Reaching out to the have-nots

My younger daughter visits her aged parents almost every day in the evening. The other day she brought a young woman, who she introduced as her ‘mentee’. I am not sure if that word exists in the dictionary. What Nina meant was that she was mentoring the girl. My elder daughter also mentors another girl. Both ‘mentees’ are completing high school and need to gain confidence in themselves and improve their spoken English.

How did my daughters connect with these girls? On inquiring, I learnt that Nina, now nearing 60, met a lady on a flight from Delhi to Mumbai. The lady mentioned her involvement in a project where more affluent women from established Delhi families volunteer to mentor daughters of domestic helps to help them rise above their present status in life. By interacting with the more sophisticated, the young girls acquire confidence to compete for employment in sectors where their parents could not think of entering. The fathers of the girls were either driving the cars of the rich or were doing odd jobs to make a living. Their mothers were cooks or maids.

Ana, my elder daughter, mentors a young Muslim girl studying in Junior College. Nina’s charge is a Maharashtrian from the Konkan region staying in the Mumbai suburb of Santa Cruz. She is to appear for the high school certificate this April. The organisation that placed these two ‘mentees’ with my daughters is better known in Delhi, where it has been operating for nearly three decades. It is known as Udayan Care. In 2016, it expanded its activities to Mumbai.

One of the girls it nursed in Delhi was sent to the UK by the foundation and emerged as a qualified Doctor of Philosophy in Science. She landed a job in England, but chose to return home to participate in the foundation’s work, including teaching science to those who, like her, were disadvantaged.

I have seen the same commitment in the girls living in a slum colony in Santa Cruz, close to a pharmaceutical factory belonging to the USV Company, founded by a former MP, Dr Vithal Balkrishna Gandhi, an alumnus of Wilson College in Mumbai. In memory of Dr Gandhi’s wife, Dr Sushila Gandhi, the first woman doctor in their Maharashtrian community, the couple’s granddaughter, Lena Gandhi Tewari, who now chairs the pharmaceutical company, has adopted the girls from the adjoining slum and transformed them into young women of promise. I met Lena at my IPS batchmate Soman’s house. Her work interested me. People working for other humans always appeal.

Lena began her mission of uplifting the overwhelmingly Marathi-speaking children of the slum dwellers living around her factory premises much before the CSR rules chipped in. Dance, and later drama classes, attracted the interest of the children. Once attendance was assured she added spoken English and maths to the subjects taught. She herself helped in the English classes and her husband, Prashant, the MD of the company, taught maths. Lena knows all the girls, past, and present, by name! One of the first girls in her class who graduated and then acquired a MBA, landed a good job in the Taj Group of Hotels in the HR department. For a decade now, we have attended every annual day event organised by Lena and her team to mark the progress of her wards.

I know of another lady, a Muslim, who spends a tidy fortune and considerable amounts of energy to improve the lot of young Muslim girls orphaned or in distress. Mumtaz ‘Mimi’ Batliwala hails from the well-to-do Botawala family, which owned prime land in front of the Mahim creek in Mumbai. Mimi and her sister, Shaneem, have turned their family property into an orphanage where 50 or more girls are housed, fed, sent to municipal schools every day in its own bus.

Mimi herself was a disciple of the great yogi, BKS Iyengar, who used to visit the orphanage whenever Mimi invited him for her yearly event. Yoga still is an essential ingredient of the evening programme.

The personal attention Shameen and Mimi have paid to the smooth and disciplined running of the institution prompts their numerous friends to render help whenever they are troubled by neighbours, petty government and municipal officials or Wakf Board members.

In Mumbai, it is not too difficult to find women and men who care for others, especially the dispossessed. But I was happy to know that in Delhi also, where the culture is different, a woman pursued her quest to ameliorate the lot of the daughters of domestic helps. Kiran Modi started Udayan Care to help women in distress 27 years ago in Delhi. It has spread its wings and its message to 20-odd centres across India. In 2016, it extended its activities to Mumbai. Today, it has 130 volunteers in the city and in the adjoining city of Thane. ‘Udayan Shalini’ is the Udayan Care’s activity that has made a difference to the lives of young girls whose parents do odd jobs. Pooja Mehra shifted to Mumbai from Delhi in 2003 and is in charge of the project here. This programme has already touched the lives of 9,600 girls since 2003. Panchkula and Kurukshetra are two centres where the NGO has been active.

As more and more of the haves come forward to lift the have-nots from their positions at the bottom of the social ladder, the ladies who live in the high-rises of smart and not-so-smart Indian cities will be compelled to do their own scrubbing of pots and pans, sweeping and swabbing the floors, cooking their own food and putting the washing out to dry! They do this in the West. We will find ways to adjust, like the Americans and the Europeans have. A start was made during the Covid lockdown when domestic helps were prohibited from entering gated communities.

The lockdown regulations are now relaxed. Yet, some intrepid ladies I know continue to huff and puff!