FST

"I thought of an idea to document women's experiences and interface with IVF technology and doctors' views on IVF expansion in the North East of India. FST held full trust and faith in my idea and provided the platform to express my views based on the study findings to a larger audience in the North East".       

Leena Uppal
FST Individual Fellow
Assam

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Tailyang Shanti

Ms. Tailyang Shanti heads a small organization called the Achukuru Welfare Society dedicated to the socially and economically neglected people of Ziro in Lower Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh. She runs a residential Home for orphans, destitutes, persons suffering from mental illness and other disabilities. She manages the expenses of the Home by raising resources on her own – sometimes collecting firewood from the forests to sell and earn some money, or asking local people to contribute. She has not received much support from other sources except for occasional small donations.

 
Apart from providing food and shelter Ms. Shanti single handedly strives to meet other needs of the residents that include education and health and much more.  Recently,  she took a group of mentally challenged people some of whom were abandoned on the roads, along with residents of her Home, to the Lokapriya Gopinath Bordoloi Institute for Mental Hospital at Tezpur in Assam. She also took a teenage boy to the Guwahati Medical College for an operation and stayed with him throughout. Not having any money of her own she somehow manages to beg and borrow money and resources for these and many other such acts of kindness.
 
Inspite of having hardly any formal education, Ms. Shanti has a strong will and is deeply committed to serve the underprivileged and marginalized in her community, and it is this zeal that keeps her going despite very little help from the Government. She has donated whatever land she owned to start a small rural tourism project with some support from the North East Regional Institute of Science and Technology (NERIST) under a UNDP funded project. Minimum fees are charged from visitors who usually spend the day there and some also give small amounts of donation. With revenues earned from running the project, she tries to meet the expenses of running the Home.
 
Ms. Shanti runs the Mother’s Home with able assistance of her son Mr. Tailyang Thanio who is educated and helps her with official paperwork.
Information
Project Name: 
Income generating programme from rural tourism to sustain Home for destitutes & orphans
Project Description: 

To augment her ongoing rural tourism project, Ms. Shanti approached FST for resources to build a boat out of raw materials available, as it was felt that a boating facility would enhance the income generating potential of the tourism project and help sustain the residential care and shelter programme of the Mother’s Home.  It would also raise awareness about the needs of the marginalized population among the visitors and local people.

 
FST’s fellowship support to Tailyang Shanti  enabled her to acquire a boat, and also included a component of capacity building for Thanio on basic concepts of NGO management, rights based approach, exposure to best practices of organizations working on related issues etc. This was done with the purpose of enhancing his understanding of the concepts of development practice and try applying them in their own organization.
 
Now, after six months of the start of the project, Mr. Thanio has attended capacity building workshops organized by FST and undertaken exposure visits to organizations working in the area of mental health and disability in Guwahati. Ms. Shanti has purchased a fibreglass boat which is being used for income generation. Tourists visiting the place are enjoying taking boat rides when they visit the place. They willingly pay Rs. 10 per head and some of them give some donations as well. The inmates of the Mother’s Home are also being trained by Ms. Shanti in some basic aspects of hospitality, to interact with the visitors. The boat has hence become a source of income generation for the Mother’s Home at Ziro.
Thematic Area: 
Gender and Social Justice
Project duration: 
6 months
Amount: 
52000
Year: 
2009
Address: 
Achukuru Welfare Society, Ziro, Dist: Lower Subansiri
State: 
Arunachal Pradesh
Email: 
achukuru47@rediffmail.com
Phone: 
9402243303, 08014012112
Project Status: 
Complete