Nanban India


Community Capacity Building

The Kalasam Movement in Madurai - Self Help Groups

Over 95% of the children who come to be classified as placed in most difficult circumstances in Madurai, emerge from the poor slum dwellers. Although some of these
	slum dwellers are literate, almost all of them both men and women have no skills or experience in the kind of trades where they can compete for employment in towns and suburban areas. Displaced as they are from agricultural surrounds to strange locales already brimming with smart alec people, the only opportunities for employment and wage earn are those lowly paid labour, rejected by the earlier settlers.

The need for the women-folk too, to take up any taxing employment to supplement the family-kitty, disrupted the traditional role of the mother, of holding the family together, of balancing the individual interests, needs and egos of the husbands and the children. Each member of the family unit seeking different diversions to stay afloat the drudgery of day to day life probably produces an empty home, a drunken father, a cinema-going mother and the children seeking some solace on the streets.

One answer to such problems would be for the women-folk to gather themselves up to regulate the state of affairs by forming small Self-Help Groups (of about 15 members each) with a token contribution of money among themselves on a thrift and savings basis with the aim of dealing with specific problems common to them. They can have their own simple bye-laws about electing their offices-bearers, about creating a thrift fund for themselves from which small amounts of money may be borrowed to meet urgent financial needs. They can also take up other common causes of the community such as their children’s educational needs, etc. These in turn would establish their claims for equal empowerment in the management of the community requirements.

Nanban’s Field Development Workers floated these ideas into some of the households in the slum areas and the first of these groups started in 1996. These self help groups were named as Kalasams. Bro.James was one of the fore-runners to the concept of 'Self Help Groups' for the marginalised communities in India. The essential aspects of ‘independence’ and ‘self-sustainability’ for the functioning of Kalasam took some time to take roots. Each basic group averaging 15 members conducts at least one meeting of their members every month. The ladies may have occasional verbal duels among themselves but it is quite apparent now, that their feelings of helplessness, their inferiority complex, their fear to voice/express their common needs and requirement, which were once submerged in their ethos, have faded away.

	Since then the Kalasam groups have taken new initiatives, in organizing free medical and eye camps for all members of the various Kalasam groups, in concerted appeals to the Municipality to improve the living conditions in the slum areas, etc.
The objective of Kalasam is to mobilize the women in slum areas who are most backward economically, unite them and let them choose their own leadership; contribute a small stipulated amount every month towards a common savings fund, from which they can draw loans in times of emergency thus freeing themselves from the clutches of usurious money lenders. This has helped them to uplift their economic standard and the members of families to send their children to schools and not to make them child labourers.

Kalasam Cluster Groups :
The system which started with seven individual kalsams had now multiplied and more and more kalasams are on the anvil. Towards forming a federated centralised body of the Kalasam units into a Mahakalasam, the various individual Kalasam groups functioning in a given area or municipal locality, initially formed into Kalasam Cluster Groups. The elected representatives of these Cluster Groups constitute the Board of Trustees of the Mahakalasam. This federation came into official existence on 11 October 2001.