Column | Sujata Sawant: at your service
Sujata Sawant, a former political worker, transitioned into full-time social work in a Mumbai slum after becoming disillusioned with mainstream politics. She now runs the Adarsh Foundation, which provides community services and meals to marginalized residents.
Why it matters
The story illustrates the impact of grassroots activism and the challenges faced by individuals attempting to address systemic poverty outside of traditional political structures.
In another life, Sujata Sawant, 49, was an accountant with a salary and Sundays off. She plunged into politics in 2014 during the Legislative Assembly election in Maharashtra as a worker of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), drawn in through an informally adopted brother.
She began working part-time in Mumbai’s Kurla constituency, and that’s when Sawant first visited a hamlet in Qureshi Nagar, a 25-year-old settlement, almost entirely Muslim and migrant, a forgotten slum sliced by the railway line. Home to daily-wage workers and with a high-school dropout rate of 95%, it would go on to become the centre of her life’s work.
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