Funding crunch shuts bank that gave hope to Mumbai's sex workers

"Now they are hiding the money somewhere in the cubicle or are stitching it up in their pillow covers," said Fatima, as she is known in the area and who gave only her first name.

"I used to ask the girls to save money to send it home," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "They come from all parts of the country. Their families are poor."

She hoped Sangini would re-open if funds for administration were found. Sangini was the first bank set up in India to help sex workers save money that could help them escape to a different future.

The co-operative bank, which started in India's second largest red light district in 2007, offered fuss-free banking services to sex workers, collecting cash deposits from their doorsteps and even welcoming homeless girls to open savings accounts.

The western state of Maharashtra, India's second most populous state with Mumbai as its capital, has for years been a major destination of trafficking victims, who are lured with the promise of jobs but sold into sex slavery or domestic servitude.

Campaigners say girls enslaved in sex work lead impoverished lives, often with no access to the money they make for the first few years, so it was a welcome move when the bank opened.

Funding woes

"When we started, we were afraid if brothel madams and pimps will allow it to function," said Shilpa Merchant, former national co-ordinator of the US-based non-profit Population Services International (PSI) that initially funded the project.

"So we aimed at opening 100 accounts in the first year. But we opened more than 100 accounts on the bank's opening day."

Sex workers soon volunteered with the bank to become collection agents, visiting brothels to collect money and handing over receipts. The number of accounts had increased to 5000 when the bank closed.

"Some sex workers could get their children married, some left the profession and started a shop," said Merchant. "We documented all this. The bank was giving them alternative options of livelihood."

Anusaya, who would only give her first name, said she was born into the devadasi system, which "dedicates" girls to a life of sex work in the name of religion, and she was one of the first to open an account at Sangini with 1000 rupees.

"Then I started saving regularly. I also started volunteering for the bank. I could buy a small room for myself a few years ago. I live there on my own now," said Anusaya.

Savita Tadke, who worked at Sangini, said she was regularly stopped by sex workers and asked when the bank would re-open.

"The women here don't have space," she said. "Their money, and at times their clothes, are stolen by pimps and customers."

Initially supported by PSI, Sangini hit a rough patch when PSI withdrew funding in 2009, trustees of the bank said.

It then got funding support from India800 Foundation, a trust set up to help the 800 million Indians living on less than $2 a day, which suffered a fund crunch three years later that affected its Indian operations as well, trustees said.

"We gave 3 per cent interest to account holders on their deposits," said Narayan Hegde, trustee of Sangini and chairman of India800 Foundation. "We in turn deposited all the money into another nationalised bank that gave us 5 per cent interest.

"To run the bank on the 2 per cent margin was becoming unsustainable. We had a liability of 4 million rupees when we closed. We had no support. The minute we said sex workers, nobody was interested [in funding the bank]," Hegde said.

"Even now I am hopeful that if we get 1 million rupees, we can run the bank."

Kamathipura is Mumbai's oldest red light district with hundreds of brothels lining its dusty streets but sex workers here were never united as they came from different parts of India and spoke different languages.

"This bank brought us together," said Maya Lama, a board member of Sangini and a representative of sex workers in Kamathipura. "Our collection agents had access to brothels. We were able to rescue many young girls from brothels in the last few years.

"We have the strength to run the bank even now. We just don't have the money."

Thomson Reuters Foundation