Around 5 p.m., when most employees are preparing to end their day at work, the corridors of Parihar — the umbrella organisation that houses Vantiha Sahayavani (women’s helpline and counselling centre) and Makkala Sahayavani (child helpline) are still bustling.
A steady stream of aggrieved people walk in, some directed by the police or advocates, some others voluntarily, to utilise the free guidance and counselling option that the helpline offers. They are weighed down by a wide range of problems, many are victims of domestic violence.
It is a mad scramble to attend to all the cases for the staff at Parihar. The team of six counsellors who joined the helplines and counselling centre in 1993 attend to as many 1,500 calls a month, and around 150 cases where they personally counsel and help rehabilitate people.
“Five people manage Vanitha Sahayavani and one person manages Makkala Sahayavani. We have two support staff,” said Rani Shetty, Parihar in charge, who is technically part of Vantiha Sahayavani but seldom gets to partake in any counselling activities as she oversees operational duties. There are two more branches of the women’s helpline in Malleswaram and Basavanagudi. A newer recruit manages the latter, while volunteers are handing cases at Malleswaram.
Limited funding
Limited funding is what is preventing them from adding more staff members. The ‘donate’ option on the Parihar website that blinks constantly is a not-so-subtle reminder about this. Though the Centre gives them some funding, the counsellors say it’s not enough to cover the costs of hiring more people, which is why the counsellors are now trying to get external funding from donors and corporates.
Over the years, they have had young postgraduates walk in and walk out of Parihar, not satiated by the rather modest pay checks that come their way for the amount of work they put in. “The same number of people which was managing around 50 cases a month over two decades ago is working even now,” said a counsellor.
City Police Commissioner Praveen Sood, who is also president of Parihar, admitted that cash crunch was what was keeping them from increasing the staff strength. The police often divert cases to counsellors at Parihar.
“We would like to increase the number of counsellors. But for everything, there is a need for funds. The government contribution is less and a lot of it has to come from donors and CSR contributions. One has to create a corpus first before increasing the staff strength,” he said.
But the Commissioner ruled out any plan to expand the number of branches. “The new branches in Malleswaram and Basavanagudi are also being run by volunteers. There are a number of NGOs in the city, so I would not say there will be a branch for every police station. When we are not able to sustain the existing ones, how can we think of starting more? We should walk before we run,” Mr. Sood added.
Cases then and now
They were a group of fresh postgraduates when they were hired as counsellors for the Family Counselling Centre in 1993. Twenty-four years later, many of the same core group of counsellors are guiding people through problems unheard of when they first started, and in numbers that they had not imagined.
Senior counsellors, who have been part of the team since 1993, said each of them handle between 20 and 50 cases a day, ranging from domestic violence to requests for shelter. Fifty was once the total number of cases that came in an entire month during the initial years. “The kind of problems we deal with here are hard to forget even when I get home at the end of the day,” said a senior member of the counselling team.
The higher number of cases coming in to Vantiha Sahayavani — a spurt that was noticed around 2002–03 — is not necessarily a bad thing, they said. “Back then, awareness about women’s empowerment and willingness to come forward to complain was very low. Now, more women are willing to discuss their problems and undergo counselling,” said another counsellor.
The nature of cases too has seen a change. As one counsellor puts it, “Earlier, cases that came to us were of discrimination during menstruation, dowry cases and interference from in-laws. The recent cases have more to do with incompatibility. The tolerance levels are much lower. Couples whose weddings are a few weeks or months old come to us for counselling.” She also narrated incidents where the daughter-in-law, for example, had a problem that her mother-in-law would open the door for her husband.
Apart from a spike in cases related to psychological or behavioural problems (a recent case that made headlines was of a husband using cockroaches to scare his wife), counsellors said pre-marital problems were also common now. Domestic violence, however, remains on top of the list of number of complaints.
