Rights collective · run by us · Chennai
We are a collective of disabled Chennaiites: wheelchair users, blind commuters, Deaf signers, people with invisible disabilities. We run a paperwork desk for UDID cards and pensions, audit the city's front steps, put ramps on shops that want them, and hold a peer room every Saturday. Nothing about us without us — including this page.
The desk log counts applications filed and outcomes received; the audit map marks steps measured and ramps built. Those registers are this page's only arithmetic — there is no sentimental counter here and there never will be.
For Disabled people who want the paperwork desk and the peer room · Donors who fund ramps and caseworkers, not pity · Shopkeepers and offices ready to fix their front step
These four are promises this page makes on your behalf. Keep them or change them — they are not decoration.
Ways to give or join
Every figure is this year's actual cost in this city: a caseworker's fair part-time honorarium, a mason's quoted rate for a ramp with the correct gentle slope, tactile tiles at the supplier's price. Access is mostly unglamorous arithmetic, which is exactly why we print it.
Monthly
UDID cards, disability pensions, bus passes, scribe arrangements for exams — the desk files them correctly the first time. This is one-third of the caseworker's monthly honorarium.
One-time
A mason-built ramp at the correct gentle slope with a handrail — for a shop or clinic that wants one. Steeper is cheaper and useless; the slope is the whole point, so it is on the card.
One-time
A member team measures one street's shopfronts — steps, door widths, counters — and publishes the map sheet. Auditors are paid a fair sitting fee; access work is work.
Volunteer
Blind members need trained readers and exam scribes more than anything donors usually think of. Two evenings a month, trained by the members you will read for.
Volunteer
The peer room runs on chai, chairs moved, and someone minding the door buzzer. Allies keep the room running; members keep the room's floor. That order is the collective's design.
Pick the way you want to help and it lands in the form below. Picking another replaces it — this page records one intention at a time, not a basket. NO MONEY MOVES ON THIS PAGE: nothing is charged, deducted or collected here, and how giving actually happens is written under the form.
On the ground
No pity framing, no inspiration framing — both are the same lens held upside down. These frames are placeholders for your own work: the desk mid-filing, a ramp being measured, the peer room's chairs in a circle. Members appear as agents, by their own consent, or not at all.
How giving actually happens
Paste the collective's bank account name, number and IFSC here, and the UPI ID if you use one — exactly as the bank has them. State plainly that the paperwork desk is free and nobody may charge for it.
Words you have permission to print
A member, in their own words, with their name — about the desk, a ramp, or the peer room — collected with written permission and printed exactly as they said it.
Your honest record
Last quarter's registers, dated: applications filed and outcomes received at the desk, streets audited, ramps built, money in and what it bought. The audited annual figures go here exactly as the auditor wrote them.
The frames above are placeholder photographs of the kind of work this page is about — not this organisation's own record, and never a person whose face buys sympathy. The slots below are deliberately blank: this is a template, and an invented beneficiary count, an invented donor or an invented 80G number would be a lie on a page asking people to give — and inventing the tax registration is an offence. Fill each slot with something real and checkable, then delete this line.
How it works
Three steps, and money moves only to the collective's account, only against a receipt.
The form records what you picked and how to reach you. Nothing is charged here — this page cannot take money, by design. Shopkeepers wanting a ramp use the same form; pick the ramp card and say so.
Within the week, with the account details and receipt mechanics — or the mason's quotation and slope drawing if a ramp is involved, or the training calendar if you pledged evenings.
The audit map shows steps fixed street by street; the desk log shows outcomes received. Both live in the office and in the quarterly sheet, and both are better reading than any brochure.
Before you give
We are a collective OF disabled people. The distinction is the whole organisation: the desk files for entitlements the law already grants, the audits measure what the city already owes, and the peer room is ours. Donors fund the work; they do not direct it.
Because access work is work, and disabled people are asked to do it free more than anyone alive. Fair honorariums are printed in the quarterly sheet. If that arithmetic bothers a donor, we would rather lose the donation than the principle.
Not unsolicited, please. Mobility and hearing equipment is personal, prescribed and fitted; a warehouse of guessed donations helps no one. If you want to fund equipment, the desk connects specific members' actual prescriptions with your money, receipted.
The desk log says what was filed and what came back, quarter by quarter, and the map says which steps got fixed. We refuse lifetime totals and sentimental counters — our members are not units of our success, and the registers we do publish can actually be checked.
Only if the 80G cell at the top carries a current number, checkable on the income-tax portal. The office shares the certificate before any transfer. An empty cell means ask first — and credit us for saying so.
The one thing this page asks
One form, one intention — donor, volunteer, or a shop that wants its step fixed. The office replies within the week; nothing is charged or collected here.
You want to help with
Nothing yet — pick a way to give above, or say it in the form.
Three required fields: a name, a channel that genuinely works for you, and which conversation this is — because a donor, a volunteer, a shopkeeper and a member need four different replies. Deliberately absent: any question about your disability (the desk asks what it needs when YOU ask it to file something, and a pledge form has no business asking), any amount field, any PAN, and any payment field — this page records intentions and takes nothing.
Your details go to the collective's office for this one reply. Desk queries are confidential to the caseworker. Nothing is sold, and nobody's information becomes a story.