Kochi: At a time when the transgender community has been facing discrimination from all sections of the society, the Kochi Metro Rail Ltd (KMRL) has now come out with a proposal to provide them with jobs in customer relations, housekeeping and crowd management once the Metro rail becomes operational.
According to the Kochi police there are about 128 transgenders in the city alone.
The Metro agency has decided to absorb them through Kudumbasree. The decision was taken following the talks held between the police and the KMRL on Tuesday.
Times of India had in a series of reports exposed the plight of transgenders in Kochi, many of them becoming sex workers in order to undergo a sex transition surgery and they were forced to shell out money for daily boarding facilities in different localities of the city.
There are around 25,000 transgenders in the state and many of them who had left the state had come back after it announced a transgender policy last year, which still remains on paper.
“Their fate is a live issue in Kochi. They don’t have social acceptance. They can’t find jobs and these people opt for undesirable occupation,” KMRL managing director Elias George said.
Last week, the police rounded up many transgenders and allegedly assaulted them for misbehaviour. But the Kochi police, in a reformist move, took the initiative of rehabilitating the transgenders and held talks with KMRL on Tuesday led by city police commissioner M P Dineesh.
“The metro agency has asked us to prepare a detailed proposal. After we hold talks with the community members we will submit a detailed report,” he said. Though they would not be directly employed by the public sector undertaking, the metro agency has come up with a plan to rehabilitate them on a test basis under the Kundumbasree and deploy them on Metro’s operational side.