This female entrepreneur quit her job in Singapore to help acid attack survivors in India

Tania Singh was 21 when she met with a fire accident in her apartment while she was studying at the Singapore Management University. Tania received high-degree burns, and for six months, she was in and out of the hospital for multiple surgeries, skin grafts, and reconstruction of her ear. 

Going through such a difficult time in a foreign country can be daunting, so she asked her parents to get her treated in India. 

“My father visited burns wards in many hospitals in India and he told me that the condition over there was pathetic. He researched that a lot of deaths that took place in the burns wards here were preventable. I did my own research to know how bad the situation was and I came across an image of an acid attack victim. That was the first time I found out that such a thing was a reality for so many in India,” Tania, Co-founder and CEO of Make Love Not Scars, tells HerStory.

She decided to join Make Love Not Scars (MLNS), a non-profit organisation that aims to rehabilitate survivors of acid attacks. It operates a rehabilitation centre for acid attack survivors in Delhi and focuses on providing immediate life saving medical attention, reconstructive surgeries, legal aid and skill training to help them cope with the massive changes

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Becoming co-founder of MLNS

In 2014, while going through her predicament, Tania started researching acid attacks in India. She came across MLNS’ Facebook page, which was crowdfunding Rs 1 lakh for a survivor’s rehabilitation. After finding out about their work, Tania approached Ria Sharma, Founder and President of MLNS, to help the survivor financially.

“Ria didn’t take the money but asked me if I wanted to help set up MLNS,” recalls Tania, adding that the two had never met each other. Ria was studying fashion communication at Leeds Arts University in London at that time while Tania was in Singapore.

The two started collaborating over the internet. During the same time, Tania graduated and got a job at a tech startup called ServisHero as a Marketing Associate, but she had a three-month break before joining her company, and decided to come back to India. 

“During this time, I helped Ria set up the rehabilitation centre in Delhi and met with many acid attack survivors through MLNS. I had decided to do everything to work towards the progress of MLNS along with my job by working extra hours and over the weekends remotely from Singapore,” Tania recalls. She says that she returned to Singapore to start her job, and while she enjoyed the freedom the country brought to her life, she couldn’t get the survivors out of her mind.

Three months into her job, Tania quit in 2016 and decided to move back to India to work with MLNS for the acid attack survivors.

“Everything that I was able to do felt inadequate and I always felt like there was more that needed to be done. Despite several instances of discouragement, when you see the person in whose life you’ve been able to make a difference, then you just want to continue with your effort and help more and more people,” shares Tania.

Impact of MLNS

MLNS started India’s first residential facility for acid attack survivors in 2016 to help those who were left to fend for themselves. The centre also helps survivors overcome their emotional struggles through recreational activities like yoga and poetry classes.

The co-founders decided to impart skill training to the survivors to help them become financially independent. They also realised that many survivors had children who were silent spectators of abuse and also had trauma. In order to help them, MLNS also crowdfunds for their education and enrolls them in boarding school so they could heal in a normalised environment.

The non-profit has collaborated with Shah Rukh Khan founded Meer Foundation, which conducts surgeries for acid attack survivors. They also have corporate donors who contribute from time to time.

However, during the pandemic, most of their corporate donors redirected their funds towards COVID-19 relief work, which led to MLNS struggling for funds so they resorted back to crowdfunding.   

They did a campaign called #EndAcidSale in 2015 in collaboration with Ogilvy and Mather. The NGO released a series of beauty tutorials, calling for a complete ban on the over-the-counter sale of acid with survivor Reshma Qureshi going viral on the internet.  

The videos has seen over two million views to date and it was accompanied by a petition addressed to the Government of India, demanding a complete ban on toilet-cleaning acid and stronger implementation of the Poisons Act and Poisons Rules. It garnered over two lakh signatures within the first two weeks. 

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On December 8, 2015, the Supreme Court of India directed Indian states to enforce the ban on the over-the-counter sale of acid. The campaign was covered in some of the most coveted news publications like The New York Times and was endorsed by global actors like Amitabh Bachchan and Ashton Kutcher.