Refugee Week was established in Australia in the mid-1980s to create awareness of local, national and international issues affecting refugees and is held in June to include United Nations World Refugee Day.
To mark 2017 Refugee Week, SBS Hindi brings you the story of an Indian Australian Ramesh Kumar who has changed lives of refugees and stateless people.
Before arriving in Australia as an immigrant, Ramesh Kumar worked as an IAS Officer in Mumbai.
As part of CIDCO, Kumar played an important role in building social infrastructure in Navi Mumbai.
“My role was to build a social community space for people arriving from different parts of India to settle down in Navi Mumbai. I ensured that we built community spaces and number of women groups to support the social cohesion in a newly-developed city,” Kumar told SBS Hindi.
Now 22 years later, Kumar continues to play that role of building social cohesion in the society.
Since his arrival in Melbourne in 1995, Kumar has worked in the social sector and has witnessed the transition of Australian society which has seen a significant influx of refugees and migrants.
Kumar worked as a General Manager at AMES Australia where he was responsible for implementing the organisation’s social participation and volunteer strategies including oversight of the Multicultural Hub, Volunteer Management, Social Enterprises, Community Engagement and Participation.
Each year, AMES Australia assists over 40,000 people by providing humanitarian settlement, education, training and employment services for refugees and newly arrived migrants.
After working with refugees for years, Kumar felt the need to focus on one of the most marginalised group of people in the world, the stateless people.
Source: SNAP
Kumar became a founding member of an independent non-profit organisation the Statelessness Network Asia Pacific (SNAP) which works to address statelessness through direct engagement and contribution from its members and stakeholders, particularly formerly stateless persons, stateless persons and persons at risk of statelessness.
Speaking to SBS Hindi, Mr. Kumar said, “Stateless people are those who have documentation to establish their citizenship. They are stuck in those places. We aim to create awareness as well as we work with the authorities to get them some sort of identity.”
Mr. Kumar says every country has stateless people.
“It is hard to believe that in a world with such advance technology, there are over 12 million people who are stateless and do not have any proof of citizenship. My aim is to help these people, one at a time,” he says.
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