The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : Winning in the face of all odds

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Monday, Feb 25, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Winning in the face of all odds

Girls at Centre for Social Service are success stories in themselves

-PHOTO : NAGARA GOPAL

Striving hard: Inmates of Centre for Social Service at Nagole.

HYDERABAD: Impossible is nothing! These words from a poster, pasted in the hall of this nondescript house at Nagole, sums-up the way girls of this house despite driven to desperation and penury have triumphed.

Each girl at the Centre for Social Service (CSS) has a terrifying tale to share. But regardless, they are perfect instances of victory in the face of animosity.

Bharathi’s father committed suicide due to agricultural debt. For one-year, she tilled the land and assisted her mother in domestic chores. All avenues in life seemed to fade away for her. Now, with a bit of help she is pursuing degree in statistics at the Pragathi Degree College having secured 85 per cent in Intermediate.

There are several such girls who thanks to the unstinted support of a few women running CSS, all of them housewives, with a streak of entrepreneurship in them are now pursuing nursing, engineering, Intermediate and other degrees.

Sravanthi was a kid when she lost her parents. She has spent her entire life in welfare hostels when not working as a domestic help or a daily labour in Guntur.

However, now she is doing first-year engineering at Sreenidhi Institute of Technology.

“We need to get jobs after graduation so that we can support more girls like us,” says Umamaheswari, an inter student, whose father was a known offender and abusive too.

Over 70 children, aged between four to eight years, apart from 25-older girls stay in the centre.

They come after their classes in the Government schools for tuitions and the sumptuous free-food on offer. These kids belong to slums located in and around Nagole, Dilsukhnagar and Nacharam.

The housewives with the help of few others are doubling-up as teachers too. “We have our limitations. From the next academic-year, we will start a boarding school for orphan girls in the age-group of five to eight years. We have to catch them young for education. We need all the support we can get,” says V. Vijaylakshmi, the person who started the initiative.

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