! He has built more than 20,000 (toilet) seats in Mumbai alone.
It was from Dharavi that Arputham drew plans for inclusive growth. He insisted on new standards on redeveloped housing, an increased floor-space-index. Over the years, Arputham has built 30,000 houses in India, and 1,00,000 houses abroad. Funding for his work comes from many sources. Thanks to his work, he has met both Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela.
The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2014 will be announced on October 10.
Diary from Mumbai: Part III

By Ariana K. MacPherson, SDI Secretariat
It is nearing the end of my stay in Mumbai, and I know I am going to miss this city as soon as I board the plane. I have spent the past week getting to know her streets and her people, and it is an experience I will certainly not forget. Mumbai is the kind of city that stays with you – the fragrance of the food, the colors of the sky at dusk, the buzz of people and traffic in the streets. Like other great cities of the world, its rhythm is invigorating and awe-inspiring – the vibrancy and speed of everyday life, set against the beautiful backdrop of history.
Over the past few days, I had the opportunity to revisit Dharavi: to walk the streets and narrow alleyways of the potters’ village and the recycling areas of the vast informal city-within-a-city, the world’s most well known slum.
We make our way from Bombay Central to Dharavi by train. It is past rush hour, so the great crowds I have heard so much about have subsided. The train is cool and quiet as it rumbles along the Central Line, and it is not long before we arrive at Sion station, the entrance to Dharavi. Actually, there is more than one train stop in Dharavi, making it very easy to access from almost anywhere across Mumbai. This, along with its central location, is one of the main factors contributing to increased interest in Dharavi as a site for private re-development. But re-development plans have not taken into account Dharavi’s place as a commercial hub in Mumbai’s informal and formal economies. They have not accounted for the outdoor kilns in the potters’ village, or the vast workshops where all means of recycling take place. Nor have they accounted for the long tradition of food production, leather shops, and textile mills. For now, plans are at a standstill. But there is a long road ahead if the vibrant economy of this bustling town is to be preserved.
We start off in the potters’ village. Here, thousands of local people work with hundreds of pounds of clay every day, stamping, pounding, molding and spinning it into beautiful pots, urns, serving dishes, candle holders for Diwali and statues of the Indian god Ganesh. Orders come in from all over Mumbai. Pottery is sold to housewives and retailers. We walk for half an hour, past shops and workshops, each one with a home overhead. Men sit inside, spinning handmade pots on wheels. A woman is polishing water pots outside her home, rubbing wet clay onto just-fired pots to smooth over imperfections. There are hundreds of the same pots lined up a few feet away. I ask her how much these sell for. Sharmila, one of the women working at the Indian support NGO, SPARC, translates for me. “About 100 or 120 rupees,” she says. This is equivalent to about US $2. This isn’t much, of course. But it is US $2 more than nothing, and when you multiply it by the 50 or 100 pots beside her, it’s a significant income. Multiply that by the many other workshops around her, and it becomes clear that Dharavi is more than a small piece of Mumbai’s vibrant economy.
From here, Sharmila takes me to another area of winding streets, this time lined with one recycling workshop after another. I have heard about Dharavi’s recycling industry, but again it is something else to see it up close and personal. Each workshop is busy with men and women sorting through, cleaning and producing every type of plastic imaginable. Women sit outside in the alleyways sorting through plastic cutlery and take-away boxes, as men work away inside on melting and shredding them to be reused across India and beyond. Dharavi is home to the largest plastic recycling industry in India. If the proposed redevelopment took place, where would this industry move to? How could it not be accounted for? How could it be seen as anything less than integral to the very heart of the city’s economy?
The next day I visit the Mahila Milan-NSDF office in Byculla. This was the neighborhood where SPARC first began its work back in the 1980s, when they made links with the community of pavement-dwellers who had their homes along these streets. Today, the streets are still lined with homes and shops, people milling about, living and working in the heart of central Mumbai, just blocks away from Bombay Central train station. Again, I am struck by the presence of the informal right alongside the formal city. Not even alongside it, but smack in the middle of it. Part of it. Contributing to it. We spend some time speaking with the women of Mahila Milan living here. They have been members of MM for over twenty years. They have negotiated with local government for toilets, for water taps, for electricity. Now each home is hooked up to the electrical grid, they have access to community toilets, and many people have water taps inside their homes. And they have prevented demolitions, prevented the threat of middle-of-the-night bulldozers and unannounced evictions.
The women know they will not be able to stay in Byculla forever, but in many ways it is better than moving out to Mankhurd, further away from jobs and schools. They made their homes here on purpose, and although they know they will have to leave eventually, it becomes clear yet again that a home is so much than a formal house. It is a community, a sense of security, access to the services and opportunities that bring rich and poor alike to the cities of the world. Why then should the right to enjoy these be a privilege only afforded to the rich? In Mumbai, the poor have claimed their space in the city – their right to it. Now the question is how they will hold onto that, and how the rest of us will support them.
For more photos from Ariana’s trip to Mumbai, visit our Facebook page.
Diary from Mumbai: Part I

By: Ariana K MacPherson, SDI Secretariat
Mumbai has a constant buzz. That is the best way to put it. The city is always moving, coming and going in all directions And full of light. I arrived in Mumbai three days ago, and immediately was taken aback by the vibrancy of it. Even as I made my way from the bustling airport at 1am to my hotel, taxi cabs lined the streets and pavement dwellers sit in front of their tin shacks, eating around fires.
I am here to visit the Indian SDI alliance, an impressive trio of organizations consisting of Mahila Milan (the women’s savings collectives, which are federated citywide as well as nationwide), the National Slum Dwellers Federation (a network of male-dominated slum dweller federations operating at the same scale as MM) and the support NGO, SPARC. I have heard tales of the dynamism, innovation and success of MM-SPARC-NSDF, but truly there is nothing like seeing it for yourself. The same goes for Mumbai, for Dharavi, for all of it: you can read all the books, see the movies, read the newspaper and taste the food abroad, but there is nothing like coming face-to-face with the life of the city, of the people, to make you really understand.
Yesterday was my first day in the field. Alongside a colleague from SPARC, I visited three of Alliance’s projects in Greater Mumbai. First we stopped at a housing project in Dharavi called Rajiv Indira, designed by the women of Mahila Milan. The building is light and airy, with children playing and riding small bicycles in the wide corridor. On the ground floor there is an open courtyard, where women congregate with their kids, chatting about the day. All but the top two floors of the building have been constructed with 14-foot ceilings so that families can build a mezzanine floor to maximize the 225 sq ft space.
The women make this happen through financing from various sources, but savings is a big part of it. Not only does money collected through daily savings go towards financing the actual housing projects, but it also serves as a means to organize, mobilize and unify the group around a common vision for the community. Even after moving into the building, the women continue to save in order to pay for maintenance and further improvements to their homes. It is not a project-based activity, but instead becomes the very core of their activities.
I have read so much about Dharavi. How residential and commercial uses co-exist. How many millions of dollars are generated there. How high the population density is. How poor some of the living conditions. How vibrant, and dynamic a place it is. But again, nothing compares to reality. It is not simply a slum – Dharavi is a town. The true essence of an informal city, existing right in the centre of the formal city, feeding into it minute to minute and day by day. We make our way to a community toilet project, turning off the main (4-lane) road and onto a crowded, winding side street. We pass a Hindu temple, painted bright with garlands and incense adorning the entrance, and are shaded by green canopies of tall, old trees. A white cow passes us on the right.
We arrive at the community toilet and it is bright, airy and clean. My colleague explains that it is used by 226 families (roughly 1,300 people), each of whom pays 20 rupees per month (about USD .40). Others pay 2 rupees per use. There is a caretaker who looks after the facility daily, closing it only from 1am – 5am. He has a room upstairs that he shares with his family, and there is a lovely roof terrace with a mosaic tiled floor that can be used by the 226 families for community events and meetings. There are basically two other options for toilets in Dharavi: 1) shit wherever you can find a hole, which often means holding it in until it is safe (especially for women), and of course causes numerous health risks; or 2) use one of the government-provided communal toilets, which tend not to be well looked after, and are often dark, smelly and unpleasant to use. By making this a community project, it has kept the toilet clean and pleasant to use. One of us even stopped to pay the 2 rupees to use it during our visit!
The last site we visit is a housing project called Milan Nagar, also designed by the women of Mahila Milan, located in Mankhurd settlement quite a ways from the centre of Mumbai. This group of women were pavement dwellers, perhaps Mumbai’s poorest population, and some of Mahila Milan’s oldest members. They lived in shacks along the sidewalks, crowding the streets near Bombay Central station. The women tell us that one of the biggest differences in their lives today is that they are no longer called “pavement dwellers” – that they are respected by others because they now live in formal housing. But pavement dwellers chose their spots on the streets to be close to economic activity, and the women say this is one of the challenges of their new home. It is further to go to work, and they cannot come home between jobs to spend time with their children. There are three different design options within the building, each one consisting of a mezzanine floor like the building in Dharavi. The homes are modest but beautifully maintained, with sparkling pots and pans and spotless floors. Children play in the hallways, and music pours down the stairwells as a family upstairs prepares for an upcoming wedding.
After spending the afternoon at the SPARC offices, housed in a beautiful old municipal building in South Bombay, another colleague whisks me off to a Mahila Milan function in honor of a Hindu holiday celebrating the beginning of spring. This is the real thing. There are hundreds of women, all dressed in colorful saris and their best gold jewelry. We are asked to come on stage, and are honored with flowers, and decorated with saffron and turmeric on our foreheads. We eat sesame sweets and listen to the women speak about their daily realities, from the importance of daily savings to their struggles with crime. Before the close of the evening, traditional music comes on and the women begin to dance. We are drawn into the crowd and a young women smiles and grabs my hand. We dance together, laughing and I doing my best to imitate her every move. It is infectious – the vibrant soul of this community. Empowered and real, dancing under the scaffolding of 900 new homes.