ActionAid, in close cooperation with thousands of active NGOs in India, is serving the hapless and deprived people through many innovative programmes such as Anugraha and Karm Mitra.

ActionAid India is a global development body fighting for the rights of the poor and marginalised for over 32 years. In India ActionAid has been working with 3000 NGOs to address the problems faced by some of the most marginalised and exploited communities like commercial sex workers, disabled people, HIV positive people, homeless, Tribals, Dalits, manual scavengers, riot survivors, people living in Chronic Hunger, people living in custodial institutions and street children.

ActionAid not only works to help these communities meet their day to day subsistence requirements but also fights for their rights to social justice

Homeless Women in Delhi

In the heart of New Delhi, in Connaught Place, is a Hanuman temple to which devotees throng at all hours of the day and night. In the murky shadows of the temple courtyard, between makeshift stalls of incense, flowers and prasad, or in its dim corners, live under the open sky homeless women, many of whom have known no other shelter for years, even decades.

It is a shriveled community of tough badly battered survivors. Women of all ages, gather there every night, in begrimed frayed sarees. Some are alone, others tend sick, disabled, drunken male partners, and still others fiercely protect their children in the spaces of the temple courtyard, which are their homes without roof or walls. Street children wander around, bringing cheer and mischief. Older men grope for the women’s unprotected bodies in the uneasy gray darkness of the city’s night, and the policemen intermittently assault them with their batons and taunts. Tempers always seem to run high in the temple courtyard, as women quarrel or a man suddenly smashes an empty bottle on a women’s head.

For a woman whose only home is the streets or open city courtyards, the inhospitable biting chill of winter nights or the foul deluges of India’s city monsoons are the least of her trials. Saroja Devi should know. The streets and temple courtyards of Delhi have been her only home for more than thirty years. Dishonour: this was the overriding feature of her life, as Saroja recounted it, without sentimentality or self-pity. ‘To live on the streets – beizzatti. The policeman beats you with his baton – beizzatti. Any ruffian sits next to you and runs his hands on your body – beizzatti’.

Saroja Devi spoke readily about her life, but it was difficult to piece together the story of her life from the scattered fragments that she shaped with her staccato words. She was born in a village in distant Guntur in Andhra Pradesh. She has faded memories of an uneventful childhood. Her father, the village pradhan, drank heavily and died early. Her mother was kind to her and did not beat her. She was married off at the age of 15 to a soldier. By 20, she was a widow.

All that she recounted about her husband was: ‘Woh English peeta tha’, or that he drank English liquor, not country toddy like the others. She repeated this many times. Most of their years of marriage, he spent at the borders or battlefronts, while she lived with his mother at their home in Hyderabad. She does not recall which war he died in. But what she does remember was that she was stretched in bed, in a stupor of malaria fever, when men in uniform brought home his ashes. She donned the coarse white of a widow, and resolved never to marry again. Her soldier husband left her two young girls, to bring up alone.

With the girls by her side, she returned first to her parental home. Her father by then was dead of over drinking, and her brothers refused to give her a share of their father’s agricultural land. She fought bitterly with them, and eventually left the home of her birth, never to return.

Her next destination was Bangalore. She struggled through many fragile tiny enterprises, making agarbattis, candles and matchboxes. But there was never enough money to feed her children. Her savings were rapidly depleting. She met a woman who advised her that her chances were far better in the thriving metropolis of Delhi. She had never traveled to the north of India, and knows only a smattering of Hindi. But she bravely decided to take the plunge.

Alighting from the passenger train at Delhi railway station nearly 30 years ago, it was not long before she found her way to Hanuman Mandir and its bedraggled collective of forlorn women. Her daughters and she lived mainly by begging and selling flowers.

She longed for some stability, some permanence, some dignity. Therefore, when a woman slumlord offered to sell her a shanty in a slum not far from Hanuman Mandir, she readily gave her remaining savings, a few thousand rupees. She moved into a shanty with her children, and continued to sell flowers outside the temple.

But only months later one day, government bulldozers arrived suddenly brutally and razed the entire slum settlement to the ground. It was government land, she was told. They were illegal squatters with absolutely no rights. The woman, who had sold her the shanty, disappeared. She took with her the life savings of many dispossessed people.

So Saroja Devi returned once again to the temple courtyard, and its community of the solidarity of the luckless. The years were the worst in her life. First her elder daughter died. The government nurse said it was jaundice. She managed to admit her to the government hospital ward one day, and she was dead the next. It was not long before her younger daughter fell from a tree, which she had climbed to pluck its jamun fruit. The child lingered in agony with broken limbs and festering wounds in the overcrowded public hospital for six months. Her mother did all she could to try to save her life, but in the end this child also succumbed.

It was during those months of desolate loneliness that Saroja met Rampyari, a crabby eccentric older widow who shared the community spaces of the temple compound. They cannot say who was initially drawn to whom, but Rampyari was kind to the twice-bereaved mother, and Saroja in turn began to take care of the older woman.

These two profoundly lonely women, each without family or home, decided to adopt each other as mother and daughter. It is a sturdy unwavering bond that has survived more than two decades of the vicissitudes of life on the streets. It is typical of many such alliances that are formed between despised people in the world of the cities’ pavements, sturdier in loyalties, more tolerant of ideosyncracies, and more tender in giving, than most biological relationships.

Between Saroja and Rampyari is another of these unlikely unions of the streets. Rampyari is a widow from Rae Barelly in Uttar Pradesh, proud of her Rajput origins. Her husband used to work in the railway police. He and her sons were killed in a murderous family feud, and Rampyari found her way eventually to the courtyard of Hanuman Mandir in Delhi to survive on her own.

Saroja, on the other hand, dark skinned and of guant frame, fluent only in her native Telegu, is everything that Rampyari with her surviving vestiges of upper caste north Indian arrogance looks down upon. ‘I don’t know what she is’, Rampyari told us. ‘A Madrasi’, she said disparagingly. ‘Maybe an isai. Maybe a kasai. Who knows?’ An isai is a Christian, a kasai a pejorative word for a Muslim. But one day it happened that Saroja gave her tea. They began to take care of each other. Saroja called her mother. And their kinship was sealed.

Together, the two women set up a small way-side stall, under a peepul tree on the pavement in front of what Rampyari described as that ‘very tall glass building’, the LIC sky-scraper in Connaught Place. For years, they sold a variety of trivia – rudrakas from Haridwar, maps of India and Delhi, trinkets, flowers, and newspapers. The bulk of their clients were foreign tourists. They would return at night to sleep outside the Hanuman Temple. Sometimes worshippers would give them money. In winter, there were always people who distribute blankets.

If there was one thing that women of the streets of Delhi are most frightened of, it is a van named ironically after Gandhiji’s ashram Seva Kuteer. The van carries raiding squads that round up people who live by begging and incarcerate them in beggars’ jails for up to three years. Women have to be alert and nimble on their feet to escape their periodic marauding. However, Rampyari is ageing and has been twice jailed in Seva Kuteer in recent years.

Saroja was distraught when I spoke to her because her mother was in the beggars’ jail, serving a year’s sentence. Apart from her husband drinking ‘English’, it was a theme to which she constantly returned as we spoke. ‘We must find a way to get her out,’ she kept telling me. She visits Rampyari every week at the beggars’ jail, and carries her favourite fruits and sweets, wrapped in her saree edge. She also smuggles in bundles of bidis for Rampari, as there smoking is a privilege, for which she had to bribe the caretaker. With her characteristic stubborn resolve, Saroja even managed to meet the Chief Minister of Delhi, Shiela Dikshit, to petition her to release her old mother.