CHENNAI: Among umpteen tales of ordeals following the pandemic outbreak, the voices of several visually impaired women seeking shelter have gone unnoticed. Fifty-nine-year-old Vasuki* along with 19 others was asked to vacate the Santhome Shelter Home for Visually Impaired Women a few days before the lockdown was announced in March.
Seven months on, they still search for home and food. In March, the government rehabilitation home authorities told the women that there won’t be enough resources to feed them during the lockdown and so they have to leave. “I was admitted to the rehabilitation home inside Poonamalle Blind School campus 22 years ago. I am not married and have nobody to take care of me.
When rumours of the lockdown began to do rounds itself, the authorities forced all 20 of us to leave,” Vasuki says. Five of the inmates convinced their friends or relatives to let them stay at their homes. “We literally had to beg our distant relatives to shelter us. We told them that we would be there only for a month. Little did we know that we were kicked out of the rehabilitation home for good.
My relatives themselves are struggling for food, and they have to now provide for me too,” she adds. Another inmate who had to vacate, on condition of anonymity, says that she is not aware of whom to raise the issue with. “I am 30-years old and I used to earn a little something through a government weaving course arranged inside the rehabilitation home.
Now neither do I have shelter, nor any money to afford lodging,” she laments. One of the teachers at Poonamalle Blind School says all has not been well with the shelter home for the last five years. “There were times the inmates had been forced to leave the home during summer months. This year the Covid crisis worsened the situation. Now, the authorities are not even allowing the existing inmates to live there. As far as I know, this is the only dedicated government shelter for visually impaired women here,” she says.