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“Get up, Stand up
Stand up for your rights.
Get up, Stand up
Don’t give up your fight.”
~ Bob Marley
The Women’s Collective work started with the objective to institute a collective of homeless women from the city by enabling and empowering them to protect and promote their rights.
Following rapid urbanization and industrialization 1990s onward, there has been an increase in the urban homeless population living without adequate housing, healthcare, food, water, education facilities. Declining profitability of the agricultural sector, lack of employment opportunities in villages, promise of a better life in the cities, has led many to uproot themselves and move to urban cities. On top of this mental health distress, family violence, localized riots etc have also contributed to distress migration. The cities and governments are unable to cater to this growing number – leading to people living on pavements, under plastic sheets, under flyovers, in makeshift shanties. They are viewed as illegal encroachers despite their contribution to the informal economy as people with odd jobs – like rickshaw pullers, rag pickers, vendors, and domestic workers.
The state has often looked at this with a short-term solution, often evicting them and throwing them in overcrowded vagrants’ homes. This has disintegrated family units, adding to the duress the urban homeless already live under. Even in this deplorable living conditions, it is the homeless women and children who are at the highest risk of violence. It is hence, the homeless women who have emerged as a visible and vocal majority with gender specific demands concerning livelihood, sexual and reproductive health, childcare, privacy, security and rehabilitation.
In Iswar Sankalpa’s experience over the years, working on the street communities, despite these odds, these homeless persons lend support to the homeless person with psychosocial disability as a community caregiver and shoulder the responsibility with a smile.
Additionally, it has also been observed that the population residing in the homeless shelters in the city are not always entirely ‘homeless’ by definition, and due to the absence of family shelters in Kolkata or surrounding districts, these street dwellers do not avail these shelters as they often live as family.
These experiences led to the starting of the Women’s Collective movement, as a way of empowering women to develop their self-agency and be their own self-advocates.
Women Leaders
Women members under the leaders
