Sister Prema Chowallur, a blessing to transgender people in India

 

Sister Prema Chowallur, a member of the Sisters of the Cross of Chavanod and a relentless supporter of the LGBTQIA+ community since 2016, is a beacon of hope for the transgender people, one of the most marginalized groups for years. Starting from 2020, when she was assigned with a social work center to support poor communities, sister Prema had taken various initiatives to support the queer community despite the common notion of homosexuality being considered against the order of nature by the Church. She started traveling to work with various church-run and development groups across India and set up a temporary shelter - Rainbow Home of the Seven Sisters (RHoSS) at Christian Basti, Guwahati on 4 May 2021 to provide refuge to homeless transgender women and help them build a better future through the field of earning they are interested in. They can earn their living being a beautician, designer, by making ornaments or other creative things. If they have a degree, they are guided to find suitable jobs, as the Shelter Home cannot be a place for them to stay all their lives. This place is only to heal and prepare them to stand on their own feet when they go back out to face the world.

As the shelter home is an apartment, it presently provides a safe space to 3 people and is not able to provide shelter to over five people at the moment. The nun is planning to expand the facility to provide a temporary home to more transgender people and is looking for a piece of land in the outskirts of Guwahati city. “Finding land is not an easy job especially when you tell people that you want it to run a Shelter Home for the Transgender Community. Finding this rented apartment was also difficult but thanks to my network, I could find this place. People within the city are still not very open to accepting the transgender community. I want a place for them where they can sing and dance; where they can be free and be themselves,” she explained.

 

Sister Prema had joined the Sisters of the Cross of Chavanod (SCC) at the age of 18. Despite being a Keralite Catholic and willing to follow the footsteps of her parents to be a teacher, she chose to work for the downtrodden and was devoted to the ministry of education for over a decade and a half. She was also part of several developmental societies and charities like Palli Unnayan Samiti (Rural Development Society or PUS), Tarumitra (Friends of Trees) and has also collaborated with the North East Diocesan Social Service Society (NEDSSS) in Guwahati alongside Purvanchal Pragati Samaj (Eastern Development Society or PPS), covering northeast India. She achieved global recognition for her exceptional contribution to society and received an invite to attend a United Nations consultation on sustainable development. She served as the vice-president of the Indian chapter of Talitha Kum, a Vatican-sponsored international network of religious congregations against human trafficking. Afterward, she became the convener of the North East Forum for Justice and Peace and coordinator of the Crossian Consortium to Reach Out to the Periphery (CCROP) of her congregation.

Sister Prema mentioned a bus incident where a transgender woman was sitting alone as nobody dared to sit beside her. The story of her deprived life inspired the nun to start working for transgender people and listen to their woes, struggles, and the discrimination faced by them in society. She remembered an incident where a family had accepted their transgender child and was willing to raise him, but people from the neighborhood did not accept that and began picking up fights with them. She assessed that this is a wrong attitude that our society has towards gender minorities and dedicated her life to serving the transgender community of Assam since then. Moved by the incident on the bus, she joined the Global Network Rainbow Catholics (GNRC) and Indian Network Rainbow Catholics (INRC) to comprehend the challenges faced by people from LGBTQ communities and fight for them.

As per the 2011 census, Assam has a transgender population of about 11,375 people including 1,348 children. Their literacy rate is around 54% only and they have to drop out of studies and earn a living through begging as none offers them a job. Even after being a complete human with all working abilities, their every right is denied. Sister Prema mentioned in one of her interviews that “They are ridiculed and humiliated, relegated on the margins of cities, forced into prostitution. These are the people whom society never counts as human beings. They experience everyday rejection, aversion, sarcastic smiles, and abusive words as they pass by cities and towns. So they walk through bylanes and stay in slums to hide from society. It is the need of the hour for us to reach out to them. Our goal is to remove them from the backyards of skyscrapers and slums, and restore their dignity.”

During the pandemic, sister Prema helped the transgender community with food, medicines, and other essentials. She also requested help from the North East Diocesan Social Forum of Guwahati, her sisters, and their Wing Women Development Centre and received kits that contained food, hand sanitizer, masks, detergent powder, bathing soap, and phenyl. These kits are distributed to the transgender community living in Maligaon, Pandu, and Gandhi Basti, three slums of Guwahati. Other groups, such as the Church of North India, Assam Baptist Convention, and the Guwahati Catholic archdiocese too pitched to reach out to the transgender community living in the railway slums of Guwahati.

 

 

Safetipin – an initiative by Kalpana Vishwanath to ensure the safest route to home

 

Safetipin, a crowdsourcing app for women's safety has been founded by Kalpana Vishwanath, a researcher, urban safety, and gender rights activist based out in Delhi. Kalpana, the CEO, and co-founder of Safetipin started this mobile app as well as an online platform along with Ashish Basu, the COO of Safetipin, after receiving funding support from The Asia Foundation’s Lotus Circle in the year 2013 when the Nirbhaya gang rape on a New Delhi bus sparked national outrage in India.  Safetipin is a cost-effective and user-friendly application where a user can log in and submit key information regarding streets and their safety status. This free app can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play and performs a safety audit to collect information about public spaces. This simple audit can be done by anyone, anywhere in the world and each audit works as a pin on the map. These pins can be used to diagnose the safety standard of any location in the city. The safety audit of Safetipin comprises nine parameters including lighting, visibility, openness, or “eyes on the street,” the state of a walking path, presence of security, as well as people and specifically women, on the streets.

 The name, Safetipin is derived from the idea of providing women more safety through a pin on a map. Furthermore, in India, women have traditionally used the safety pin as a defense mechanism against street and stalking harassment like groping, teasing, and catcalling. A jab in the flesh with a safety pin is often considered an effective deterrent to the roving hand. Moreover, the safety pin is a symbol of something that holds fabric together and stops it from coming apart. Hence, this safety app plays the role of bringing together the fabric of our society.

 

Safetipin believes that cities must be made safe and inclusive for all citizens. This tool is dedicated to making the cities safe by collecting data through crowdsourcing and other methods. Apart from that, this mobile app also collects nighttime photographs of roads to assess the parameters of safety audits. To date, Safetipin has collected data from 28 cities across 10 countries. The nighttime pictures enable the app to collect large-scale data for urban planners, transportation authorities, and city administrative bodies. Proper usage of these data by the Public Works Department and the New Delhi Municipal Commission facilitates improving lighting conditions in dark areas to increase safety and accessibility for people. Furthermore, Safetipin gathers Safety Scores for bus stops across the city and notifies the transportation authorities about the need for improvement for specific bus stops that immediately require lighting and better infrastructure to offer safer travel in the city.

 Identifying over 7000 dark spots only in the Delhi area led to a large percentage of them getting repaired by the local authorities. The safety audit in the city bus stop and its metro stations helped to identify obstructions, such as poor last-mile options, deserted areas, and poor lighting, which can be proved unsafe for women. The data gathered from this app also helped in prioritizing efforts and resources by comparing the urgency for improvement between localities. In Delhi, these data help police administration to determine which areas of the city need more patrolling to ensure the utmost safety for the women.

 

Safepin held hands with UN-Habitat to collect data and address women’s safety in all the cities worldwide to support the respective city governments. Following the same regulation, they used their collected data to improve city safety and enhance gender inclusion in public spaces for the cities like Bogota and Nairobi. Safetipin measures and advocates for some of the other safety parameters like access to public transport, walkability, and IPT. This easy-to-operate citizen engagement platform address last-mile connectivity and safety at bus stops, stations, and bicycle tracks in cities like Delhi, Hanoi, Bogota, and Durban. This technology platform has assisted the Safe Taxi campaign initiated by women’s groups through detailed safety audits at waiting spaces in Durban. In a nutshell, this safety route platform has been proved successful, as safety audits can be conducted post-intervention to calculate a change in the Safety Score and women’s feeling of safety. 

This user-friendly safety platform is available in five languages – English, Hindi, Mandarin, Spanish, and Bahasa. With a clear goal of increasing the arena as cities join the network, Safetipin aspires for safer cities for women worldwide through their immaculately collected data. As cities try to meet the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) that aims to make cities safe, resilient inclusive, and sustainable, having reliable data on the ground is an essential step. 

With its user base being close to 1 lakh, Safetipin has done nearly 4 lakh audits, across 65 cities in 16 countries since its inception. Apart from the Indian cities, Safetipin has made betterments in Nairobi, Manila, Hanoi, Bogota, Dhaka, and many other urban spaces so far.