13 Scholarships

Hope Unlimited has provided scholarships to 13 school-going girls from across Tamil Nadu. They may come from different areas but the families of the girls have some things in common: their already fragile hand-to-mouth existence was made more untenable after the Covid pandemic, many had lost their jobs then; most of these children are in single parent homes with the mothers being the sole wage earner. Hope Unlimited’s partner, Action Aid identified the 13 girls on the basis of their vulnerable living conditions. Below are a few case stories.

Shanthi, who belongs to a tribal community, works as a sweeper in Semmancherri, a suburb in Chennai. A school dropout, Shanthi was married before she turned 16 years of age. She has two daughters, Ammuni, who is 17 years old and has finished school and Easwari, 14, who is in Grade 9. Shanthi’s husband, who had health issues died in 2019. “I became depressed after my husband’s death. My monthly income of INR 8000 as a sweeper was just not enough to run the family. The Covid pandemic made things worse as I did not have any income then. I had to borrow money from private money lenders. Now, the floods in December 2023 has made things worse. We have lost everything,” says Shanthi. 

Forty-year-old Jansi, from Chetpet village in Tiruvannamalai district, is a single parent of two girls: Shrisha is 10 years old and is in the fourth grade while Jeslin is six years old and in the first grade. Jansi’s husband left her when the children were very young. Jansi was unemployed then. She started working as a domestic help and since the income was not enough to cover the monthly expenses, Jansi found work in a shop selling textiles. But her monthly income of INR 5000 is barely enough to feed her children.

Kanishka, 14, is in Grade 8. The family lives in Vetrapatti village of Dharmapuri district. The girl’s mother died when her younger sister was barely two. The girl’s father is a daily wage worker earning INR 7000 a month.

Hope Unlimited had supported Saranya and her sister during the second wave of the Covid pandemic in 2021. The two siblings had just lost their mother and sole breadwinner to Covid. Their father was and remains an alcoholic. The two girls stay in a residential school but during summer holidays have to go home. Saranya was one of the 13 girls to receive the scholarship. 

(April 2024)