In his 20th year as a social worker, S. Murugan, the founder of the NGO Theruvoram talks about his work with abandoned children, the poor, and the mentally ill 

Photos: Illustration by Tapash Ranjan; S Murugan  

By Shevlin Sebastian 

Inside the dormitory of the Theruvoram shelter home, at Kochi, Govind sits on a bed. He smiles, even though his right arm had been amputated at the shoulder. Govind was working in a hotel in Trichy when he got electrocuted. Apart from his arm, his left leg was damaged. He walks with a limp. From Trichy, he came to Kochi. Then he started begging near the High Court. “I used to earn Rs 400 per day,” he says. 

But life on the streets finally got to him. He became mentally unhinged, was picked up by the police and brought to the Theruvoram shelter. At the shelter, after his hair and nails were cut, he was given a shave and a bath. “Thereafter, he was taken for treatment at a mental home at Thrissur,” says shelter founder S. Murugan. “Now he has improved and we have brought him back. We are trying to find a way to send him back home. But at this moment, there are no leads.”

On one side of the dormitory, there are two rooms. Inside one, three men are lying on a bed and look vacantly ahead. “They are all mentally disturbed,” says Murugan.  

More than 80 per cent of the inmates have come from states like Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Delhi. They are usually found near the Guruvayur or Chottanikkara temples or at railway stations at Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode or wandering about aimlessly on the roads. Many remain in Kerala for a long time.  

But there are happy outcomes. One 55-year-old woman, Rakhi fell in front of a train and got severely injured. She was taken to Kalamassery Medical College. The hospital authorities looked after her for six months and got her healed. Then the hospital informed the then Kochi Collector K Mohammed Y Safirulla, who called Murugan. “I went and collected Rakhi, looked after her for three months and sent her to a shelter home run by nuns,” says Murugan. “The nuns managed to find her relatives in Gujarat and she was sent back. So, this story had a happy ending.” 

Another happy ending happened for two elderly sisters. They had a fight with their family at Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh. So, in a rage, they went to the railway station and took a train, which brought them to Kochi. When the police found them begging on the streets, they were brought to Theruvoram. “After two weeks, they gave us the contact numbers and their sons came and took them back,” says Murugan.   

Murugan clarifies that Theruvoram is a half-way home. The initial stay is at the shelter and thereafter, the affected people, be it children, the poor, or the mentally sick, are moved to different places. The two-storey building and land belong to the Social Justice Department. After Murugan presented a plan called the Streetlight Project the government gave the go-ahead. The partnership began on May 16, 2013.

But today, Murugan is celebrating 20 years as a social worker. He got the idea of social service when he began selling newspapers as a youngster at the Kerala State Road Transport bus terminus at Kochi. Murugan came across an array of people: beggars, drifters, pickpockets, mentally ill people and sex workers. “The sex workers told me how they were trying to earn money to pay for the school fees of their children, to take care of their aged parents, and to look after the needs of the family,” says Murugan. 

He felt the need to do something. By this time, he had bought a second-hand autorickshaw, with the help of loans from friends and a Catholic priest Brother Maurus. So, he would take the mentally-challenged to his home, get them cleaned up and take them on his auto-rickshaw to the various shelter homes.   

“I felt empathy for another reason,” he says. “I also have come from a poor background” 

Of Tamilian origin, his parents were workers at a tea estate in Peermade, Idukki. Unfortunately, Murugan’s father, Shanmugham, was an alcoholic. One day when Murugan was in Class two his father left in search of another job. 

His mother earned Rs 10 as a daily-wage worker. “We had very little to eat,” says Murugan. “At lunch, I had kanji (rice gruel). Sometimes, in the evening I would share one vada with my sister.” 

He was studying in a school but when his mother could no longer pay the fees, he had to drop out. After a few years, Shanmugham suddenly returned and took the family to Kochi. 

But the hard times continued. Murugan began earning a living as a rag picker. But one day, in 1992, Brother Maurus befriended Murugan and took him to the Don Bosco Sneha Bhavan Orphanage at Palluruthy. Murugan lived there for eight years and learned to read and write in Malayalam. “I started reading books on Mother Teresa and Sree Narayana Guru,” says Murugan. “The nuns told me their life stories too. I decided that when I grow up I would be like them.”

And, in his own way, Murugan has done so.

(The New Indian Express, Kochi)