Restorer of Slums

Santosh Thorat, a young father of five, was grateful to have picked up an extra day's work. That morning, he left his home, which he shared with 17 others in an East Mumbai slum, to help a bulldozing crew ward off protesters as they demolished a nearby slum. "That day when I went to work, I thought, 'I don't want to do this,'" Thorat recalls. Three days later, Thorat's bosses demolished his home. Lucky for Mumbai's slums, Thorat was not one to just sit there and obey the status quo. "If all they want is to make Mumbai slum free and tidy... then instead of spending money on demolishing they should have given them money for restoration," Thorat proposed. Today, that's just what the government of India is doing. And Thorat has become a leader in the movement, rebuilding and revitalizing his own 3,000-household slum.

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