a small community in a big city..

In a small place under the Ulubari flyover,Guwahati lives in a community, a community who has migrated from Punjab to Guwahati during the partition of India and then settled there. They earn their daily living by cleaning around places and so they are also known as the cleaners colony. They almost go to work to every corner of Guwahati, starting from Kamakhya to Guwahati Medical College , Secretariat and other domestic places but their existence is hardly recognized.

My first visit there was a rough one. In the broad daylight i was eve teased by drunk surd boys playing carrom on the road, feeling a little uncomfortable i decided to come back. Next day i approached the head man of the Sikh community there, he took me around and showed me the community and their living condition. I then started conversing and making friends. In a few days i got pally with few of the ladies and made a very good friend, Sunita without whose support i would not have been able to uncover those unheard voices.

Spending time with them during the day, I mostly got to interact with the womenfolk. Though i went with prepared questionnaire, i realized it was not the best method with them. There were few unique problems to each and moreover they hardly knew to answer the questionaire appropriately.
Through interaction and observation I realized, there were many grave problems facing that community,lack of awareness was one big problem. Most of the kids there were suffering from water borne diseases, which was mostly ignored as common cold or cough. Tracing down their water source I realized they mostly had one source of water, which they used both to drink and bathe. This water pipe was few inches above the ground which made the water anyway polluted. There was government construction work going on in their area which was slow and delayed causing a lot of pollution.

Talking about employment, their first major complaint was that the fathers were the only working members, grown up boys hardly go out to work and their biggest problem was drinking. Whatever money the fathers would earn, will be spent by them or their boys on buying booze. They had no savings and were not even familiar with the concept.
I then proposed a question of their employment, on which i realized that married women were not prefered by the community to work outside and they got married at an early age of 18 -19. But what came as an eye opener was that most of the women there had successfully crossed their matriculation exam. On asking them the role of the government , they showed some amount of distrust. Apprently most of the girls there were trained in stitching and skilled in beautician techniques but were not employed.

Since i did not have much time in hand, the best i could do was organise a community awareness campaign and invited every Sikh household settled in that community to attend. There i invited representatives of the RGVN (Rashtriya Gramin Vikas Nidhi) ,SIRD (State Institute of Rural Development) and Rotary Club. They spoke to them about forming self help groups and providing employment.
I also initiated a process of distributing filters,for which they can pay in monthly installments and RGVN has taken up the process. With a little smile today I can probably say, every house there today has a filter.

But there is much more to do, their sanitary condition and living condition needs some proper attention. The children goes to their local community school where the teachers hardly turn up. Living in the busy city Guwahati where the rich gets richer everyday  where would these unheard voices voice their opinion? Where is their platform? They did not even know who to approach and who to trust..