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Hope and home for the homeless
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The name is apt. So is the endeavour. Asha, an NGO working for the uplift of the deprived and dispossessed, is doing its bit to make today better than yesterday and tomorrow better than today for thousands of homeless people across Delhi. UPENDRA TANKHA speaks to Dr Kiran Martin, the force behind sustainable development... .
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IN 1990 Shanti Vihar in South Delhi's Moti Bagh area, was a slum settlement. A year later in 1991 it was transformed into fairly hygienic one-room units with power and water. Who wielded the magic wand? Nobody. Did somebody build it for them? No. They built it themselves. Who put hope in their hearts and showed them the way? An NGO called Asha which owes its work ethic and power to Dr. Kiran Martin who has just been honoured with Padma Shri.
I meet her in her Ekta Vihar office in R.K. Puram which also serves as a polyclinic with nominal rates for the deprived. I shoot all the uncomfortable questions about NGOs at her but she is unfazed. Even today she is full of beans and as enthusiastic as when just after getting her post doctoral degree from Lady Hardinge Medical College in 1985, she started working in Ambedkar Bustee, a slum with 5000 people, where cholera had broken out.
Braving all odds she set up a clinic and put her shoulder to saving lives. Being a qualified paedriatician, she could easily have set up practice in an upmarket area of South Delhi but she chose to help out and work in a slum. She comes from a family of lawyers and businessmen, so it was not money that she was looking for. Service came before funds and recognition much later.
Dr. Martin explains her strategy to me. One can do very little by providing external help: For example, most slum dwellers who were settled in far away houses made for them have sold them and are back to square one. The key is to inspire them to better their lot on their own with minimum help. At Shanti Vihar an interest-free loan of Rs.10,000 each was provided. The 10 by 12 sq.ft. room came up by self-help and the important thing was the loan was not given in cash but materials. Moreover, the rooms are in the name of wives as the husbands tend to sell off and blow the cash in drink or gambling. Even then anybody managing to dispose off will have his room sealed.
I am taken around Shanti Vihar by Soni Sharma, a social worker who has been with Asha since its inception. I spend 50 minutes sitting in two of the rooms which had sofas, all kinds of gadgets and well set-up kitchens. Surely they had come a long way with their living standards changed to levels they could never have once hoped for. A woman from Maharashtra, whose husband was at home and on psychiatric treatment, is all praise for Dr. Martin who had been quite kind to them.
Earlier I spent 40 minutes in a slum called Kanak Durga, which is in R.K. Puram, Sector 12. A group of 20 women had assembled in a concrete civic structure and formed a mahila mandal set up by Asha. The rather cramped space was being used to let the women air their views on their problems. At the same time social workers were interacting with them to enhance their feelings of self-worth. Though they were all unschooled, some had been trained to administer first aid as well as dole out basic necessary medicines, including antibiotics. On almost similar lines bal mandals had been set up to inculcate a sense of hygiene among the young who were also going to schools.
Later I walk through the slum for a while and see how things could be worse for the social workers had got the dwellers to cut out makeshift drains and provided grills. Garbage had not been allowed to spill over and dumped at one place.
About 30 per cent of Delhi's population lives in slums and unauthorised colonies. Dr. Martin's outfit is reaching out to 1,75,00 slum dwellers in 30 colonies across Delhi. She has a band of dedicated social workers who spend long hours working among the deprived. Of course, many of them are paid but all are fired by the desire to help out, without which social work can't simply be done.
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