Excerpt
SUMMARY: Slum Dwellers International, an advocacy organization started in India, has had success rallying large numbers of marginalized people to push for their rights and get basic amenities like toilets, electricity and permanent shelter. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro talks with founder Jockin Arputham about his lifelong calling to improve living conditions and empower communities.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour): Few cities display a wider gap between haves and have-nots than Mumbai or Bombay. Real estate here is costlier than Manhattan, yet two-thirds of this city of 16 million people live in slums, crammed spaces that are technically illegal and by most measures unfit or unsafe for human habitation.
It’s here that Jockin Arputham is a towering figure, even though he’s barely 5 feet tall. His efforts have helped nearly 40,000 families get out of dangerous and unsanitary improvised shelters to complexes like this one, which is now providing new homes for squatters who are living under electric towers.
So you have 600 families here?
JOCKIN ARPUTHAM, Slum Dwellers International: Yes.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Six hundred. And how — OK. How much of a dent does that make? Are there are many more families who still need to be rehabilitated?
JOCKIN ARPUTHAM: There are about 3,000 families to be rehabilitated in this kind of scheme.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And this is just people who are squatting in electric towers?
JOCKIN ARPUTHAM: Yes.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The apartments may not look like much, one 225-square-foot room, but of brick and mortar, instead of plywood or tarp. They have running water and something the majority of Bombay’s residents don’t, a private toilet.
Of all the indignities suffered by slum dwellers, Arputham says none is more humiliating than not having a toilet, private or public.
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