The legal system punishes a person for the crime committed. However, society punishes the family by ostracism and often hounding them out of familiar surroundings. Children drop out of school because of reduced family income. Even after serving time in prison, the stigma remains, blocking access to jobs and a reformed life and tends to hasten return to crime. Krupa works at multiple levels to help overcome these road blocks to their social reintegration.
Nomadic tribals, their different life style, poor hygiene and cultural habits, have alienated them from society. They are mistrusted, exploited and trusted only at the fringes of the main stream society. They live in shanties making and selling bead ornaments, flowers and by the kids collecting waste iron bits and pieces by running a magnetised hoop along the roads.
When climate change threatens small farmers’ viability, they turn to work as construction labour. Without even primary education, they are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty, under employment and despair that is carried forward to the next generation.
Urban slum dwellers, are shifted out from their huts to far flung suburbs and tenement blocks. While housing is better, they lack jobs and all facilities that they had in the city. With limited skills, long commutes and poor infrastructure, the colonies are filled with hopelessness, despair, substance abuse and crime.
Illiterate and poor rural people are lured into a debt trap at high interest rates. Unable to settle debts, they enter into bonded labor at brick kilns and rice mills where the pittance they are paid goes towards their loans and to survive, they need to borrow again. Whole families are trapped thus, women and children subjected to abuse. A modern form of slavery!
Where it all began in 1988 even before Krupa was formalised. This community bears the stigma of a disease that people believed were the wages of sin or immoral living. Hated, reviled and rejected by society, patients and their families lived in small communities outside cities and survived by drug running, boot legging, rag picking and begging..
Special children in rural areas have limited or no access to day care facilities that they need. Consequently, the children and their caregivers are under a bondage with the caregivers, who are already economically deprived, find little or no time for a regular job for their sustenance.
Krupa is a registered charitable trust working among forsaken and forgotten people groups, primarily in and around Chennai and Madurai. Krupa’s mission is to these forsaken and forgotten people. To nourish their bodies, inspire their intellects and cherish their souls.
Portrait Mode, Please.