SHANTI SHINDE STANDS at the edge of the pit and points to the foul black water at its bottom. “We’ve first got to pump that out,” she tells me. “Then, line the ground with large paving stones.”

Shanti and I are in the middle of a Mumbai slum. A 20-seat community toilet block is being built here by a slum dweller’s organisation to replace an unusable municipal toilet. The new facilities will be a boon for the slum’s 2500 residents, most of who currently have to defecate in the open.

It’s hot and sticky under the noon sun, but Shanti patiently describes how a two-storey community toilet is constructed. As the 39-year-old mother of two talks briskly, it’s hard to believe that she’s a poor, illiterate product of a Mumbai slum.

“How do you know all this?” I ask. Shanti smiles. “It’s all thanks to Sir.”

JOCKIN ARPUTHAM – Shanti’s “Sir” – sits cross-legged on the floor of his office in Dharavi, Mumbai’s largest and most notorious slum. The room is packed with slum dwellers. A small man wearing a light blue long-sleeved shirt and dark pants, Jockin is talking on two mobile phones at the same time, as well as to an anxious-looking woman before him.

One of her children has leukaemia, and Jockin has been trying to raise money for the treatment. He’s also been sounding out Mumbai’s municipal hospitals for a nurse’s job for another of the woman’s daughters.

“Come on Monday,” he finally tells the mother in Hindi. As she touches his feet and leaves, one mobile phone rings.

“No,” Jockin tells the caller in Marathi, the local language. “I’m meeting the municipal commissioner on Friday morning.”

He’s barely disconnected the phone when there’s a call from Nairobi. “Hello Jane,” Jockin says, switching to English. “Yes, I am going to Zambia. The Minister from Zimbabwe was here and I took him to London for the affordable housing meeting.”

If Jockin seamlessly straddles many worlds, his mission in each is the same: to get decent housing, sanitation and livelihoods for slum dwellers – of whom he is one – by developing their strengths as individuals and as communities. In the past 25 years, the organisations he has created and partnered have helped improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in India and more than 30 other countries.

Says former UN Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson: “The work of Jockin and his far flung network of associates is perhaps one of the most successful anti-poverty initiatives in urban Asia and Africa today.”

ALTHOUGH 63-YEAR-OLD Jockin spent most of his life in a Mumbai slum, his family was originally well off. When the young Jockin went to school, servants would carry his books and snacks. But because of his father’s alcoholism, the family sank into poverty.

At 16, Jockin dropped out of school and left home, eking out a miserable living in Bangalore working for a carpenter. At one point he grew so desperate that he swallowed poison. Fortunately, he threw it up.

In 1963, an apparently prosperous uncle invited the teenager to live with him in Mumbai. But when the uncle turned out to be a small-time smuggler living in a large slum called Janata Colony, Jockin moved out. He remained in the slum, sleeping in the open and bathing at a public tap.

Janata Colony, like all Mumbai’s slums, was a bustling township. As he began making a living building and repairing huts, Jockin became involved in the life of his 70,000-odd community. He began by organising singing sessions for the children, and then started an informal school.

Next to the school was a huge pile of rubbish, which hadn’t been cleared; the municipality’s garbage collectors didn’t service the colony. So Jockin thought up an ingenious plan to needle the authorities into doing their job.

At six one Monday morning, several hundred schoolchildren gathered before the rubbish mound. Each child packed about a kilogram of garbage in a newspaper. Then, singing and shouting, the children walked to the nearest municipal office – which hadn’t yet opened – and dumped the stinking packets outside its doors.

The municipal officials were furious with Jockin. But they agreed to send a truck to regularly remove garbage from the colony.

“That incident changed my life,” Jockin recalls. It taught him the power of an organised community.

Jockin quickly became one of the colony’s key youth leaders, well-known for activities ranging from community clean-ups of municipal toilets to arranging illegal water connections.

Then in the late 1960s, the municipality ordered the colony’s residents to leave their homes and move to another site a couple of kilometres away, saying that the land was needed by a government agency to build 700 apartments for its employees. The residents protested, pointing out that, unlike most Mumbai slums, which were built on illegally occupied land, Janata Colony had been established by the municipality 20 years earlier. But the authorities were adamant.

A prolonged struggle ensued, with Jockin in the thick of it. He organised road barricades, public meetings and demonstrations, lobbied national political leaders, and filed court cases against the government. He was arrested dozens of times – though he also occasionally managed to evade capture by concealing himself in the midst of large groups of slum women.

Jockin’s actions attracted considerable international attention. But it didn’t matter. In May 1976, bulldozers flattened Janata Colony.

DURING THE NEXT FEW YEARS, Jockin, supported by various pro-poor Christian organisations, travelled to different cities in India meeting slum leaders and housing activists, who were all struggling to check demolitions. They decided to band together and create a National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) with Jockin as president. Today, NSDF has around two million members across 72 cities in India.

Meanwhile, Jockin’s ideas were changing. He was coming to the conclusion that large-scale improvement in the lives of the urban poor was possible only if strong community organisations cooperated with the government. But that didn’t mean the poor simply accepted whatever the authorities did. That was why so many development projects had failed. The poor had to have a major say in the design and running of such projects. Moreover, they had to prove to the authorities that they could acquire – despite their poverty and lack of formal education – the skills to oversee projects that affected them.

This strategy was no magic bullet either. The journey would be long and arduous. Infinite patience would be required. But given the government’s unmatched power and resources, there was no other option.

IN THE MID 1980s, Jockin learnt about an unusual Mumbai organisation called SPARC (Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres), set up by a group of professional women dissatisfied with traditional social work. These women, like him, believed that the poor must be organised. SPARC worked with women pavement dwellers and was convinced that women had to be at the vanguard of the poor’s bid for a decent life. Women knew what their families lacked and needed better than men, and they were much more committed to getting it.

In July 1985, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the Mumbai municipality could start demolishing all pavement dwellings in the city from November. The ruling sparked off panic. Politicians and radicals talked of resistance, but the women pavement dwellers would have none of it. They knew that in any confrontation they were bound to lose.

What could be done? To focus public attention on the crisis, SPARC carried out a detailed survey that revealed that pavement dwellers were the poorest and most vulnerable of Mumbai’s poor.

SPARC’s survey report, released in mid October, received wide publicity. Impressed, Jockin met its director Sheela Patel and suggested that their two organisations join forces. It would be an unusual alliance between a street-savvy slum leader and an upper middle-class activist. But it was to prove enormously fruitful.

All Jockin’s colleagues in the NSDF were men, but Jockin instinctively realised that it was mostly from SPARC’s sisterhood of pavement dwellers that the NSDF’s future leaders would spring.

At his urging, the women pavement dwellers began to discuss the kind of houses they’d like, learn the basics of construction and save money. Since the women were illiterate, Jockin taught them how to estimate length by using saris (traditional costume) and mangalsutras (necklaces worn by married women.)

Sheela recalls worrying if all this wasn’t raising false hopes. But Jockin disagreed. “If you don’t have faith,” he told her, “you shouldn’t be in this business.”

Over the years, 60,000 women all over India – they call themselves Mahila Milan (women’s congregation) – have saved more than Rs70 million ($1.52 million). And with the help of banks and other organisations, they’ve disbursed nearly Rs100 million ($2.17 million) in loans.

A firm believer in the poor learning from one another, Jockin began spreading his ideas abroad. In 1989, a group of poor Asian women attended a Mahila Milan workshop in Mumbai, and two years later, the NSDF started a programme of regular exchanges with South African slum community leaders. Today, the Slum/Shack Dwellers International connects poor communities in 34 countries.

Another key concern of slum dwellers is sanitation. The NSDF, in partnership with a number of Indian municipalities, has designed and built more than 800 toilet blocks in slums benefiting several hundred thousand people. The contractors for the majority of these blocks are women like Shanti Shinde.

SUNANDA KAMBLE OPENS the door of her ground floor apartment in a Mumbai highrise and lets me in. Her 14-year-old daughter Trupti is playing games on the computer.

The 20-square-metre flat Trupti, her parents and two brothers live in is a bit of a squeeze, but infinitely superior to their earlier home: a flimsy shack a few metres from a railway track.

For decades, thousands of such shacks had slowed passing commuter trains to a crawl. Finally, in the late 1990s, a government plan to speed up train services by resettling 60,000-odd people who lived alongside the tracks was drawn up with the World Bank’s help and the alliance was given the mammoth task of organising the shift. The railways, without any warning, began demolishing huts.

It took five days before Jockin and his colleagues, cornering every top government official they could, forced the railways to stop. Meanwhile, more than 2000 huts were destroyed and their residents forced to live out in the open.

Jockin did not let the outrage deter him from continuing with the resettlement. Families were housed temporarily in transit camps, quickly built by the alliance at two-thirds the normal cost. Over the next year, the affected people were shifted to new homes. It was one of the world’s largest resettlement projects and its smooth execution prompted a team of Kenyan officials facing similar problems in Nairobi to come to Mumbai to learn how it was done.

Back in the present, Jockin is chatting away with a group of NSDF women after a party. How long can he go on like this? He’s 63 and suffers from diabetes. He’s had a coronary bypass. He owns practically nothing, not even a bank account.

Jockin looks amused. “This is my life,” he says. “This is what I enjoy. My only prayer is that when I die, it will be at a meeting, or while I’m walking in a slum, or at a get-together like this.”