“Women just need to look out for one another when it comes to confidence building,” says Kalpana Sankar, the Chairperson and Managing Trustee of the India Chapter of Hand in Hand, an international micro-enterprise working towards eradicating poverty. She was in Madurai to accept the Soroptimist International (SI) Woman of the Year Award.
When she refers to women, she says she not only means those who are empowered like her but also those innumerable faceless women in distress in far flung corners of the country, who silently fight their own battles. Abandoned by their families or deserted by their husbands for reasons common to weird, Kalpana says, she is always touched by the innate courage of these women who create a support system for each other.
“Travel into the interiors and you will find many such informal hand holding networks, they are a case in point,” she says and adds, “when you support women who are seeking change, you cannot imagine how much you can lift them.” And that is exactly what the nuclear physicist has been doing for nearly two decades now, bound that she is to the cause of fighting illiteracy, poverty, unemployment and child labour.
“I call myself a social entrepreneur now, but I discovered social service accidentally,” she laughs. Married to a bureaucrat, she was initially engaged in solving myriad problems of her house helps who came from less-privileged backgrounds. When her husband was posted as Coimbatore Collector, she was automatically drawn into various voluntary organisations and joined the Tamil Nadu Women’s Development Corporation. “Ten years with them as monitoring and evaluation officer helped me reach out to the disadvantaged and I realised how much I enjoy working at the grassroots,” she says. Swedish businessman and philanthropist Percy Barnevik approached her to eradicate child labour in Kancheepuram district, thus giving birth to the international NGO Hand in Hand in Tamil Nadu in 2003.
From those days — when she went door-to-door identifying children who had fallen off the education loop, rescuing them from bonded labour, convincing their parents and sensitising the community to help the children study — to her journey today, Kalpana says she finds it unbelievable how it happened. Today HH International has its presence in 14 countries that have adopted India’s socially innovative models aimed at lifting the bottom billion out of poverty in the next 10 years.
“One third of the 1.2 billion poor people live in India. All they need is three pairs of clothes, two square meals, a roof over their head, a pond of clean water, a school bag for the children and a helping hand that will lead them to self-sustaining income generating opportunities,” says Kalpana, whose consistency in reaching out to the economically weak and transforming their lives has earned the NGO several national and international awards.
In her achievements, she counts 3,15,000 children who were enrolled and retained in schools over the years and can’t erase memories of so many of them including Jayanthi Ekambaram whose parents were brick-kiln workers. At seven, she was forced to join them to augment family income when Kalpana brought her to her Residential Special Training Centre and nourished her with food, care, education and all facilities free of cost. But again her parents forced her into child marriage when she turned 15. “We rescued her the second time and now she is completing her BCom and wishes to become a teacher to help students like her to study,” says Kalpana, who was awarded the Government of India’s Nari Shakti Puraskar in 2016.
From a small team, she has grown in strength and today HH-I works in 16 States with a staff of 4,500 people who are helping rural women redefine their lives through skill development and access to credit for setting up small businesses. “From Bhatinda to Rameswaram, we have helped nearly two million women become financially independent by strengthening the self-help groups,” she says and adds, “help a woman change and the whole community around changes.”
Still, there’s a long way to go, says Kalpana. Access to potable water, business coaching modules for first generation women entrepreneurs, waste management and health care, the key challenges keep resurfacing. “Often they are community and region-specific and we continue to work and support with the hope of closing all the gaps one day.”
The award presentation function was like a tonic for the audience consisting of the club members, past presidents and award winners. In its tenth year of journey, SI-Madurai also refuses to slow down in bringing women out of their shadows. As the 16th club in India and second in Tamil Nadu after Chennai of the worldwide NGO for women, the SI-Madurai’s multiple projects over the years have tapped into creative thinking to promote the best practices in waste segregation, safe hygiene initiatives for women and girl children, educate-to-lead campaign, greening through Miywaki and rain water harvesting and life skill programmes in schools and colleges to name a few.
“We too have a long way to go,” says the club president Janet Vasantha Kumari. “The SI is vehicle for us to be agents of change and it is not about doing it alone,” adds Anitha Rajarajan, the founder president.
