Helping the differently-abled women gain independence

It is a hot summer afternoon and watching 35-year-old Appala Raju at work is mesmerising. She sits with a stack of newspapers and her hands move swiftly as she folds into bags. There is a rhythm to it and she does not miss a beat even as she chats with her colleagues. Naturally, since she has been doing this for over a decade now.

Appala is one of the 15 girls who work at Sampoorna, a city-based non-governmental organisation that works for the welfare of women with disabilities. The NGO has been providing employment opportunities for them. Sampoorna’s founder Ch Satya says they enable financial independence in the women, “Through various services like making paper bags, sanitary napkins and tailoring.”

The idea for Sampoorna ame from Satya’s personal experience of being polio-affected and being confined to a wheelchair. “It was in the late 1970s that as a fresh graduate I was doing the rounds of offices for job interviews.” While getting a job was not her problem, accessing the venues was posing to be a great hurdle. None of the offices that she visited was accessible for people like her. “ There were no elevators or ramps and unavailability of separate toilets made employment a distant dream for me,” she recalls.

If this was her plight, she wondered how people with disabilities managed in the rural and tribal areas. This concern led to the establishment of Sampoorna in 1984. “Initially the aim was just to raise awareness about the condition and the needs of the differently-abled,” she explains but later in the early 2000s, the organisation began conducting training programmes for bag making and tailoring.

But just these classes wouldn’t be of much help unless there was financial independence that came with it, she says. And just having a skill did not have the jobs coming.

So Sampoorna reinvented its approach and apart from the training sessions it started supplying paper and cloth bags to several organisations across the city. In 2005, they shifted their office from Pedda Waltair to Maharanipeta. “We also started supplying murukulu, jantikalu, nimkis, fryums, vadiyalu and pappads to surrounding bakeries and sweet shops,” says Satya and followed it up with exhibiting the products made at Sampoorna at local exhibitions.

The organisation is also home for these 15 women who live at the facility in Maharanipeta. The work at the facility begins at 10 am. The schedule usually depends on the orders. Currently, Raju and three other women are making bags for another city-based NGO.

Most of these women come from the rural parts of Vizianagaram, Srikakulam and Visakhapatnam. Thirty-five-year-old polio-affected B Laxmi who comes from a village near Simhachalam says she always wanted to fend for herself but did not quite know how. “One of my friends suggested that I attend training programmes conducted by Sampoorna and that is how I was introduced to Satya in 2005,” she says. Laxmi learnt tailoring here and now she specialises in making cloth bags.

According to Satya, it was in 2015 that the organisation also started making sanitary napkins from machines that were given by the Rotary Club. “These sanitary napkins are sold to the Rotary Club and an NGO that distributes it to students who can’t afford them. We also provide pads to several hospitals across the city.”

(To reach out to Sampoorna, 9959151666)