Girish Kulkarni

Girish Kulkarni grew up in a comfortable middle-class family in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, and his social work began with what he saw on a detour. Aged about eight, walking between after-school maths and English classes, he took a longer route through one of the town's red-light areas, where children were not supposed to go. He saw girls of his own age sitting outside brothels, and on one occasion a child being beaten and tortured because she had contracted syphilis and could no longer work. He has said that his inability to intervene stayed with him into adulthood.

At college a friend, embarrassed about where he lived, eventually let Kulkarni visit his home in the red-light area, where three generations of women — a fifteen-year-old sister, a mother in her forties and a grandmother of seventy — were all in sex work. Rather than join a youth organisation, he decided to act locally and asked the women themselves what would help. Their answer was: take our children. He began collecting two children a day and taking them to a park, buying them food, telling them stories and teaching them to cycle; within four months about eighty children were coming. He also encouraged the children to show their mothers respect and collected leftover food from weddings for women who had not earned that day, which gradually won the trust of a community used to contempt. When one woman who reported harassment to the police was raped and robbed by them instead, the sex workers organised and marched; the officers were transferred and punished, and the women had a platform for the first time.

He founded Snehalaya — 'home of love' — in 1989, and insisted that three of the sex workers become trustees, coaching them into the role. All three later died of HIV-related illness, and the organisation has since kept at least two women from that community on its governing body. When HIV began killing people in Ahmednagar, Kulkarni set up a Death with Dignity programme using roadside huts and a bicycle cart to provide palliative care to some of India's earliest AIDS patients. Snehalaya now runs some two dozen projects in Ahmednagar district across healthcare, education, rehabilitation and awareness — including the Snehankur adoption centre and Radio Nagar, the district's first community radio station — reaching in the order of 15,000 to 17,000 people a year.

Snehalaya's work has been recognised with the Dr Durgabai Deshmukh National Award, presented by the President of India for contribution to women's welfare and empowerment, the Niskam Karmayogi Puraskar for its work in the red-light areas, and the Reliance Foundation's Real Hero Award.[2][3]