Helping the shanty towns’ inhabitants claim their rights, that is the meaning of a day at the office for Fedina (Federation for Educational Innovations in Asia), an Indian partner of Frères des Hommes. In Bangalore, a south Indian city and capital of the state of Karnataka, Fedina campaigns to favour the access to property for inhabitants of the slums, to energise communities and micro financial relations. It brings, in addition to this, by means of its new Senior Citizen programme, precious help to the aged. Every week, social workers from the association take to the streets in order to talk with inhabitants about their problems, inform them of their rights and co-ordinate their activism. Fedina has, in this way, contributed to the constitution of Self Help Group (SHG), which facilitated the creation of a system of lending and internal credit, thus saving the local population from dependence on loan sharks and financial transactions involving exorbitant rates of interest. The goal is therefore an educational one: assist citizens of the shanty towns in their understanding of citizenship.

Fighting for access to property 

Bangalore is commonly nick-named the Indian Silicon Valley. Nevertheless, its recent fame - in the high-tech world and as a centre of scientific and economic development - cannot conceal the existence of slums and some extremely poor communities. In the shanty town of Ragiguda, which accounts for approximately 10,000 people and 3,000 houses, the government wants to destroy the village so that it can put new residential developments in its place, moving the inhabitants thirty kilometres away with no regard to their attachments to schools and jobs in the area.

	Two elderly ladies in the alleyways of the shanty town of Kottur / © Fanny Blanchard (FdH).

The only alternative, therefore, is to give these people a chance to become owners of their properties. The problem here is that the government is demanding sums that are completely disproportionate to the economic situation of these communities. Fedina intervenes therefore by means of citizenship training, and helps the inhabitants take action so that their neighbourhoods are not reduced to rubble. The shanty towns’ inhabitants have at other times already attempted numerous demonstrations which have sometimes been violently repressed. Nevertheless, the daily assistance given by Fedina in these poor areas, strengthening social cohesion, especially in the area of microfinance, allows their inhabitants to hope for a better future. As one of them rejoices, “it’s great. Fedina helps us every week”.
This is borne out by the Senior Citizen programme, which provides reception and care centres, and essential assistance in negotiating all the administrative hurdles involved with applying for a pension. Fedina also carries out lobbying work with the goal of contributing not only to the raising of the level of pensions, but also to the numbers of people who are able to benefit from them. 

Helping the aged 

Mosses, the programme co-ordinator, travels regularly to the shanty towns in order to hold meetings with elderly people and inform them of their many rights. He explains to them, for example, that it is possible to ask a doctor to draw up a certificate indicating that a woman is more than 65 years old. Like this she will, if she cannot work, be able to benefit from a pension. He alerts them equally to the fact that the doctor cannot ask for any money in exchange for the certificate as it is a free service. Fedina’s work, therefore, is one of day to day distribution of citizens’ information, combined with encouragement towards active citizenship so that impoverished communities have the means for increasingly independent organisation in defence of their rights.