UTTAR PRADESH: It was past midnight on April 30, 2006 when 22-year-old Pragya Singh of Varanasi, just 12 days into her marriage, was travelling by train from her hometown to Delhi to pursue a career in apparel management. Pragya woke up with a burning sensation after a guy threw acid on her face because she had previously rejected his marriage proposal. She had no idea that she was about to undergo the most painful event of her life.
Pragya began shouting and sobbing in pain about two in the morning. As Pragya remembers, “I was just screaming and writhing in pain that was unbearable as if everything were burning around me.” Her screams drew the attention of her fellow passengers, and a doctor in the adjacent coach attended to her, but even he was only able to apply water to her acid-burned face.
On reaching Delhi, she was immediately taken to a super speciality hospital where she was followed by the attacker who entered the ICU with two more bottles of acid to attack her. He, however, was caught while trying to attack Pragya. “While attacking me, he had burnt his hands which later came as the direct evidence of his actions and he was caught by the police the same night,” says Pragya adding that after a decade-long legal battle, the culprit was sentenced to a 4-year jail term.
On the threshold of a new life with her husband, a dark night had led Prayga’s life to go upside down. Being unsure just 12 days into her marriage with her husband whom she hardly knew as it was an arranged marriage, Pragya was nervous about her future. “But if luck went against me at one point, the fortune smiled on me in other ways to balance the agony which was there to stay with me throughout my life,” says Pragya, sharing how her husband became her support system throughout her difficult journey to recovery.
Pragya had to undergo 17 surgeries. She lost her eyelids, vision in one of her eyes and got a disfigured nose. “I spent two years in recovery and rest having correctal surgeries from top cosmetic surgeons of India and abroad. Since it was a time taking process and I had realised that I could not stay away from my family anymore, I decided to own my scars,” says Pragya.
In the meantime, she gave birth to lovely daughters. Impressed by her positive approach towards life like a fighter, Pragya was often called by her doctors to counsel many others like her.
By then she had settled in Bengaluru along with her husband and children. “An acid attack is not a death sentence,” says Pragya Singh, who after seven years of recovery from her nightmarish experience, decided to create a safe space named Atijeevan Foundation with the support of her husband, friends and lot of plastic surgeons to help acid attack victims and burn survivors.
Confident of her abilities, Pragya laid the foundation of Atijeevan believing that a person’s identity was much beyond the face or physical appearance. So she decided on the slogan of her foundation: “I am not my face.”
Atijeevan is an NGO, which arranges free surgeries and non-surgical treatments for acid attack and burn victims, along with post-op counselling and skill-development workshops, to help them get a fresh start.
So far, Atijeevan has funded crucial surgeries like skin grafting, hair transplant and even reconstructive surgeries for over 250 acid attack survivors from across the country hailing from various parts of Uttar Pradesh, Delhi-NCR, and West Bengal. It has also offered counselling services to many of them.
Moreover, Atijeevan organises workshops to equip the victims with several skills so that they could sustain themselves on their own. “They are taught to make decorative items, home furnishings, stitching clothes, knitting and similar crafts,” says Pragya.
Her relentless efforts to bring about perceptible change in the life of such victims won her many accolades with prestigious ‘Nari Shakti Purashkar’ given by the President of India being one of them.