One might have heard of any number of NGOs serving urban slums, but rarely of their founders who shared the travails of the slum-dwellers. This typical experience renders the social activist and convenor of Campaign for Housing and Tenurial Rights (CHATRI) Varghese Theckanath a class apart. He had stayed for 11 years in Kamalnagar and Musanagar bastis of Chaderghat.
Hailing from a middle-class religious family of Kochi, and having graduated from Andhra Pradesh, Mr. Theckanath initially worked for Santal tribal people of Bihar, and in the process, got influenced by the peasant movements there. After a four-year programme in Philosophy and Religion, he returned to Hyderabad with a resolve to work in urban slums as he believed that urbanisation was a solution rather than a problem for the underprivileged.
Bus trip
Instead of working from outside, Mr. Theckanath decided to understand a slum by being part of it. The question of which slum it would be, was answered by an RTC bus. “From Lakdikapul where I stayed, I took the first bus and got down at the first slum that came my way. It was a bus bound for Dilsukhnagar, and the slum was Musanagar near Chaderghat.”
Finding accommodation was not easy. Local leaders had to be approached and he was once shown a place near the stinking public toilet.
“Finally, I found a room with a mason, a vegetable vendor, an auto-driver, and a gunny-bag vendor as my neighbours. We had a common toilet. Water had to be brought from a pump outside,” he recalled. It was tougher during summer.
. “I always advised students who camped there to go out and work with the slum dwellers to know what they went through.” Starting with tuitions for children, he soon founded “People’s Initiative Network” from Musanagar, which in no time spread to cover 60 slums through 25 schools. Many people who were inspired by him then are now running NGOs in various sectors.
Protests held
In 1997 came the Nandanavanam Project, and one component of it was to evict the slum dwellers around Musi. A huge protest was launched with Mr. Theckanath in the lead under the banner of Nandanavanam Basti Samrakshana Samiti. The movement was later renamed ‘Musi Bachao Andolan’, and became ‘CHATRI’ .
“When you are passionate about something, your body is driven to endure hardships. There were times when I stayed for 15 days without sleep, and when I slept, I did on bare floor,” Mr. Theckanath says.
He is now heading the Montfort Social Institute and works for the welfare of orphans and destitute children in the Montfort Nilayam.
–Agencies