A volunteering force and some home truths

Flood relief work figures prominently in Chennai Home Guards’ annual calendar. As they help those in inundation-prone areas, one cannot help asking if these volunteers themselves would do with some help. Two Home Guards, one high up the totem pole and the other at the coalface, on what could be done for the betterment of this volunteering force and the movement it represents

Home Guards are pillars shoring up the police force, stepping into their boots in situations that stretch the latter’s resources to the limits.

Drawn from civilian citizenry, these “pillars” come in different, often sharply contrasting forms.

Here is presenting two representational pillars, embodying two categories of volunteers within the Home Guards collective. Sanjay Bhansali and S. Jothilakshmi: the former, a seasoned strategist in Chennai’s Home Guards ecosystem, and the latter, a trooper that has to translate strategy into beneficial action on the ground. Even outside this ecosystem, they occupy two polar realities.

Joining the Home Guards not out of necessity but for the satisfaction of serving a civic role, Sanjay is an entrepreneur when he does not don the cap of Area Commander, Home Guards’ Chennai East. The modest honorarium, ₹560 a day, holds no allure for him.

But it does for Jothilakshmi, a 35-year-old dialysis technician at Stanley Medical Hospital for whom every rupee in that daily honorarium counts. Even this honorarium is clasped by a tight cap: a Home Guard is allowed a maximum of ten days’ work in a month. Jothilakshmi is a home guard attached to the Tondiarpet police station, and usually, only when she is offered station duty can she rack up those 10 days.

It might be a lifeline, a reinforcement in the battle for survival, but Home Guards is as much an emotion to Jothilakshmi as it is to Sanjay. Her dream of joining the police force dashed by height requirement, she plumped for the next option, wearing khakhi fatigues as a Home Guard and serving in a supportive role to the police.

Both Sanjay and Jothilakshmi have thoughts to share about the honorarium and other features within Home Guards, for different reasons. Sanjay makes a point and he does not want to belabour it as it is plain as a pikestaff: this honorarium has no pulling power.