Supporting Vulnerable Women and Children in Kolkata, India

Murshida, resident of Topsia canalside squatter camp is 18 years old. She has just completed her final school exams. Her father is a tuktuk driver who earns about £2.50 (Rs200) a day.  Most girls in this community marry at 12 or 13 years old but Murshida and Tiljala SHED's staff persuaded her parents to let her continue her education.  Murshida has attended Tiljala SHED's classes since she was small and aspires now to become a teacher. She shows every sign of accomplishing her ambition. So how does it worK? How does a child born in a shelter beside a railway line in Kolkata escape the cycle of poverty?   With illiterate parents, mother a rag picker, father a rickshaw wallah and often too drunk to work, both repeating the cycle of 2 or 3 generations since the family escaped starvation as landless rural poor by moving to the big city for a better life?   How can an anxious mother with 6 or 8 mouths to feed every day even think beyond the immediate daily i...

Yesterday, the Kolkata branch of the Nivedita Shakti , a women's empowerment movement, presented an award to 19 year old Shaista Shamim.  The  literature states that she "successfully completed High School examination with 1st Division and is now taking up the onus of educating girls like her with great pain".  But there is so much more to Shaista's story than that.  I quote here from Shafkat Alam, who has been teacher and mentor to Shaista over the years "Shaista Shamim is the second child in her family. She has 4 sisters and 1 brother. Her father is a labourer in the Bantala Kolkata Leather Complex factory and mom does odd stitching work for additional income to run the family. Shaista lives in the Tiljala Darapara slum, one of the biggest slums in Kolkata Metropolitan area. She has been living here since her childhood. She is the brightest and the most ambitious child in her family. She became Gyan Azhar Library member in 2008 when she was a small...

Situated down an alley right beside Kolkata’s notorious Darapara slum and the Park Circus railway squatters encampment, is a tiny room about 2 metres square which has become a beacon of hope for destitute girls from the area.   It is Tiljala SHED’s Beauty Training Salon – a vocational training centre giving hope to girls who would otherwise have had little expectation of life beyond an early marriage and a life of poverty, childbearing and drudgery. Madhu is 19. She lives in a shelter beside the railway lines with her parents, 2 younger brothers and an older sister.  Her father is a street hawker selling sattu (a traditional drink made from chickpeas and spices). He earns around Rs200 a day – that is about £2.20. Madhu is ambitious but struggled with school and eventually dropped out in class 10.   She was an enthusiastic participant in the first batch of girls to enrol in Tiljala SHED’s beauty Training Programme and passed out first in her ...

So, according to this week’s The Economist (March 3 rd 2018), India’s “armies of ragpickers” are responsible for the fact that India does not feature in the world’s top ten biggest plastic polluters.   Despite having the world’s second biggest population at 1.3 billion. India is poor enough, it goes on to say, for ragpickers to exist, unlike Asia’s biggest polluters, like Vietnam, which isn’t.    Well, good for India.   Good for those entrepreneurial souls who can literally make a living from rubbish.   Producing a meal from the proceeds of ragpicking I should also mention on this International Women’s Day that the vast majority of those rag pickers are women.   Illiterate, destitute, and living in illegal makeshift shelters beside railway tracks, canals (open sewers) or on the streets, they scour the streets for waste that they can sell on to dealers.   They are looking for plastics, paper, cardboard, metals – anything they can sel...

Education is one of the most effective agents of change in society. When a child is able to go to school today, he or she sets off a cycle of positive change. But, thousands of children in India lack access to education and can’t even write their own names. (CRY India) Rehan wants to be a software engineer This is Rehan. He is 14 years old and lives with his parents in a makeshift shelter in the Topsia Canalside Squatter Camp, a narrow strip of land with huge open sewers running down either side.  There is no proper sanitation, no toilets and the 2 drinking water taps (for 710 families) operate for just a few hours a day.  Many of the residents here are rag pickers but all work in the informal economy: rickshaw drivers, fruit sellers, daily labourers.  Illiteracy, child marriage, child labour, domestic abuse, alcoholism and substance abuse are rife. Rehan’s father is a rickshaw driver earning Rs3000 – 4000 (£33 - £44) per month. His mother is a housewife. Rehan’...

I visit Kolkata and Tiljala SHED two or three times a year. I love to catch up with old friends and spend time exploring my favourite city.  But most of all I love to be part of the great work Tiljala SHED is doing amongst the city’s most vulnerable communities.   Those who live in the canal-side and railway squatter camps of East and East Central Kolkata lead the most difficult lives.  Originally landless poor from rural Bihar and West Bengal, these families would have come to the big city for a better life. And in some respects, that’s what they have: the chance to collect, sort and sell other people’s waste enables them to eat.  They build illegal shelters on government owned land but are mostly left alone.  Occasional home-destroying fires, disease, lack of toilets and sanitation, drinking water rationed to a few hours a day are probably seen as a reasonable trade-off for leaving the hunger and backwardness of their former rural lives....