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MUMBAI: Armed with deposit envelopes and a pen, Akkatai doesn’t
even cast a passing glance at the men looking for sex in the red
light district of India’s financial capital.
She has her mind focused on another more
important task—collecting bank deposits from the prostitutes who
rush up to press rupee notes into her hand.
Akkatai takes the money, scribbles in deposit
books the women carry, and continues towards the first of 294
bedrooms she visits daily in Kamathipura, the oldest prostitutes’
haunt in the sprawling city of 18 million people.
“Some of the women stay up all night. They
tell me it’s good we come to get the money because they can’t
deposit it during the day,” said Akkatai, a collector for Sangini
or “Friend,” a banking service set up for prostitutes
Exploited for years by moneylenders and pimps,
prostitutes in Asia’s largest brothel district had long demanded a
bank so they could safely access their earnings.
Their wish was granted by Population Services
International (PSI), a Washington-based nonprofit group which set up
the Sangini project last July.
“If we get unwell, men don’t want to come to
us. If we have a little money in the bank, we can use those 10-20
rupees [25 to 50 cents] when we get sick,” said Maya, a prostitute
who heads a community rights group.
The collected money is pooled into a single
interest-bearing account at the State Bank of India. The account is
in the name of the Sangini cooperative, which manages the women’s
individual accounts. Sangini, like a bank, keeps cash on hand and
facilitates deposits and withdrawals into that account.
More than 2,500 women, many of whom have no
papers and would not be allowed to open normal bank accounts, have
so far deposited $160,000 with Sangini.
“Some women said this was the first time they
felt they owned their money,” said Jiwan Prakash Saha, PSI’s
finance manager.
In February, Sangini also began issuing one-year
loans of up to 15,000 rupees ($350).
Diane Cross, PSI program manager, said that one
woman had used a loan to renovate her crumbling brothel, while
another had helped her son open a DVD and mobile phone shop.
The bank has also expanded to two other
red-light districts, hoping to reach more of the 100,000-plus women
and girls estimated by several non-government organisations and the
US State Department to be working in Mumbai’s brothels.
“Before I’d save money with someone and they
would deny having it or they would run away with it,” said Simla,
a prostitute from Nepal.
Prostitution is illegal in socially conservative
India, making it difficult for sex workers to rely on authorities
for help. But things are slowly changing, and in recent years
prostitutes have been more vocal in their demands for legal rights,
licensing, and reemployment training.
Still, most prostitutes lack identity cards or
even minimum balances needed to open commercial bank accounts and
rely on people such as shopkeepers to hold their money for
them—often at the risk of losing it.
Sangini is the harbinger of the changes that are
now making life a little easier, and certainly more normal, for
Mumbai’s prostitutes.
Thanks to the group’s initiative, Simla can
walk into Sangini’s small office without any papers, as staff use
a webcam photo stored with her file to identify her, and manage her
own money.
“It’s made my life easy. The bank is nearby
and we can come whenever we want,” she said.
Simla said she is saving money for her
seven-year-old son, and for her daughter, 5, whom she has sent to a
boarding school to shelter her from the area’s lifestyle.
“My life’s been wasted but I save money so
my children can study a little and do something with their lives,”
Simla said.
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