History of Saksham

Saksham was formally registered as a charitable trust on 17th December, 2003. It had been conceived, however, about two years earlier, when a few kids in a juggi cluster in NOIDA, sat around an emergency lamp, in one of the huts, trying to form the Hindi alphabets on their slates.

Population in this juggi, mostly comprised of migrant families of West Bengal and Bihar. The men worked as rickshaw pullers and the women as maids. The children roamed around, snot nosed, bare-footed ragamuffins, swearing without inhibition, chewing gutka, smoking, getting into fights, not knowing any other way of life. The little girl children invariably stayed at home to look after even smaller siblings and the slightly older ones were also engaged as household helps by the age of nine or ten. A few parents did get their kids admitted to the Government Primary school, nearby. Almost always, however, they dropped out after a few weeks, the excuse (or the truth) being that "MASTERJI BAHUT MAARTHA HAI" or that "SCHOOL MEI KOYI PADAYI NAHI HOTI." Caught up in the struggle for survival, the parents were too tired or indifferent to keep track or be insistent.

And a struggle it surely is! The previous two years had seen a fire that razed the entire place to ashes, police raids looking for Bangladeshi migrants and eventually, demolition of the juggies by the NOIDA authorities. Again and again, those families had had to start from scratch, leaving them in a condition of perpetual debt and utter ennui. Now scattered all over, the cohesion and sense of belonging and security that life in that juggi had provided, however tenuous, had also been taken away.

The informal classes were resumed in the basti of Nithari village ,where some of the families from the erstwhile juggi cluster had relocated after the demolition of their huts and this was the beginning of "Saksham"