Being change makers

Updated on: Wednesday, November 10, 2010

A defunct school is given a new lease of life with teachers, attendants and brand-new playground equipment in Delhi's Dakshinpuri slums. From nowhere-to-go to two fully functional anganwadis for Bangalore's pre-schoolers. An ‘obstacle race' called the Kolkata Metro to barrier-free access across an entire section of the underground subway. CRY volunteers make change happen by taking up new challenges and pushing the boundaries for children's rights across the four metros.

Young, trendy, professional... any of these could be used to describe 26-year-old Sharmistha Biswas. But there is another side to this young IT professional. Every other weekend, Sharmistha hauls her heavy SLR camera into an auto and sets off to a dusty construction site, spending hours talking to and photographing children of construction workers .“The irony of construction work is that you can help build some of Mumbai's poshest buildings, but your children will grow up uneducated and poor, like you.” The perception of such ironies, and several sessions in how to handle the camera, powered Sharmistha to live out a new identity; as a CRY volunteer. Under the aegis of a group of amateur photographers called Click Rights, people like Sharmistha received professional training through ‘Child Rights and You' to explore the metropolis of Mumbai from the point of view of the neglected children. Two experienced photographers, Tui and Nathan Sigman, took the group through sessions to develop their skills.

The results were startling. “We collected photos of children playing, making friends, talking, but they had an important difference: they were all struggling to eke out a living, while others of their age are cared for and go to school,” says Alpesh Kandoi, one of Sharmishtha's groupmates. “In Mumbai, we are used to sights like kids selling gajras at the traffic signals, but it doesn't strike us that those kid ought to be in school,” he says. This change in perspective is because Alpesh and four others went through two months of orientation under CRY's volunteer programme. “Photographs speak volumes without being preachy,” says Kreanne Rabadi, CRY's Regional Director. “This is why, after absorbing just how grim the situation of children is, the Click Rights group decided their way of advocating for child rights will be through photography.”

Collective power

What led to the idea of pulling people together to work on child rights was the realisation that the urban middle classes, a growing segment, are a reservoir of energy and the power to influence others. To tap into their potential, CRY creates public action groups around a theme to take up any issue close to them and use the collective power to pitch for a better and more caring environment for the city's children. In the process, people find new facets of their identities by pushing their personal boundaries; because of the insights they gain into the world around them. Alpesh, for example, made friends with and followed 12-year-old Sachin, a street child, with a camera. The photos that he and the group took were exhibited at a most unlikely place: the busy VT station in Mumbai, where hurrying commuters were treated to large black-and-white photographs of the children they don't really notice: the shoe polishers, toy sellers and children of construction workers. The idea as well as its execution would not have worked out were it not for the power of many that the group used, bringing together trainers, child rights experts and the amateur photographers themselves.

The entire exhibition was as much of an eye opener for CRY as for the volunteers. “Because of the ‘aam junta' nature of the venue, we managed to meaningfully engage 100 people, and conveyed the fact that street children too deserve to be in school; that being poor does not discount the fact that they, too, have rights,” says Sharmishtha. Pulling together an interest group to do something not usually done, in their free time, using their own resources, is a small team in CRY who make up for their few numbers by the sheer energy and commitment they bring to their mission. A small team in CRY specialises in tapping what the team leader, Soha Moitra, laughingly calls ‘the changemaker gene' that they believe is lying dormant in most of us. “What we do is constantly engage with people. What we involve them in is the nature and scale of the crisis that children in India are grappling with today.” Over a period of weekly meets and dialogue, volunteers are gradually mentored to seek solutions to real life, serious problems that children in their city live with.

Diya is the central node for a Kolkata-based group that is called Campaigners for Inclusion, who, in the past three years, can be said to be behind some very significant government decisions on making schools and public spaces friendly for persons with disabilities. “The basic

ideas behind the campaign came up form the volunteers themselves,” says Diya. The group has organised college campaigns, written and performed plays on the streets of Kolkata, conducted audits on how accessible the city's schools are: basically done all they could to draw attention to the fact that the otherwise developed city is not quite easy to live in if you have a disability. Diya's work included finding the group an anchor. “We have a highly motivated activist working on disability rights, Shampa Sengupta from the Sruti Disability Center, who now anchors the initiative,” she says. “Shampa herself is a CRY research Fellow. This way, we make sure initiatives like this spread and grow and are not limited by CRY's own limited resources and time.”

In the process, of course, the first set of hearts and minds that changes are those of the volunteers themselves.

“After my first interactions with CRY on the issue, I happened to be in Germany, and one thing that immediately struck me was how many more persons with disabilities I was seeing in public spaces. I Googled the issue and found what I'd guessed already: that it's not that Germany has more persons with disabilities than India, in fact the ratio of those with disabilities to those without is 1:10 in both countries. The difference is in the environment and attitudes. My six weeks in CRY had changed the way I look at the world around me forever: from not noticing issues that are not to do with me directly to not just noticing, but engaging with the issue. We realized that the Kolkata local subway was an obstacle race for anyone with a disability.” This is from 25-year-old Saptak Mohanto, a student of Geophysics, who helped organize a campaign on inclusive education at his alma mater, IITKharagpur.

Along with others, the group of disability rights activists, as they have now become, also succeeded in making their voice heard at the Government bodies such as Social Justice Ministry. After sustained dialogues with the Kolkata Metro, the authorities decided that its new platforms from Tollygunge to Garia should be barrier-free and have ramps in them. A private school revamped their whole campus to make access easy. The Campaigners for Inclusion joined a nation-wide campaign to demand amendments in the new Right to Education Act so that children with disabilities are able to access education. Taking the ‘im' out of ‘impossible' Most people feel things like ‘changing outlooks' and ‘ policy implementation' are too complicated and give up on their involvement even before starting. This is where Diya's expertise comes in, in helping volunteers walk out on their assumptions and usher in new ways of thinking about problems, towards envisioning alternatives that work.

Being change makers

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