At Sewa Nyaya Uththan Foundation (SNUF), we often find that Hindu families escaping religious persecution in Pakistan are not expecting freebies and handouts from others in India. They are here to thrive in a much safer environment. They would much rather find employment or start their business than accept charity. SNUF team admires such values and does everything possible to support them.
New families from Pakistan keep coming regularly to the camp for Hindu families located in Delhi’s Majnu ka Tila area. We recently distributed rations and essential supplies among them. However, some individuals pointed out how they would prefer to sustain themselves by any means of employment instead of depending on others to support them.
Dhanraj Bagdi, who used to reside in Supari Park in Pakistan’s Karachi, moved to India with four other family members – wife, son, daughter, and a brother. His three brothers and parents are still in Pakistan. During the ration distribution, Dhanraj mentioned he would like to start working here if he received some support.
Another Hindu resettler, Prakash Bagdi, who used to sell mobile accessories, expressed similar ideas. His belongings were damaged due to the recent rains in Delhi.
SNUF came forward to help both of them. It was decided that Dhanraj would also sell mobile accessories. The next day, they were given mobile covers, tempered glass, pins, and other items purchased from the Karol Bagh market in Delhi.
They were happy to find employment and expressed gratitude to our team and founder, Swati Goel Sharma.
Ramchand Bhil is a Hindu refugee who has been displaced from Pakistan. Eight months ago, he arrived in India with his family on a religious visa. He was forced to leave behind his home, land, and every other possession, but not his skills in making delicious food.
With help from the Sewa Nyaya Uththan Foundation, Ramchand found livelihood selling ‘Kabuli Pulao’ in Jodhpur. He now beams with pride as the owner of a thriving business.
Ramchand used to live in the Sanghar district of Sindh province. There, he worked as a cook to support himself and his family. However, due to the increasing religious violence in Pakistan, he decided to migrate to India like thousands of Hindus have done over the past few decades.
He began the process of getting passports and visas for all members of his family. After gathering money for four months, the documents were ready. The family first arrived at the Attari Wagah border in Amritsar, and after completing all the paperwork there, he went to Haridwar for a religious pilgrimage with his family. Then he came to Jodhpur in Rajasthan to settle and start his life anew in the refugee settlement in Gangana village.
Ramchand and his family had only 70,000 rupees (in Indian currency) when they came to Jodhpur. With this, they purchased a small piece of land in the Gangana settlement and built a hut.
Although they had come to India, considering it their homeland, Ramchand was now faced with the challenge of finding employment to support his family. He took on whatever work he could find and tried his best to fulfil his responsibilities. Often, he took up daily wage work to run the household. However, daily wage jobs weren’t always available. The children often faced significant hardships due to a lack of work for weeks.
In May, when the Sewa Nyaya Utthan Foundation team reached the displaced Hindu refugee settlement in Gangana, Ramchand shared his employment challenges with the organisation’s co-founder, Swati Goel Sharma.
Ramchand said he was the sole earner in his family and was struggling to find regular employment. Sharing his previous occupation, he mentioned that he worked as a cook in Pakistan and made delicious vegetarian biryani.
Impressed by Ramchand’s willingness to work, we decided to help him. We gifted him a food rickshaw to start his business. We also provided some material for building a house on his purchased land. Receiving the food rickshaw brought immense joy to Ramchand.
Now, he runs his food rickshaw daily, which has increased his income. The vegetarian Kabuli dish he prepares in Jodhpur has become quite popular among the locals.
See some pictures below:
Ramchand arrived in India from Pakistan about 8 months ago. His hut was one of the structures demolished by Jodhpur administration in April
On his request, we @sewanyaya gifted him an e-rickshaw to sell vegetable pulao. Oh my recent visit to Jodhpur, met him at his house. He… pic.twitter.com/WGbO0n7Skt
Shri Haldar works as a cook in residential societies of Noida city of Uttar Pradesh, bordering New Delhi. She earns just enough to get her two children educated – a girl studying in class 11 and a boy who will enter college this year. Shri is a widow; her husband died of an unknown illness only three years after her marriage.
A brave resilient woman, Shri has single-handedly raised her children as her in-laws have no employment either and no other son.
When one of our team members met Shri, she was using a very old cycle for commuting to work that looked like it was on the verge of breaking. Asked why she was not buying a new one, Shri said she would when she able to save some money after paying for the schools and her house rent and other expenses.
The next week, the team member of Sewa Nyaya Utthan Foundation Shri to a cycle store and bought her a cycle of her choice. She was ecstatic. Shri is not someone who would ask anybody for money, but she accepted it when we told her it’s a small gift for the exemplary way she has raised her children without any support. Shri is herself uneducated and cannot read or write Bangla, her native language.
You may see a video below. We have blurred Shri’s face on her request.
Also some pictures”
Shri has raised her children single-handedly for ten years after she lost her husband to an accident. She works as a cook
She could not buy a new cycle as she was not able to save
In December last year, our co-founder Swati Goel Sharma came across a frantic call for help on Twitter. A good samaritan Vikram Kumar Bagde urged the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh for help to rescue a family of blacksmiths that had lost its only son. The man was also the family’s bread-earner as the father was terminally ill.
The son had died as a result of electrocution three years back, which put his old parents and sister in a precarious position. His father Ghisa Ram was fighting the last stage of cancer. The family, deprived of a breadwinner and burdened by Ghisa Ram’s mounting medical expenses, struggled to make ends meet.
After learning the pitiable plight of Ghisa Ram and his family members, Sharma got in touch with them through Bagde. Sewa Nyaya Utthan Foundation supported Ghisa Ram in his cancer treatment. Unfortunately, the killer disease had the last laugh despite our best efforts and that of the doctors. Ghisa Ram breathed his last on August 5.
Ghisa Ram’s teenage daughter Tina is now the only hope for her mother. The foundation helped the family set up a grocery shop in front of its home. We also helped in stocking the shop up as well. Bagde rendered exemplary support at every step, volunteering to steer our entire initiative while we provided monetary support.
We are not just thankful towards him, we are also extremely proud of him. It is such people who make all the difference in society with their humanitarian approach.
An ailing Ghisa Ram a week before his death
Sharma also offered to open a bank account in the name of Tina, so she could have financial security. Tina did not have a bank account initially but is in the process of getting one opened. Once that is done, Sharma had pledged to transfer a substantial amount. We not only sought to prop up Tina and her mother’s lives right now but has also strived to secure their future.
Our founders have always tried to make families self-reliant. We have gifted well-stocked kiosks to several women, who had thought they did not have anything left in their lives. From Rinku Devi in Bihar to physically-challenged Durga in Delhi, we have done our best to set up sources of livelihood for the ‘Lakshmis’ of their respective families.
Tina is another of the girls whom we have helped. The kiosks gifted by us could be turned into rich sources of income with adequate hard work, and we ardently hope that the women who have received them can really benefit from them.
The foundation has also sought to create human chains so that the poor and needy do not run out of support at any time whatsoever. Do support us so that we can continue to save lives.
Ghisa Ram from Madhya Pradesh died of cancer this week. Our team met his wife and minor daughter. Poor family had no means of income
Sewa Nyaya Utthan has opened them a grocery shop. We have also helped them with an urgent relief fund
They say love is blind and often you end up having scant control of your heart and hence, your actions. In the world that we live in today marked by new modes of communal strife, falling in love without knowing much about your suitor can land you in serious trouble. That is what Neetu Yadav of Baraut in Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat district found out, as have many before her.
Neetu got married in 2012 to a man from the same caste. The couple had a four-year-old son. However, the marriage soon hit rough waters. The couple separated in 2017, but Neetu was not allowed the custody of her child as she was unemployed. She returned to her parents’ place after her divorce. She had received Rs 2 lakh as part of the mutual separation, but her parents felt it was too little an amount and started pressurising her to extract more compensation from her divorced husband. Neetu refused. Tired of the demands, she left her parents’ house and began living in a rented accommodation in a nearby village.
Following the breakdown of her marriage, Neetu strove to stand on her feet and be financially self-sufficient. She enrolled herself in a nursing course in Noida. Soon, she started working part-time in a private nursing home in Loni. When her year-long course completed, she got full-time employment as a resident nurse at one Rashidiya hospital hospital in Baraut.
There, she came across a man, who introduced himself as Aksh. They became ‘friends’ and grew closer. ‘Aksh’ was a Unani medicine practitioner at the hospital. They soon graduated from being mere friends. Aksh told Neetu about his divorce and his child. He also enquired about Neetu’s relationship status.
Within a few months of seeing each other, Aksh proposed marriage to Neetu. He said that he longed for a family and a mother for his child. Neetu could not make up her mind immediately, but she not only had a soft corner for Aksh, but she had also fallen in love with him.
Neetu decided to take a rented accommodation outside of the hospital, where Aksh began to visit her in the afternoons. Soon, she became pregnant. Neetu had already gone through the trauma of a divorce and being separated from a child whom she had given birth to. She now started to believe that life had taken a turn for the better. After all, she had found true love and was going to be a mother again.
This time, she was certain that her husband and child would be staying with her. It would be the end of her woes, she hoped. She asked Aksh for a formal marriage; he assured her it’s a mere formality and he would get it done as soon as possible.
However, that was not to be. Fate pulled the rug from under her feet so violently that she was left battered, bruised and shell-shocked. Aksh revealed his true identity in June 2020 when Neetu was one-month pregnant. The Aksh that Neetu had loved and trusted as her saviour and the hero of her life was in reality, Akram Qureshi and a married man. It turned out that Akram was never divorced but had a wife, who too was pregnant.
Neetu met Akram’s wife Rukhsar to confirm this. The meeting turned out to be bitter. As per Neetu, Rukhsar attacked her verbally, calling her a vile prostitute who had seduced her unsuspecting husband. Rukhsar tried to occupy a moral high ground and told her that she was carrying Akram’s legitimate child.
An unrepentant Akram asked Neetu to be his second wife, saying it’s “allowed in his religion”. This was shocking beyond words for a Hindu woman, who had grown up considering monogamy to be morally and legally binding. Neetu felt cheated again. Her love was consigned to the dustbin with such disdain that she wondered if life would ever do justice to her. What sins was she paying for, that too repeatedly? Neetu wondered.
Neetu decided to part ways with Akram. There was no way that she could stay with a charlatan who had cooked up a story to trap a gullible woman. Who knew what more ordeals lay ahead. She realised she would be forced to change her religion to be a second wife. She realised she had fallen prey to “love jihad”, a popular term for the diabolical methods by which Muslim men have been known to entice and ensnare women from other religions in the name of romance and then forcefully convert them to add to the Muslim numbers. Demographic dividend in this polarised world is like gold dust.
Neetu, however, was not someone to go down without a fight, and she found a pillar of support in the form of Sewa Nyaya utthan co-founder Swati Goel Sharma. Neetu registered an FIR against Akram and his family, and Sharma brought the story out in the open through her fearless reporting for Swarajya magazine. Not only that, after knowing Neetu’s plight, Sharma and her foundation decided to do everything in their power to make Neetu’s life better.
Since Neetu was well-versed in nursing, Sewa Nyaya Utthan Foundation spent Rs 1.2 lakh and gifted her a nursing home comprising two beds. This was designed to put Neetu firmly on the path of financial self-reliance and stability.
Neetu is a strong woman, whose fight even while being pregnant, is an inspiration to one and all, and should serve to motivate all those girls who have been silently suffering as victims of cheating or ”love jihad” and feeling too scared to speak up. Today, Akram’s father keeps calling Neetu, begging her to take her case back, mentioning Akram’s pregnant wife and young child, trying to earn Neetu’s sympathy. Neetu, however, is relentless and has vowed not to rest until the cheaters are brought to book.
At the time of filing the police case, Neetu was six months’ pregnant. In January 2021, she delivered her baby, prematurely. Doctors told her the child won’t survive unless immediately taken to a good hospital in Delhi. Neetu rushed to Delhi with helped of a colleague. She could not find a bed in any government hospital. She was running out of time.
Then, Neetu approached us again.
With full financial support from our foundation, Neetu got her child admitted in a private hospital in Dilshad Garden. The child remained on ventilator for a week. Thankfully, she survived. Neetu again thanked us profusely for the timely help. She even offered to volunteer for the foundation as a gesture of thanks.
Sewa Nyaya Utthan Foundation is extremely proud of Neetu and the exceptional courage shown by her at a time when any other pregnant woman would have wanted to keep hassles at arm’s length. Neetu, however, had nothing to lose. She knew nothing about love jihad till she almost fell a victim to it, and now she has decided to fight it tooth and nail. Sewa Nyaya Utthan Foundation is grateful to all its sahyogis, without whom, it could not have helped Neetu to the extent that it has.
Neetu Yadav, who we helped set up a nursing home, thanks @sewanyaya for timely assistance
We helped Neetu with Rs 1 lakh
Neetu is eight-months pregnant and fighting a case against a man who allegedly cheated her after lying about his identity and marital status pic.twitter.com/9mHassxCP0
Delhi last year was torn apart by some of the worst riots in its history; surely the biggest since the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984. Families lost their breadwinners. Many turned homeless overnight. Others lost their livelihoods.
Shyam Sahni lives in northeastern part of the city, which was one of the worst affected by the riots. He used to run a tea stall on rent and had a rented accommodation for him and his family on the floor above. Rioters looted his house and vandalised his shop. They carried away Shyam’s six gas cylinders and stocks of ration. Shyam and his family barely escaped with their lives with the help of their landlord. We met the family as part of our riot rehabilitation drive. We helped the family with a relief fund. We also made sure they were regular beneficiaries of a month-long free food drive in the area during lockdown.
Subhash Gupta was another victim of the Delhi riots. He had a garment shop and godown. His shop was looted and set afire, and was partially burnt. Like Shyam, Subhash also escaped with his life. His earnings of lifetime was tuned into ashes. Sewa Nyaya Utthan Foundation offered a monetary grant from its riot rehabilitation fund to help him in reviving his life and livelihood. Even if we were not able to turn his shop new again, we certainly ensured that the shop is well-stocked. Our indefatigable volunteers have worked day in and day out to help those like Subhash, who badly need it.
Chandrapal Singh, a 66-year-old vegetable seller, found his cart destroyed by the rioters. Chandrapal and his family lost their only source of living. After learning of their plight, we sent them immediate help, with which Chandrapal could resurrect his business. The courageous Chandrapal never gave up despite terrible odds and desrves respect for that.
Sewa Nyaya Utthan Foundation has always tried to rescue families that have been driven to the edge of collapse as a result of misfortune. Our volunteers and sahyogis have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with us to realise our sewa goals. They have hit the streets even when the rest of the society had chosen to stay indoors. We have sought to build a human chain, whereby if one falls, others undertake rescues. The rescued families have never ceased to thank us.
Watch Shyam Sahni’s story here:
Shyam Sahni runs a tea stall-cum-confectionery shop on Karawal Nagar road near Moonga Nagar in northeast Delhi. The shop is on the ground floor while he lives with his family on the first floor, both on rent + pic.twitter.com/sjzCOIFaPO
