05.19.06
Jockin Arputham , a slum-dweller and a Magsaysay awardee
This is an interesting fwd I received.
Posted by Shankar Iyer
http://www.ourplanet.com/imgversn/122/arputham.html
Jockin Arputham , a slum-dweller, is President of India’s National Slum Dwellers Federation – a people’s organization made up of pavement-dwellers and slum-dwellers from more than 30 towns and cities in India. He is a Magsaysay awardee 2000 for international understanding.
Jockin Arputham suggests how people living in slum environments can escape the cycle of poverty and disease.
Poor people in the cities of developing countries live in slums and squatter settlements where such basic amenities as water, sanitation and electricity are absent or inadequate. Their homes are mainly tiny, ramshackle, unfit for human habitation – and prey to the elements. All this has direct implications for public health, promoting illness and disease.
Poor people pay more for essential services than their better-off counterparts. If a slum family has diarrhoea and has to frequent pay-and-use toilets, it can literally see the day’s earnings go down the drain. Women in slums often have to buy water at unaffordable rates, or spend long hours collecting it. Electricity is often provided by middlemen charging several times as much as the public utility. All these expenditures for public goods – to which everyone should be entitled – erode the living standards of families already barely able to make ends meet. And when people are ill and cannot work, their incomes are affected and poverty increases. If the main breadwinner dies, the family plummets into economic crisis.
Whose city is it anyway? Political and bureaucratic elites – and the middle classes – depend upon the labour of the urban poor, but see them and their homes as a blight on the landscape, an eyesore to be removed.
Demolition and insecurity
The poor work as refuse collectors, construction labourers, handcart pullers, vegetable vendors, factory workers, domestic servants and so on. They provide goods and services at rates that most of the city’s people can afford.
But when it comes to their housing, the city turns its back on them. Planning does not provide enough affordable land. In Mumbai, 55 per cent of the population lives in slums, occupying only about 8 per cent of the habitable land. Slums are demolished, and slum-dwellers live in deep insecurity. Demolition achieves little, people simply shift from one part of the city to another. Do the policy makers who fail to recognize this really believe that people will go back to their villages or small towns when they have come to the cities for opportunities that do not exist at home?
Demolition causes the poor to spend on rebuilding their homes, driving them further into poverty. It also affects their incomes. Poor families work in their houses to generate income, but the insecurity prevents them from investing in their tiny businesses, and from improving their conditions of existence.
Herdinand de Soto describes how poor people in the South are unable to mortgage their homes for loans for small business because they do not have clear title to their land. He argues that the capital of the poor exceeds all aid given by the World Bank and other international agencies – but remains unproductive. Attempts to alleviate the poverty of slums and squatter settlements in the South are formulated and implemented by privileged external agents, experts and consultants, international financial institutions, multilateral and bilateral aid agencies and governments at all levels.
A small group of decision makers decides the course of action and there is little consultation with, and barely any participation of, the majority of people affected. Lip service is paid to the concept of people’s participation, but grassroots democracy hardly exists in practice. In particular, entrenched patriarchal values keep women confined to domesticity and do not permit them to enter the public world of government and administration.
Reversing trends
How can we reverse these trends? Firstly, by building the capacities of poor people’s organizations so that their voice is heard where it matters; secondly, by mobilizing women to enable them to participate actively in public life; and thirdly, by forming strategic alliances with external agencies such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), governments, mainstream institutions and international agencies.
Policies and programmes will not succeed unless the poor, particularly women, participate in designing and implementing those that affect them. The policies and programmes of the key actors must be influenced to become pro-poor. Roles and relationships must be realigned so that community-based organizations have a much larger say in governance. Only by strengthening such grassroots organizations can political parties and governments be held accountable for their deeds.
City development plans must keep in mind the needs of the poor. Tenure should be secure. There should be no demolition without resettlement. Land and infrastructure should be provided to the poor at affordable rates.
We must create space for hope by building inclusive cities. This will only happen when the urban poor become authors of their own destinies rather than characters in somebody else’s manuscript
Jockin Arputham
Head, National Slum Dwellers Federation
Jockin Arputham is head of the National Slum Dwellers Federation in India, one of the largest ‘urban poor’ organizations and social movements in the world. He is also President of Slum/Shack Dwellers International, an umbrella group formed by urban poor and homeless federations from many different nations – as they support and learn from each other. Having worked for more than 40 years in ‘slums’ and shanty towns, building representative organizations and demonstrating what slum-dwellers’ own organizations are capable of, he has shown what powerful partners slum dwellers can be for governments and international agencies.
Jockin moved to Mumbai (formerly Bombay) in 1963 aged 16, never intending to become a community leader. Initially working as a carpenter and building contractor, he became involved in community action within the settlement where he lived and worked – for instance in trying to get the household wastes collected, in setting up informal schools for the children living there, in getting water connections – and as his settlement of some 70,000 people came under threat of eviction, in fighting the eviction order. The settlement was finally evicted in 1976, but the struggle of the inhabitants to avoid this over many years became very well known in India. Jockin set up the National Slum Dwellers Federation in India which developed to become a mass movement with hundreds of thousands of slum dwellers as members. It formed an alliance with Mahila Milan; savings cooperatives formed by women slum and pavement dwellers, and with a Mumbai based NGO, SPARC in 1984. Since this, Jockin has pioneered a new approach with these two partners – offering governments and international agencies a partnership with slum dwellers and their organizations – to upgrade their homes or to develop new ones – and if low-income settlement have to be moved, that the inhabitants manage the resettlement and influence the choice of location to which they are relocated. The alliance of these three organizations is working at a very large scale – with hundreds of community-designed and managed toilet blocks build in Pune and Mumbai and with programs growing in many other cities; also hundreds of community-police stations set up in ‘slums’ in partnership with the Mumbai Commissioner of Police; and housing projects underway involving tens of thousands of units. In each of these, the alliance insists that it is the ‘slum’ and ‘pavement’ dwellers that must be able to design and manage these – and in so doing, they have demonstrated cheaper, better quality solutions than those developed by governments and international agencies.
In 2000, Jockin received the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.
Also read: http://in.rediff.com/news/2000/jul/26award.htm
