Jockin Arputham

Jockin Arputham (15 August 1947 – 13 October 2018) was an Indian community leader and activist, noted for over four decades of work on issues related to slums and shanty towns. He was born in Karnataka, India and moved to Mumbai, where he became involved in community organizing and leadership. In 2011, he received the Padma Shri for his contributions to social work. In 2014, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the organisation he co-founded, Slum Dwellers International. When he was 16, he moved to Bangalore looking for work.

Politicization When he was eighteen, he moved to Mumbai where he worked as a carpenter and building contractor. Since he had nowhere to live, he slept on the street in Janata Colony, a slum of 70,000 people. He worked at the construction of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). Seeing that he did not need credentials to do so, he began a company to manage workers and organised a school in the slum. The city did not organize a rubbish collection, so he encouraged 3,000 children to bring a bag of garbage to a picnic at the council offices and won a regular rubbish collection service.

Between 1971 and 1972, Arputham went to Kolkata to work with refugees escaping war in Bangladesh.

Back in Mumbai, when Janata colony was threatened with eviction in the 1970s, he helped organize protests and court cases. He was arrested over 40 times. He also sat outside the Parliament in Delhi for 18 days until the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi would see him. She promised they would not be evicted, but in 1976, 12,000 police stormed the slum and evicted all 70,000 people in one night. Everyone was forcibly transferred to the still extant Cheetah Camp slum.

Arputham has also worked with the police to set up "police panchayats" in many of the informal settlements in Mumbai. Here, for the first time, police are assigned to work in these settlements and are supported by a committee of ten residents from the community (made up of three men and seven women). The concept was pioneered by Anami Narayan Roy, the Police Commissioner of Pune.

Awards 2000: The Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding. 2014: Skoll award for social entrepreneurship. 2014: Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Stefan Attefall, Swedish minister for public administration and housing.

Selected works Arputham, Jockin. 2008. "Developing new approaches for people-centred development". Environment and Urbanization, 20 (2) 319–337 doi:10.1177/0956247808096115 Arputham, Jockin; Bartlett, Sheridan; Patel, Sheela. 2015. "'We beat the path by walking': How the women of Mahila Milan in India learned to plan, design, finance and build housing". Environment & Urbanization, 28(1) doi:10.1177/0956247815617440 Arputham, Jockin; Patel, Sheela. 2008. "Plans for Dharavi: negotiating a reconciliation between a state-driven market redevelopment and residents’ aspirations". Environment and Urbanization 20(1) 243–254.