Uniting parallel worlds

Leprosy patients don't anymore go about begging with bells tied to their waists as they did in the Dark Ages. But they still beg, in India, for they know of no other means of earning their bread.

They live an underground existence in a satellite world of their own. Yohei Sasakawa, the man from Japan who was declared the Millennium Gandhi by the International Leprosy Union for his efforts to wipe out the disease, wants to see that leprosy does not mean beggary in India and that the parallel worlds unite.

Sasakawa who visited India recently, announced that he plans to introduce micro credit in leprosy colonies in the country to wean them away from begging. He is seeking out NGOs and companies to join hands with him to work in these colonies that have been, by and large, neglected even by them.

Chairman of the Nippon Foundation, Sasakawa is the synthesis between corporate prosperity and altruism.

Sasakawa, who inherited his business and his philanthropy from his father Ryoichi Sasakawa, has been working for medical eradication of leprosy for the last few decades and providing free drugs with a donation of $ 50 million to WHO.

The latter pronounced him the goodwill ambassador for elimination of leprosy. Today the disease is endemic only in six countries. His next step was to fight stigma as a matter of human rights.

He raised the matter of social rehabilitation at the UN in 2003. The commission appointed a special rapporteur to study the docile discrimination caused by the disease .

In 2006, Sasakawa followed this up with a global appeal to end stigma which was endorsed by 11 world leaders including Jimmy Carter, Dalai Lama, Vaclav Havel and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

While it was a dead issue for most of the world, for Sasakawa it is still the beginning of a struggle. He sees his efforts wasted as he sees people he cured now begging on the streets.

"These are people we cured over the years, and we want them to be self supporting,'' he says. Sasakawa who has been behind a headcount of cured patients in India says there are about 700 self generated colonies and they are all into begging. Their children also live in these and depend on the alms of the parents for their schooling.

He says, "A huge social problem exists, and people are rejected by hotels, no one will sit with them and have dinner. Besides there are 20,000 new patients in India annually".

Sasakawa foundation has been focussing on medically treating them. "Our next step is to find out what can be done to provide livelihood to this parallel world. That is the reason we have started micro credit to enable them to work,'' he says.

He says NGOs and companies have had no access to these colonies of leprosy patients and these are considered non existent in society.

"We are reaching out to companies and NGOs. He has been promised help by Tarun Das, the chief mentor of Confederation of Indian Industries . He has told me that he would include successful MFIs in this work,'' says Sasakawa

"We will be a catalyst to bridge different NGOs and companies to become a single force in two to three years," adds Sasakawa.

nippon-foundation.org