May her tribe prosper

Sandhya gets up at 5 in the morning. By 6 she leaves home to catch the morning train to the city. From her house she takes a van rickshaw and travels for an hour to reach the railway station.It takes about an hour and a half by local train to reach the city .Her duty at the big city hospital starts from 8.30 in the morning. In the evening she leaves the hospital at 7.40 pm and by the time she gets back home it is almost 11 pm . She stays at home for five to six hours everyday.Rest of her time is spent travelling and attending to patients at the hospital.


Sandhya stays with her mother and a thirteen year old daughter. Her daughter is in the eighth standard and walks everyday for over an hour to reach the local high school.She cannot afford to buy a cycle for her daughter yet. But her brother has promised a cycle to his niece if she manages a high score at the end of term exams. Sandhya is hopeful. She is illiterate but dreams of a better life for her daughter .Sandhya’s husband lives a separate life. She seems to have no regrets.

Sandhya’s mother packs her some boiled vegetables and rice most of the days. Most of the days Sandhya gets a share of the leftover food served to patients.At the hospital there are scores of girls like her slogging it out.They are temporary outsourced staff and get paid by the agency.Girls like her are not too educated and attending patients and handling simple jobs are things they can manage. At times they hear about the agency withdrawing from the hospital services and a cloud of uncertainty looms large now and then .Apprehensive of losing their jobs they desperately try to seek assurance from the nurses and hospital staff. It is a life full of struggle yet hundreds of poor women ,some abandoned by their husbands , some with incapacitated men at home ,some simply to supplement their meager family income -find this to be a better alternative than living isolated and lost in distant villages. Kudos to these brave and resilient women of Bengal.