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(Naveen Kumar is a former college lecturer and founder of Atchayam Trust, an initiative aimed at making India beggar-free)
These days’ people post before and after pictures of their physical appearance after some fancy diets on social media.
For us the term has an entirely different connotation. Many of the people whom we pick up from the streets for rehabilitation are in such dire situations that once we nurse them back to a healthy life, they look way beyond recognition.
We have a nursing team that offers haircuts, shaves and baths. For most of them, it is the first experience of its kind in ages. The joy we get to see on their faces is our greatest happiness.
Once we make them ready for life, our next step is to find suitable job opportunities for at least some of them, so that they don’t go back to the streets again. This doesn’t work all the time because many of the beggars we find on the roads have some sort of physical ailments or the other that prevents them from doing any kind of work. Others are just too lazy to do anything. Then there are people who are mentally unstable.
We divide them into various categories so that we can initiate rehabilitation works accordingly.
Since I started Atchayam Trust in 2014, we have managed to provide jobs to 83 beggars in capacities as watchman, cook and drivers.
During the first lockdown, our team ensured that none of the people living on the streets were deprived for food. We managed to get special permission from the local district administration to conduct our services. With their help we rented out a government school building and provided food and accommodation to the people whom picked up from the streets.
Then in 2020, after nearly six years, we got financial support from a local philanthropist to construct a building of our own. Our mission now is to make Erode beggar free by 2025.
(Continues)
(In conversation with Sangeeth Sebastian, founder Vvox, a sextech platform. The series is a part of an AKADialog initiative to capture the lives of newsmakers.)