Sharana : A shelter in Pondicherry.

Sharana is a relief association, founded in 2000 by a brave and visionary Indian woman: Rajkala. Sharana, which means “shelter” in Sanskrit, is an association dedicated to the support of development rather being a charity or emergency association. That is why long-range projects at different levels are set up, in order to help the village families all around Pondicherry to enhance their conditions of living. So let’s discover (again) this serious association more in depth.

Two associations, two founding mothers and one common objective.

Actually the association is composed of two different branches: Sharana India and Sharana France. Each of these associations is working according its own skills to achieve successfully the different ongoing projects. The Sharana India team is in charge of the relief works on the field, while Sharana France strives to make the association famous and to raise funds.

*Sharana India created by Rajkala.

Rajkala has already a long and rich career within the relief work, indeed after being awarded a degree to Social Sciences in Chennai; she has been working for 10 years in a famous relief agency in Pondicherry. She discovered there her passion to relief works, and was faced to the practical aspects and difficulties of the management of this kind of association. Even if Rajkala was very involved and motivated by her job, she decided to quit the association,, in order to set up her own organization with another way of doing. Her vision was to replace charity and emergency actions by long-range developing actions.

Indeed Rajakala is a woman with very modern ideas and a relevant vision of long-range development. She wishes to act deeply for the development of unprivileged people, particularly for women. To achieve this aim, she should set up her own frameworks, her own projects and a work team. That is how Sharana was born, with the idea to set up global development projects, integrating the whole community to reach slowly but certainly autonomy for these people.

The beginnings are difficult, because everything has to be set up. Fortunately Rajkala can rely on friends as much involved to relief works than her, like Muriel Baube.

*Sharana France, created by Muriel Baube.

Muriel Baube has always felt the relief passion. Indeed when she was young, she traveled a lot in Africa with her parents, which gave her a very open-minded vision of the world and its needs. As she was dreaming about the end of hunger in the world, that is why she chose to study agronomy and became engineer. She started to work for Danone in India, in Mumbay, that is not exactly what she was thinking to change the world, but she become use to it for a while.

Chance or fate (it depends on the point of view) made that Muriel’s mother was sponsoring a little girl in a relief agency in Pondicherry, where Rajkala was working. So Muriel was asked to go there to visit this little girl. And when she went in Pondicherry she met her mother goddaughter but especially Rajkala. She also discovers the daily work of an Indian NGO, and becomes very motivated by this way of working/living. That is why, she stops her work for Danone few times after, and decides to work full time in Pondicherry in this NGO with Rajkala on her sides.

The day, when Rajakla decides to launch Sharana, Muriel follows her in this ambitious adventure. In order to achieve successfully this project, it is first important to know how the association will be financed. For this reason, Muriel launches, with her husband and her friends, Sharana France, in order to make the association known in France and Europe and to raise funds to finance the developing programs. That is how step by step, the frameworks are setting up, and Rajkala’s team can start to lead actions on the field.

The Sharana’s actions.

The philosophy of the association is to assist in a global and sustainable way the development at a local scale for most unprivileged people.

*A global development scheme.

The Sharana actions include four main themes, which are all essential conditions for development of unprivileged people.

First of all, education is primordial, because the world of tomorrow is building by the children of today. That is why, it is important for every child to get knowledge and to study as far as they want. Moreover, it makes the parents more responsible and optimistic about the future of their children, because they didn’t have the same opportunity. Sharana sponsors many children from villages, who couldn’t go to school before that. Sharana pays the schools directly, and offers evening courses, school supplies (uniforms, schoolbags...), medical assistance and holidays for all sponsored children. The aim of the school is of course to push sponsored children, to study as further than they can. Pressure is particularly high for the girls (50% of the sponsored children), because they know that their future depends on their school success, which involves a big motivation.

The second main field, where Sharana acts is of course economy, to help these families to get out from the poverty circle. The association helps especially the mothers of sponsored children, through microcredit. These small loans are free interest rate, and have to be used to finance activities, which will make extra money for the family. The loans are granted to groups of six or seven women, who are mutually responsible of the refund. This interdependence involves solidarity and the refund rate amounts almost to 100%.

It is important to notice that Sharana doesn’t influence these women about their choices of investments. On contrary Rajkala’s team try to motivate them to find a challenge, they really want to take up. Even if it is difficult to give back self confidence to women, who after years of more or less happy marriage are reluctant to take alone this kind of decisions, many of these women accept the challenge.

The more usual example is to buy a cow, which ensures regularly incomes, because the consumption of milk products is very high in India, so there are almost never stocks. So the woman goes to a cow dealer, chooses a good animal. A veterinary is paid by Sharana, to check if the cow is able to give milk, and if it is ok Sharana pays the dealer. Sharana offers even insurance for the borrower, in case of the cow would die, in order to prevent that the borrower become heavily in debt.

The health matter is also one the major preoccupations for Sharana. Indeed in the villages of Tamil Nadu, there are very few doctors and no social aid. The association owns a dispensary, where screening sessions are organized (eyes, teeth, lungs…). In partnership with hospitals, free consultations sessions are also organized, for which around thirty nurses and specialist doctors come directly to villages and offer diagnostic and treatments to villagers. Indeed as these people have no access to cares, they wouldn’t understand the functioning of hospitals, so it is easier that doctors come directly to them than the contrary. The next step will be to make them independent and integrated to the society, but that will be the crusade of the next generations.

Finally in addition to health, there is a particular attention on nutrition, especially for the youngest. Indeed malnutrition for babies or children can involve irreversible neurologic malformations. That is why a production unit of spirulina has been built. Even if this alga is rather well-known in Pondicherry, it stays something mysterious for public. So it can be useful to remind that this thousands of years alga is a wonderful weapon to fight malnutrition, thanks to its concentration in minerals, trace elements, beta-Carotene, amino acids, iron and other vitamins. So special spirulina diets are offered to children, which also lets to reinforce their immune systems. Moreover as spirulina is a ideal dietary supplement for every child and every adult, a part of the production is sold in Pondicherry and in France. These sales let to make the production unit financially independent.

*A local implementation.

The aim of Sharana is to provide to a small amount of people (village or neighbor) the essential tools for development. The task of the association is rather focused on the training to use wisely and independently these tools than just to offer the tools. The final objective is to integrate people to the development of their own community, in which everyone would play a major role. When the tools are well integrated and assimilated by the community Sharana can propose its services to another group of people. Along the years, Sharana has helped eight villages, in the surroundings of Pondicherry. The association gives priority to quality rather than quantity, for example it would be a big mistake to spread microcredit in a maximum and poor area, without featuring it with a suitable training. The only result we could get would be a worst financial situation for the borrowers.

First of all, the Pondicherry suburbs of Kurchikuppam and Vaïthikuppam have been the first sites, where Sharana acted. So for ten years now, many children are sponsored and go to school thanks to Sharana.

The Angalakuppam village is the cradle of the first community center of the association, which groups together child care center, microcredit center, dispensary. We can also observe that all the children of the village are sponsored by Sharana.

Sodhanaikuppam is a fishermen village, which has been strongly affected by the 2004 Tsunami, so Sharana helps the village in the fishing and schooling sectors.

The Aranganur site is an agricultural field, where the Spirulina production unit has been built. The environment is really amazing for this aquaculture, and reflects on the Spirulina quality. A resource center has been built as well, and the association sponsors all the children of the closer village.

In Chinnakalpet, Sharana supports a evening course school for the surrounding children.

And finally the very poor and remote village of Mathur, where Sharana is really involved, by sponsoring all the children of the village, but also by building a child care center and by supporting women.

So step by step the association conquers many areas by fighting against underdevelopment. By following this logic of meticulous progress, Sharana could be much beneficial in the 10 next years, than what she was in the 10 first years of activities.

Reports and projects after 10 years of activities.

Ten years after the foundation of Sharana, many projects have been implemented, so it is the right time to assess the activities done. At the beginning Rajkala wanted to work in order to reach a society where three ideals would complete each other:

-The maximum of people would be pushed to take responsibilities with the maximum of autonomy.
-Everybody would feel responsible for themselves and for the community.
-Education would be the basement of our society, in order to build a brighter future for the children.

Sharana has strived to act according these ideals, by always trying to make the helped people responsible for their lives. Education as a very important field for development has been a priority for Sharana that is why the number of sponsored children has always been increasing since the beginning, until amounts to 900 children today. This great success results also from the generosity of all the sponsors in Europe or in the USA, who have trusted Sharana.

Moreover Rajkala has managed her association in a very innovative way. Beyond his long-range development ideas, she insisted on the fact that their activities should be assessed not by an audit firm but by their beneficiaries, i.e. the villagers! This process is very unusual in the relief world, but has been very fruitful, even if at the beginning the villagers were reluctant to assess people who help them. But finally, it has been very useful, and the association has readapted its actions according the expectations of the villagers.

Sharana wants to go further in the long-range development that is why many new projects are ongoing. For example, the association would like to support financially children who want to get higher education. The idea would be that Sharana pays half of the fees, and the second would be advanced as a loan, without interest rate, that should be refund by the parents and the student. Moreover Sharana is also working on the opening of its resource center in Aranganur, in order to be able to help always more people.

To conclude, we can say that Sharana is an example about what should be a relief association. It is a solidarity network, where complementary skills of each worker are used in order to push unprivileged people to go out underdevelopment, by especially making possible the education of children. It is also a good example of collaboration between North and South; each acts according his skills, where he is the most efficient. This is a great cocktail of solidarity, success, respect and sustainability, as we would like to see flourish many more among the reliefs NGOs.

For more information about Sharana, please visit their website: http://sharana.org/

By Guillaume Laisse for ToutPondi.com