"Jockin-sir" is what thousands of former and present slum and pavement dwellers in Mumbai call Jockin Arputham, the founder of the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and president of Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI).
SDI today spans 33 countries where 90% of the world's slum population of 800 million people live.
Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) focuses on giving voice to those living in informal settlements, linking up urban poor communities across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
SDI was founded in 1995, with Arputham as its head, to link organisations dealing with urban poverty across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
One development of the concept of SDI in the electronic environment is a computer program that scans computer bulletin boards, electronic mail messages, and similar networked information resources and selects items that meet a user profile.
In response, libraries have provided Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) services, in which librarians choose information that may be of interest to their users and forward it to them before the users request it.
The SDI was intended to defend the United States from attack from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by intercepting the missiles at various phases of their flight.
Though initial funding for the SDI had been approved by the U.S. Congress by the mid-1980s, the program aroused a heated debate among both arms experts and public officials over its military and political implications and its technical feasibility.
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), dubbed "Star Wars" after the popular science-fiction movie of the late 1970s, was denounced by the Soviets, including Gorbachev, as a dangerous escalation of the arms race, a position also taken by many critics at home.
