The poor can rise above their situation. All they need is the right environment and opportunities' - Mrs Joshi (above) -- ST PHOTO: WANG HUI FEN

THE womenfolk of Sangalwadi remember life before 2002 well.

Like 40 per cent of their countrymen who live in slums all over India, this community of about 600 in Sangli, a city in the state of Maharashtra, had no toilets.

The women in this slum nearly 400km south-east of Mumbai had to wake up at 3am, and line up along the main road to do their business under the cover of darkness.

If they had to answer the call of nature in the day, they went out to the fields, also in pairs or groups. There, they risked being beaten up by landowners if caught, preyed upon by molesters or bitten by snakes and other wild animals.

Madam Devkuli, a 37-year-old quiltmaker, says wryly: 'We ate only twice a day so that we would not have to go to the toilet too often.'

Then the woman they affectionately call The Toilet Madam came into their lives.

She is Mrs Pratima Joshi, 43, an architect who is also the founder and director of Shelter Associates (SA), a non-profit organisation devoted to housing the urban poor and helping them get access to basic living and public amenities.

Working with NGOs, local officials, politicians, foreign aid agencies as well as the slum dwellers themselves, she and SA spearheaded efforts to build community toilets for Sangalwadi.

Now five years on, she is trying to finalise plans to build proper housing facilities for the community, with help from various agencies.

The mother of two children, aged 18 and 14, says: 'Giving hope and dignity, that is a major part of the work we do.

'A proper home with proper facilities does not just make for better living conditions. It raises self esteem, and is also a very important vehicle for transforming lives.'

Hers is a daunting task.

Last year's United Nations figures put the number of slum dwellers in India at nearly 61.7 million.

But since setting up SA in 1994, she and her team of 18 volunteers and social workers have made significant strides in pushing for the poor not to be left out in urban mainstream planning.

Among other things, the team has built hundreds of toilets in Sangli, found land in neighbouring Pune for slum dwellers affected by floods and secured electricity for two settlements.

The group's greatest achievement, however, is using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a computer program, to build a comprehensive database of information on slum communities in 2000.

With information collected by enthusiastic young slum dwellers, the database synthesises information for each slum and includes precise details ranging from socio-economic backgrounds to access to infrastructure.

It is an indispensable tool, allowing Mrs Joshi to trot out precise facts and figures when lobbying for official funds. So far, SA has surveyed more than 100,000 households in 200 settlements spread over 230 slums in Pune.

The articulate and effervescent woman never imagined she would spend most of her working hours in some of the poorest areas in India.

She had a privileged upbringing in Chennai. Her father is a chemical engineer who set up a foundry and her housewife mother is an accomplished writer and musician. She has two younger brothers who now run their father's business.

She was an all-rounder in school - a performer, an athlete and an avid reader who loved books about the works of famous Maharashtra social reformers like Vithal Ramaji Shinde.

She studied architecture in the highly regarded Anna University in Chennai, 'conceiving fancy five- star hotels and airports which will never be built'.

In her third year at university, while visiting a professor who was working on a community housing project, she visited a slum for the first time.

What she saw shocked her.

'The first things that hit you are the unhygienic conditions - the muck, the tiny tin sheet structures which house so many people, the sewerage running outside their doors. I also saw the hardships of the women, they cooked, cleaned, raised kids, earned an income while their husbands frittered away their money on alcohol.

'The women gave me some of the most humbling moments in the slums: I've seen them hospitable and smiling despite the crummy lot they've been dealt in life.'

Touched by what she saw and convinced she had to give back to society, she applied for and won the Aga Khan Scholarship to study a course called Building Design for Developing Countries at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning in London.

She returned to India in 1989, got married to an electrical engineer and moved to Pune, where she started working with the Centre for Development Studies and Activities.

About three years later, she set up SA with two other architects. One, an American, has since left India, the other took a back seat several years ago because of health problems.

Although her husband and parents support what she does, her in-laws initially couldn't quite understand why she didn't want to work in a posh architecture firm. They've since come around.

'When I first started, people in the slums and municipal officers viewed me with suspicion. Some thought I was one of those ladies of leisure who thought it was fun to traipse through the slums holding pails of water,' she says with a laugh.

The derisive comments have stopped.

'My work speaks for itself,' she says.

Eyes flashing, she adds: 'Just because I'm with the poor, does that mean I have to stop being who I am? If anything, I'd like to pull them up with me.

'It is ambitious but, hey, it is worth trying. The poor can rise above their situation. All they need is the right environment and opportunities.'

Indeed, her effectiveness is obvious during the two days I spent with her in Sangli. She obviously commands a great deal of affection and warmth from the slum dwellers, and she interacts with bureaucrats and politicians with great finesse and street smarts.

But there have also been setbacks and heartbreaks. She says: 'The first demolition I saw was heartbreaking. Without any notice, municipal officers came in with bulldozers and mowed down an entire settlement. I remember there was a child in a hammock in one of the shacks but they didn't care.'

Her spirituality helps her when the going gets tough. She has been meditating daily for more than two decades, and leads a class daily in her home every morning.

'Meditation has helped me put God at the centre of everything. Everything will fall into place after that,' she says.

But she confesses sheepishly that work is never far from her thoughts. She recalls a visit to Singapore last year to attend a conference on urban planning. 'The organisers put us up at the Shangri-La. You know what I was thinking?

'How many toilets I could have built with the room rates,' she says, before breaking into peals of laughter.

kimhoh@sph.com.sg

If you are interested in becoming a volunteer or funding any part of Shelter Associates' work, e-mail Mrs Joshi at info@shelter-associates.org

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'The poor can rise above their situation. All they need is the right environment and opportunities'
Mrs Joshi