The Hindu Business Line : A social activist with corporate muscle

It was a visit to Shiva Shakthi Kakkum Karangal, a home for mentally challenged children, which opened a new chapter in his life. It made him understand the commitment of social workers and the problems they faced in running their organisations.

He also realised that all that was required to solve their issues was planning and professional management. "The task was to bring business skills into social work," says Devarajan.

For instance, he realised that the biggest issue for any social organisation was food. To solve this, he formed the DOS (Dal, Oil, Sugar) club.

As a part of this initiative, housewives collected essential food products from their neighbourhood once a month, which was then channelled to various Non-Governmental Organisations such as The Banyan. Today, 2,000 kg of essential food products are collected every month from 800 families in the city.

Then, Devarajan put to use his immense experience and network of resources to lend a helping hand to Shiva Shakthi Kakkum Karangal.

"We built a new home for the children and a friend of mine donated his house in Bangalore," he says.

He now plans to create a home for senior citizens, orphans and mentally challenged children.

"This is an experiment; we want to create a therapeutic community by bringing these sections of society together," he adds.

In order to sustain these activities, Devarajan created the Manava Seva Dharma Samvardhani trust. The first objective of this trust was to bring recognition to social workers.

"We wanted to showcase people who were doing good work," says Devarajan.

Therefore, the trust instituted the Sadguru Gnanananda National Awards for social workers, which includes a cash prize of Rs 50,000 and a citation. Its winners include Vaishnavi Jayakumar and Vandana Gopikumar of The Banyan, who won the award in 2000.

Another initiative of the trust is the Centre for Social Initiative and Management (CSIM), a school for training social workers. (See Box)

The trust's next big idea is to empower the agents of social change by placing them on the payrolls of corporate organisations.

"Companies have cricketers or sportspersons on the rolls, similarly they can employ social workers," he says. He explains that this would give the profession the status that it deserves.

He also believes that support for social activities must come from the community and that the Government can only facilitate in policy formulation.

"There's so much of social inequality and we need millions of trained social workers to change the society. This is just a small step," he adds.

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