CHENNAI : Seventy-five years ago, Bala Mandir Kamaraj Trust (BMKT) was established in T Nagar to support children facing adversity. It was founded by the then chief minister K Kamaraj along with freedom fighter S Manjubhashini with support from journalist Ramnath Goenka. The trust was set up with two infants — one boy and one girl — and now shelters 180 children — 75 boys and 105 girls.
In this diamond jubilee year, the trust plans to scale up in terms of the number of children directly impacted by its services, focus on the quality of social impact provided and recorded, and sustain its value systems such as child-centric behaviour, integrity, respect for law and rules, equality and others. “At 75, we have the mindset of a start-up,” says Natarajan P, honorary treasurer and trustee of BMKT. During the celebrations on Sunday, a book on the history of the trust written by the management team will be released along with a six-minute video of the work that has been done over the years.
Services rendered
Other important happenings at the celebration will be the setting up of “effective” operations of a US body of the trust formed in December last year. The foundation runs on one-third of government grants, one-third of donations and one-third is internal. “A majority of our donations come from the US. So, we thought of setting up an entity there,” he adds.
The need for this donation increased when the management realised that the demand for social impact was higher than what they had been doing on the ground under their Kinship Care Programme. Started in 2021, this initiative is ongoing in five districts around and including Coimbatore (Salem, Namakkal, Tirupur, and Erode) and nine districts around and including Chennai (Chennai, Kancheepuram, Chengalpattu, Thiruvallur, Tiruvannamalai, Ranipet, Vellore, Tiruppatur). The programme focuses on fulfilling the needs of children from 12 to 21. “When the pandemic hit us, deaths were reported in large numbers. It was then the Chennai city collector called us and said there would be a lot of admissions as a lot of parents had died,” says Natarajan about the origin of the project. The trust sent their social workers to the field to see the reality.
Life changing narratives
Narrating an incident, he says, “The first home we went to opened our eyes. There was a grandmother and a newborn, the father had already abandoned them and the mother died after giving birth. The grandmother is now with an infant, most unexpectedly to take care of the infant. So we thought of taking the child in. But the grandmother promised the dying mother that she would take care of the child. Now, she cannot work, without working she cannot earn money, and without earning money she cannot feed the child. So the first thing our social worker did was to come back and take milk powder and other things to feed the baby. That is when we realised that this is real life.” The situations they lived in and the fear of the future were real. “A child needs a kin. In this particular programme, along with the child, the next of kin is also empowered,” adds Maya Gaitonde, honorary general secretary of the trust.
The trust then reached out to many such families and aided them by equipping them with a stable source of income, providing counselling sessions to new mothers who lost family support, cycles for children to reach school, tabs to learn, and more. Eight hundred children and families are a part of this initiative.
Inspired by Read A Story, a Pune-based organisation that teaches English to the tribal communities of Maharashtra, the trust started ‘Happy Reading’, a solution to make English easy just by communicating in the language. Volunteers have come forward to teach the kids to read and write Tamil in Coimbatore.
Years in review
“We operate in an agile mode where we don’t wait for a perfect solution to evolve. Whatever we come up with ideas, we put them into a pilot and start. The whole emphasis is on action. So we get going and then we correct ourselves,” says Natarajan, walking us through their history.
Since its inception in 1949, BMKT has developed along with its children’s needs. “With the infants, we set up a home; when they grew older, a school; if they are not good at studies, then we gave them vocational training; when they were adopted, a research centre was instituted to conduct studies like the effects of Ayurveda on children who are slow but not with special needs,” says Maya.
The school, which offers English and Tamil medium of education, is now being reengineered to become an English medium. The research centre conducted studies on behavioural changes in children. This study was backed by Dr Sharadha Menon from ICMR. Another activity of the trust is the Madhuram Narayanan Centre (MNC), which largely works on early intervention for children with special needs. At the event, all the five activities by BMKT will be merged to “bring a balance” adds Natarajan. “As part of our 75th year, we are branding all of these more strongly as BMKT.” These initiatives are interlinked in terms of the values they uphold and the intent of providing quality-based impact to children.
Planning as and when the need arises, the Bala Mandir team also wants to expand its horizons as it coaches its methodologies and encourage others to impart its learnings to a larger audience.
BMKT will celebrate 75 years tomorrow at 10.30 am at Sir Mutha Venkata Subba Rao Concert Hall.