Sajida’s lifelong engagement with women

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: For Sajida Begum, the founder and President of Aasra Women & Children Welfare Trust, International Women’s Day does not come as a celebration of womanhood but as a reminder of the woes of the common women in the society, which need sympathetic resolution. Her constant engagement with such women propelled her into the lifelong task of redressing their woes.

For nearly 13 years, Sajida’s Santhawana Family Counselling Centre has been actively engaged in settling marital disputes and helping women in distress, reconciling disputes between couples and counselling them about mutual love and trust. The Centre was founded by her in 2010. Having worked among women in individual capacity for two decades prior to it, Sajida was well aware of issues that lead to the tenuous relationship between spouses, and causes of marital breakups.

In 2010, she along with a band of dedicated social workers registered the Aasra Women & Children Welfare Trust and launched the Santhawana Family Counselling Centre with an office in Frazer Town. It was recognised by the Women & Child Development Department in 2011.

High among the aims and objectives of the Trust was to counsel families of prospective couples to solemnise the marriage in a manner that does not involve unnecessary expenditure and ostentation and avoid getting into debts. She would advise visiting couples to look at marriage as the sharing of marital bliss and the way to raise a responsible family rather than a deal for exchange of dowry.

According to Sajida Begum, the Aasra has handled nearly 4,000 cases of marital dispute, estrangement between spouses, dowryrelated harassment, denial of share in inherited property to women members and sexual abuse of women. She says most people take a cue from the society’s elite when it comes to the question of marriage.

Hiring of expensive function venues, lavish expenditure on garments, ornaments and food and hospitality often derails the family finances which in turn results in huge debts. Financial risk aversion has been on the top of the Aasra’s agenda while counselling. She says the emergence of social media and general access to gadgets like the mobile has led to rampant extramarital relations, which lead to splits and marital breakups.

In several such cases, counselling has been helpful in settling differences and uniting estranged spouses. She says, though members of the lower middle class are a majority, incidence is not common among the elite, as a few of such cases have come up for resolution. She has also been advising the spouses of rights and duties towards each other and to avoid greed, suspicion, demand of dowry etc.

She says though cases of divorce could be tackled on a legal plain, desertions among lower middle class have been rampant. According to her, since most of the male members of the lower middle class work in the informal sector, it renders the task of finding the whereabouts of absentee husbands and making them comply with family responsibilities highly cumbersome.

In case a man deserts his wife, the responsibility of maintenance of children falls upon the women who in most cases are housewives and have no skills to earn a livelihood for the family. She says much hullabaloo is made about talaq, while tackling desertions should be the top priority. Aasra’s Santhawana Family can be reached on 080-25479968, 80509 07706.