You've probably walked past them in your neighbourhood without giving them a second look. Now, meet the people who are changing the fabric of your locality -- freeing service lanes of tow trucks, cajoling kids not to drop out of school, even building all-girls football teams at the docks
You've probably walked past them in your neighbourhood without giving them a second look. Now, meet the people who are changing the fabric of your localityu00a0-- freeing service lanes of tow trucks, cajoling kids not to drop out of school, even building all-girls football teams at the docks
Neighbourhood: Mulund
Pele with a purpose, Rohit D'Souza
All it took was one wrong turn to change the direction of his life. Back in 2009, Mulund resident Rohit D' Souza was searching for a ground where his football club could practise. He reached Durgawadi, a dumping ground in Mulund (E) crowded with a group of children deep in play.
The next day, the 27 year-old, who coaches school football teams, returned with a football. He began to dribble, and the children who lived on the landfill watched, fascinated before asking him to teach them the trick. Over three months, as D'Souza continued to play with the kids, a project took shape in his mind.
"The children here have no television or Internet. Many don't go to school. I decided to share basic life skills with them." he says. 
Rohit D'souza seen here with children at the Durgawadi landfill.
PIC/ Prajakt Patil/The Ball Project
The UNICEF, UNESCO and WHO list 10 core life skill strategies: problem solving, critical thinking, effective communication skills, decision-making, creative thinking, interpersonal relationship skills, self-awareness building skills, empathy, and coping with stress and emotions.
D'Souza took on a partner, a 29 year old architect and photographer named Prajakt Patil, who agreed to 'document' D'Souza's project.
The strategy they had in mind didn't involve charity, aid, or classes. They called it The Ball Project. All they did was bring the children out to play.
At first, they played games devised by the duo that brought the children to play in teams. Then they progressed to handballu00a0-- a kind of football that involves passing the ball with the hands ufffd and set boundaries and rules for the children to follow.
In the beginning, it was not easy, and grids were as easily broken as team members replaced.
Soon, the cones used to mark boundaries disappeared, and D'Souza didn't have to blow his whistle to call a foul too often.
"Playing involves marshalling one's resources into a game. You get to be creative, set a challenge for yourself, think out of the box and test the limits of rules," says Patil, whose videos and photographs helped the duo mark the change in individual children over time.
In formal education systems, a child's progress can be gauged through knowledge of the alphabet, numbers and the organic composition of harmful gases like Methaneu00a0-- one of the common gases emitted at landfills. But D'Souza and Patil knew the difficulty of gauging an increase in the utilisation of life skills.
In one video taken two weeks ago, an eight year old wearing a Barcelona T-shirt, dodges his opponents expertly to get the ball. Once it's in his hands, he begins a mad dash to the goal only to stop two seconds lateru00a0-- even before D'Souza could call out his foul ufffd and hands over the ball to the other team.
"It's against the rules to run and the child knew it, stopped, and gave the ball back. That's self awareness, self-control, and following rules."
Why should you care?
Durgawadi in Mulund (E) is a garbage dumping ground. Families that live on the landfill earn their living through segregating waste and selling recyclable materials like glass and plastic.
The city generates over 11,021 tonnes of waste per day, which includes bio-degradable and recyclable waste and other forms of garbage. In fact, BMC officials who relaunched their initiative to segregate dry and wet waste this January, say 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the total waste is recyclable while another large portion is biodegradable. Recycling waste would reduce the burden on the city's already overflowing landfills, and help save the environment of air, water and soil pollution.
In such a scenario, the work of residents of Durgawadi takes on a lot more significanceu00a0-- their actions do much more to save the environment than
we do.
Neighbourhood: Churchgate-Dadar
Fish & Kicks duo Parvati Pujari & Gaurang Chauhan
Two years ago, Devi, then nine, would wake up early, get dressed in her ghaghra-choli (the traditional dress for girls in her community), and accompany her mother to Sassoon Docks at Cuffe Parade, where they would buy prawn by the kilo and shell the heap for Rs 10.
Sometimes, the Ambedkar Nagar Chawl residents would make another round of the docks during the day, and Devi would miss school.
She and Gaurang Chauhan coach girls in football. Residents of
Ambedkar Nagar slum, the girlsu00a0 work at Sassoon Docks. PIC/
Prathik Pachamnia
But all that changed when Devi attended her first football session at Oval Maidan, Churchgate in June 2009. There, she saw Parvati Pujari dressed in trackpants and a jersey, spin a football on her finger waiting for four girls from Ambedkar Nagar, including Devi, to gather round.u00a0
Pujari, a spunky 20 year-old football player, and Gaurang Chauhan, a 23 year-old football coach for an NGO, decided to start a football team for girls in the slum, "simply to give them a break."
At the back of her mind, Pujari knew that bigger things were possible. After all, she'd been through it.
One of six daughters of a construction worker from Karnataka, Pujari was born in Mumbai and grew up on the site where Phoenix Mills in Lower Parel now stands. Her parents helped build it.
She studied informally till she was eight, but the teacher insisted she join school. She was far too bright to not go to school, her parents were told.
Pujari was admitted to class three at a nearby BMC school in Lower Parel, and three years later, she joined Magic Bus, a non-profit that works with underprivileged children and uses sport as a medium of development.
Nine years later, Pujari is a trained football player and works as a coach in the organisation.
Chauhan and Pujari started their club, Leher, in 2009 with four girls. The team grew to include 20. Four months ago, they started another club for children from Dholakwala Chawl in Dadar and "boys are clamouring to get into Leher," laughs Pujari.
In a locality where the girl child's education is not top priority, Leher has helped bring about small but significant changes.
Some were immediate. "The first day the girls came for practise, they wore ghaghras, which was a hindrance while kicking the ball. In the next session, they all came dressed in salwar kameezes. "Today, they come dressed in full gearu00a0-- shorts or trackpants and jerseys."
As their game improved, their confidence grew too. The Leher girls took part in two inter-school and inter-organisational football tournaments a few months ago. Two girls were chosen to visit Delhi to attend a Rugby training camp last May.
"Now, they want Leher T-shirts, so that they can identify themselves as a group in their colony. Their team spirit is inspiring," says Pujari.
The coaches have also organised informal English classes for the girls, many of whom are still unable to go to school, since they work at the docks.
"This Sunday, we've organised a match between the boys and girls of the colony," says Pujari. "And I've heard the boys are a little worried."
Agents of change
There are various programmes that use football to reach out to underprivileged children around the world. World Cup organisers FIFA and Streetfootballworld, a not-for-profit organisation initiated the Football for Hope in 2007 that aims to inspire positive change in five focus areas: health promotion, peacebuilding, children's rights and education, anti-discrimination and social integration, and the environment.
Closer home, not-for-profit organisation Magic Bus uses sports and outdoors as a medium to help the children discover their true potential, and develop positive role models. Last year, they sent a team of eight children from Mumbai's slums to South Africa, to participate in the Football for Hope matches.
Neighbourhood: Andheri
Teenage Ninja tutor, Suneeta Singh
There's nothing about Suneeta Singh that gives away her age when you meet her for the first time. Fair and petite, with her hair pulled back sternly into a pony tail, the bespectacled 15 year-old sits amidst a bunch of schoolchildren aged six to 12 every morning on a footpath along the Juhu Versova Link Road, solving their math, history, Hindi and Marathi queries.
She looks stern, but a quick smile appears ever so often on her face, which she tries to hide by looking away.
"They don't take me seriously sometimes," she says. Singh is referring to the 20-odd students who attend the Asha Kiran Charitable Trust footpath school every morning before heading in the afternoon to a 'real' school nearby.
Suneeta Singh teaches math, history, Hindi and English on a
footpath along the Juhu Versova Link Road to kids every morning
before they head to a 'real' school. PIC/ Anuja Gupta
The daughter of a vada pav vendor, Singh was a student of the footpath school for three years. Now she's in junior college and her sisteru00a0-- the youngest of four siblingsu00a0-- has joined the school to brush up on maths and English.
Studying on the road helped Singh in more ways than one. It improved her scores, allowing her to gain admission in a college of Commerce. Today, it provides her with a steady source of income.
For Singh however, the biggest difference that the school made was to give her access to education. "I wasn't very good at school and couldn't understand basic concepts. The numbers in class were huge, and those who couldn't grasp things in the first go, got left behind. This continued till I was in class 6 and was ready to drop out," she recalls fiercely, perhaps out of the awareness that her life would have been different had she dropped out.
While walking back home one morning, she chanced upon the Asha Kiran class. Intrigued, she walked up to find out what was happening.
That day, she attended her first footpath 'class', and didn't stop going back till she cleared her class 10 exams.
"The volunteers at the school told me if I studied hard, I could teach as well."
Realising that this was her chance to help other potential drop outs, Singh jumped at the offer.
And the rest as they say, is history.
"Children from Telegu and Kannada medium schools also come here. Luckily, they know enough Hindi so we can overcome the language barrier. Every child must study," she says, pushing the spectacles determinedly up her nose. And you know she means business when she does that.
Why should you care?
The Annual Status of Education Report 2010 released by NGO Pratham in January pointed out that though 99 per cent of all children in the 6-14 age group in rural Maharashtra were enrolled in school, attendance rates were far lower. The report also revealed that standards of Mathematics were appalling, with nearly 60 per cent of class V students incapable of doing division. While the report may have focused on rural educational centres, government schools in the city don't fare much better.
The Asha Kiran footpath school, which has nine centres across Mumbai, aims at correcting this. In the past 15 years that it has been operational, the informal 'school' has educated over 1,000 students, many of whom study in nearby BMC schools. Many of those who passed out are now teachers here.
Neighbourhood: Sion
The PIL crusader, Gaurang Damani
How does a start up entrepreneur, who once featured on an International list of the Who's Who of Technology, land up at the Bombay High Court three times? He files three Public Interest Litigations.
Gaurang Damani is up for his biggest PIL hearing yetu00a0-- one that could affect the lives of nearly 5.5 crore health insurance policy holders in the country. And the hearing is scheduled for tomorrow.
In 1997, Damani, an engineer from the Vivekanada Institute of Technology, who grew up in Sion and migrated to the US in 1994, launched his own IT consulting company. He also started a websiteu00a0-- Die Hard Indianu00a0-- which aggregated news, the good bits, about India. At one point the site had over 47,000 NRI members.
After he returned to India in 2002, the site became an information portal (which licenses are needed to renovate a flat or own a shop; how to obtain senior citizen services offered by local NGOs) and focussed on local issues affecting Sion, Wadala and Matunga (which roads needed repairing, which traffic signal isn't working) shipped out every month to its 4,800 members as an email newsletter.
The 38 year-old filed two PILs in 2005 and 2006u00a0-- the first against towing trucks, and another against Vilasrao Deshmukh, then Chief Minister, for extending the term of PS Pasricha, the director general of police, beyond his retirement age.
"The number of towing trucks was brought down from 130 to 75, and Pasricha's term was not extended," says Damani.
But it is the third PIL that has got Damani, who stood for BMC elections as an independent candidate in 2007, fired up.
Damani filed a PIL against Third Party Administrator firms in the health insurance industry. These are in violation of several norms in the Insurance Act, theu00a0 Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority regulations and the Health Services Regulations. Damani points out page-after-page in a thick file that puts to lie Insurance companies' claims that they are in the redu00a0-- the total claims paid ratio for the industry last year was a profit-making 96 per cent.
What's more, says Damani, TPA firms are offered incentives to reduce claim amounts. A document downloaded from the New India Assurance website states that the TPA firm stands to gain 10 per cent of the amount by which the claim is reduced, if the cut falls within the bracket of 60 per cent to 90 per cent.
TPA firms are not permitted to own other businesses. Damani says the most well known is run by a famous cardiovascular surgeon who owns a hospital in Gurgaon.
"If a patient goes to his hospital," conjectures Damani, "won't his TPA claim the full amount from the Insurance company?" Clearly, the die hard activist is ready for his next challenge.
Why should you care?
There are nearly 5.5 crore people in the country with a mediclaim insurance. If the High Court accepts Damani's PIL, not only will the health insurance industry become robust, TPA companies won't get to play middleman between you and your insurance company.
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