Jockin has not left the room: Celebrating the life of Jockin Arputham (SDI)

With thoughts on Jockin and the things he taught us from:

Father Jorge Anzorena - Arjun Appadurai - Mikael Atterhög - Srilatha Batliwala - Evelyn Benekane - Erik Berg - Joel Bolnick - Somsook Boonyabancha - Robert Buckley - Sundar Burra - Gautam Chatterjee - Beth Chitekwe-Biti - Joan Clos - William Cobbett - Celine d’Cruz - Sonia Fadrigo Cadornigara - André Folganes Franco - Arif Hasan - Chris Hoban - Rajiv Jalota - Thomas Kerr - Inês Magalhães - Jack Makau - Jean Pierre Elong M’bassi - Ruth McLeod - Rose Molokoane - Joseph Muturi - Sarah Nandudu - Tim Ndezi - Pär Pärsson - Sheela Patel - Shirish B. Patel - Anacláudia Rossbach - David Satterthwaite - Alex Silva - Lindiwe Sisulu - Rajesh Tandon - Jane Weru

Details of publication and publishers: Joel Bolnick, Sheela Patel and David Satterthwaite prepared this book and edited it, with the support of Indu Agarwal and of Holly Ashley (who copyedited it).

1.1 Introducing this book and how it is structured

Joel Bolnick, Sheela Patel and David Satterthwaite

Jockin Arputham died on 13 October 2018. A slum leader who redefined the role of slum/shack dwellers first in Mumbai, then in India and then globally. Founder of the first National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and one of the founders of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI). For more than 50 years, Jockin had sought to ensure that the residents of slums/informal settlements and their organisations were at the centre of designing and implementing solutions. In 2014, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, alongside SDI.

But Jockin has not left the room… because his incredible gift to us, the federation approach, lives on.2 His vision of giving voice and a seat at the development table to all the urban poor needs to continue guiding us all.

This approach supports community-managed savings groups all over a city, formed and managed mostly by women to address immediate needs. These savings groups create federations to learn from each other, support each other and help develop responses to larger city issues – with national federations, and with SDI at a global level, supporting and learning from all the savings group-led initiatives. It has been able to support many federations working at scale, sometimes alone but in most cases in hardfought partnerships with local governments.

There are also all the strategies, tools and methods Jockin developed with women and their communities, around issues that mattered most to them. They are increasingly available to all, so that now they are being used in hundreds of cities in over 30 nations. This approach, pioneered by Jockin, has begun to transform the way that the governments in many of these cities view ‘slum’/shack dwellers. It has also transformed slum/shack dwellers, who 2 For more details on the federation approach, see Sheela Patel’s contribution in Part 1: Jockin has not left the room. 8 have become organised and ready to struggle for and then to work in partnership with local government agencies on a growing range and scale of different initiatives.

This book brings together memories of Jockin from a large and diverse range of people. We encouraged contributors to include stories of working with him and reflections on what he taught them (and he did teach all of us). But the contributions do more than this – they contribute to a deeper and more detailed documentation of Jockin and the slum/shack dweller federations. They fill some spaces in our understanding of Jockin and the momentous social and political changes he drove and inspired.

How do we respond to this legacy? By living and working with his principles and strategies that are described in contributions by Sheela Patel and Celine d’Cruz. Can we prepare regular reports to Jockin on progress within the federations as Joseph Muturi’s contribution does? And keep him in our rooms? As Somsook Boonyabancha notes, ‘Even now, after he has died, when I have some really difficult thinking, or see something happening that disturbs me, I think about him, and carry on those conversations with him in my mind. In this way, I still talk to him, still get inspired by him.’

The book’s structure

For the reader that does not know much about Jockin and SDI, it may be difficult to make sense of all the stories the contributors tell. To help guide the reader, we have included a timeline, showing Jockin’s work over 50 years and Jockin’s own description of his early life.3 Box 1 has short descriptions of the key institutions that figure in most of the contributions. Also, throughout the book, there are references to tools and approaches that Jockin developed that are used by all the federations. Brief descriptions are also given of these in Box 2.