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PRAYAS

PASUMAI TRUST

Prayas

Prayas means 'an effort'. It is an organisation started by Jatinder Arora in 1998. A journalist by profession with a leading publication in Delhi, Jatinder's life changed completely when she met with an accident that caused her the loss of her eye sight. This incident enabled her empathize with other 'challenged' individuals especially children. She understood their hardships; pain and the difficulty these children were faced with in conducting simple activities. She volunteered her time at a nearby school for the physically and mentally challenged children.

Working with these children was a huge motivation for Jatinder. Children gathered round her and competed with one another to show her round, illustrate the pictures in their books to her or just simply to hold her hand. She learnt that a little extra care and lots of love is all that these special children yearned for to lead dignified lives.

After undergoing a couple of surgeries, Jatinder regained her sight. She had only one mission - to work for these special children. Thus, PRAYAS was born. Located in Jaipur, Rajasthan, Prayas works with special children especially those with mental retardation, providing them with love, care and opportunities to become self-dependent and useful members of the society. Today, Prayas can be proud of 38 such citizens.

The Approach:

• Education, health care and nutritional support to children with special needs through the Integrated School and Community Based Rehabilitation Programme.
• Mobilise the community, create awareness on the issue of disability
• Awareness programmes, health camps among parents with special children especially working parents in slum areas who have to leave their children at home.
• Vocational training in skills like tie and dye, paper bag making and card making. The products produced by children are sold and the proceeds earned from the sale are put into the individual accounts of these children.

The Result:

The novel approach of inclusive education for all children - challenged and non-challenged children - encourages learning and interaction that has truly worked wonders. Today, children who were earlier neglected, left at home are Prayas's protection. It has begun home based programmes for adults, parents to help their children perform basic activities like going to the toilet among others.

Jatinder's dream of a 'dignified', healthy and happy childhood for every child has started taking shape. She has been allotted land at 10% of the reserved price for a disability friendly building and with this Jatinder hopes to accommodate many more children and restore to them a future that is rightfully their own.

CRY's role

• Funding the education centers and health camps
• Funding the community organisers who brought the community together, giving them a perspective on their rights and this issue.
• Helping Prayas plan campaigns and programmes aimed at mobilising the community.
• Providing training and organisational inputs that ensured the accountability and effectiveness of the programmes.
• Linking the child rights agenda with the macro issues of livelihood.
• Linking Prayas to other NGOs through the state and the country, thus enabling them to share experiences and learnings.

This, in a nutshell, is what CRY attempts to do with each of the organisations and thousands of communities it works with. The core of which is the belief that each child has rights that society and the state owe her - the right to survive, to develop, to be protected against exploitation and to participate in the decisions affecting her future.

Pasumai Trust

The brick kiln workers in the villages of Villupuram district, in Tamil Nadu, are mostly dalits. Owning no land or livestock, dependant on exploitative landlords, paid a pittance, shut out from common resources, denied access to the Public Distribution System, squeezed by agricultural policies that favour large agri-businesses and contract-farming, this is the only avenue they have to scratch out an existence. The kiln owners know this, and take full advantage of the situation, contracting whole families for labour, for as little as Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 20,000 from January to July each year. Even this amount is often not paid - being illiterate, the workers are unable to tell when they are being cheated.

Children suffer along with their parents. When the adults migrate, the children have to move as well, as there is nowhere to stay and no one to look after them. Schooling, rare to begin with, is discontinued. Access to Primary Health Centres (PHC) is arduous. Older children are soon put work, kneading and moulding clay. Little ones are ignored, and often get hurt falling into sand pits or being hit by falling bricks. Girl children are the worst hit as gender discrimination is rampant. Girls are not wanted, as the dowry system is widely prevalent. If, at all, girls are sent to school, they are invariably pulled out to do the household chores or look after their younger siblings. Most are married before they turn 18. These issues affect the children's very right to survival.

K. Murthy knows all this, for he hails from a landless dalit family himself. After completing class 10, he had to drop out of school and start working in a brick kiln due to economic compulsions. He started his career in the development sector, in 1989, as a Non Formal Education (NFE) teacher cum community organizer. In 1998, he received a fellowship from CRY (Pasumai trust is an ex-CRY project) to work among the brick kiln workers in Thiruvallur. For 6 years, he soldiered on, single-handed, to bring school drop-outs back into the education system, conducting NFE centres to help children who had dropped out and lobbying with local schools to readmit the children in the middle of the academic year. He was able to develop a good rapport with the migrant workers in the kilns.

In 2002, CRY started supporting Pasumai Trust, a program of which Murthy is the Managing Trustee. Pasumai Trust initiated work in the five villages and brick kilns of Villupuram district.

The approach:

• Collects and analyses data on various parameters related to children and child rights (e.g. infant mortality rate, number of malnourished children, children in school, children who have dropped out). This is used to make the parents, women, and community at large aware of their rights, so that they can demand their basic requirements from the local government bodies.
• Organises brick kiln workers into cohesive groups that are not afraid to demand and obtain their rights, thereby ensuring the rights of their children too.
• Facilitates sustained community intervention to address the systemic and structural issues affecting migrating communities. In the process, they have mobilised the brick kiln workers, strengthened women groups so that they take part in village development activities, brought dropouts back to school, enabled community action (through the panchayats) to retain children in the villages and prevent them from migrating along with their parents.
• Focusses on interventions at the policy level to ensure the livelihood rights of traditionally agricultural communities who are forced to migrate every season, affecting the childhood of their children.

CRY's role

The partnership with Pasumai trust has been a real learning experience for CRY. What have we contributed?

• Linking of the child rights agenda with the macro issues of livelihood
• Helping Pasumai Trust plan campaigns and programmes aimed at mobilising the community (especially the migrant community) and creating awareness among them about the importance of child rights
• Providing training and organisational inputs to Pasumai Trust to ensure the accountability and effectiveness of the programme
• Linking up Pasumai Trust with other NGOs, activists, lawyers, academicians and so on, through the state and the country, enabling them to share experiences and learnings