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Help me if you can
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Forum NGO-corporate partnerships can provide solutions to bring the disadvantaged to the mainstream, writes SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY
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Innocence Some of the children supported by DuPont at a Prayas shelter in New Delhi
Little Farzana might scale up to about two feet in height but doesn’t know how old she is. “Shayad Gudiya baji ko pata
hai,” she says coyly, looking at her older sister, and flashing a toothless grin that makes you fall in love with her at once. But Farzana eagerly tells you that she knows she is in Class II, and that her section is “Number 2”. Her second sister, Bulbul, is in the same section, she adds.
This frail frame of a girl also knows that she belongs to Tigri village near Badarpur in Delhi. And well, she remembers something else too that altered her life forever. You don’t have the heart to pose her that question but you can very well imagine that it must have been after rounds of visits to the police station and also to the hospital along with her sisters for physical examination to establish sexual abuse that all three finally landed up in this juvenile home, run by Prayas Institute of Juvenile Justice at Tughlakabad Institutional Area.
“My mother keeps visiting us, yahan pe achcha hai. You get to eat good food, there are a lot of girls to play with, everyone takes care of you,” she tells you quite playfully. And immediately, counts “bat-ball, badminton, football and cheri-chakka” as her favourite pastime. Hearing this, Nisha, her friend sitting next to her, adds, “We also like ludo and carrom. Do you want to play with us?” Ask them what they would become when they grow up and the replies are: “I want to be a pilot”; “I want to be a police officer.”
You laugh with them and love their innocence but you cannot brush aside the reality that no childhood dreams but suffering a similar lot early in life has brought Nisha and Farzana together, and so are the other girls like Gudiya, Bulbul, Soma, Manisha and Preeti. But their relaxed selves and carefree laughs make you think that drunken fathers, abusive relatives and neighbours are thankfully a part of history for them now.
Hostel atmosphere
“We are lucky,” says 12-year-old Gudiya, a pensive sort. More talk with them and you realise that seeing the dark side of life at such a young age hasn’t made any of them disregard gratitude and give up on life. They sleep on bunk beds, almost in the fashion of a hostel, eat the same food cooked at the shelter kitchen, and attend the school run by Prayas.
While some might decide to go back to their families after some time, many end up living on their own once their education is over, says Rajib Haldar, Head of the Prayas team at the shelter.
But side by side the tales of these girls also comes to the notice a trend fast catching up in India, that of the feasibility of NGO-corporate partnership. Prayas is being funded by the multinational company, DuPont India to take care of six of these girls here. “It is a part of the Prayas Anurag Sponsorship programme”, says Haldar. This partnership is but one of the many names in Prayas’s funding list.
Krishnaboli Dutta, DuPont India’s spokesperson at its Gurgaon office, says, “The programme is an initiative by the company employees.” Two other sponsored children “have already been placed in their families after rehabilitation”, she says.
This partnership with the NGO is not even a year old and Dutta believes that it is “a test study” and might double in three-four years.
DuPont also runs a one-room school in the basement of a slum in Chakarpur village in Gurgaon in partnership with an NGO called Human People to People India. With two teachers, it provides three hours of basic education to children of the slum area five days a week free of charge. “Most children coming here speak Bengali at home and so my first attempt was to break the language barrier than teach them how to read and write. Teaching the importance of hygiene was my other priority,” says Renu Sharma, one of the school teachers.
Chaganlal Sharma, the other teacher, says the children are showing a lot of interest in learning computers. The three-month-old school has a computer and that seems to be quite a magnet for both the tiny tots and their parents.
Dutta says besides these two initiatives across Delhi, the company runs many a local community programme at site locations including Savli (Gujarat), Madurai and Hyderabad. “We always try to do something in an area where our labourers reside. There are a couple of initiatives on planning stage for the next year,” she adds.
Hope that includes more and more welfare schemes for children in need. Maybe more Farzanas and Nishas can be helped.
(The names of children have been changed to protect identity)
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