some of you may remember the story (earlier in this blog) or shared in our conversations over dinner, in Mysore, about Manjula getting her voting card.

She declared that her life was half over before she managed to vote. Well that set me on a journey to help sort out her various ID cards, in a sense to legitimise Manjula in the eyes of the state! This is still a very informal society, at least in some respects, so many people don’t have a birth certificate, know of their actual birthdate and maybe even just have one name. It is, of course, very important to get these things sorted especially if you want to do any formal business or even travel abroad. So this was to become one of our major projects. I immediately I realised there were all sorts of problems….