Disaffected by the local and state administration, members of a slum community have joined hands with an NGO to launch an online campaign to raise funds for themselves two months after a fire gutted 50 homes in a Dharavi cluster, leaving nearly 250 people homeless.

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"I was at school when the fire started... the uniform I was wearing was the only thing I was left with," says 14-year-old Ansuja Madival, recounting the January 4 fire that burnt her house to cinders in the Naya Nagar slum of Dharavi.

Ansuja's is one of the 45-50 families rendered homeless by an early morning fire, believed to have been caused by a short-circuit. Panic-striken residents woke up their sleeping family members and abandoned their tenements, leaving behind gas cylinders, which fuelled the fire into a blaze.

The fire reduced to ashes all of Ansuja's and her family's meagre possessions and savings. Her mother, Bhima Madival, was inconsolable until Ansuja and her siblings reminded her that none of them had died or were hurt in the blaze. Two months on, Bhima, who works as a domestic help, has taken on a second job to make ends meet. While the family has moved into a relative's tenement in the same cluster, there is little the Madivals and other families have to look forward to.

The residents say that petitions to the local corporator, MNS' Shraddha Patil, and to MLA Sadanand Sarvankar of the Shiv Sena have fallen on deaf ears. The emergency relief compensation of Rs1,100 per family, too, has not been received. "This is why we decided to launch an online campaign on generosity.com to raise funds so that the affected families can buy basic things, such as utensils and blankets," says Nawneet Ranjan, a documentary film-maker who has been teaching children in Naya Nagar to use laptops, browse the web, make apps etc for the past two years. "We've been lucky to get support from Gyanodaya Foundation," Ranjan said.

The campaign, titled 'Help Tech Girls Rebuild After a Devastating Fire', hopes to raise $10,000, or about Rs 6.7 lakh, over the next month. "Donors have pledged $2,400 so far, but we have a long way to go," says Ranjan. The money, says Ranjan, will be used to buy food, books and stationery, clothes, fire censors and laptops.

Incidentally, the campaign is so titled because of the prototype apps that the girls of Naya Nagar built on open-source platforms to enter the Global Technology Entrepreneurship Program, or simply the Technovation Challenge, in 2014. Of the three prototype apps, one — Women fight back (a GPS-linked, SOS alert for women's saftey) — went live last year. The app was conceived of and built by Ansuja, Mahek Shaikh, Rani Shaikh and Kusum Verma. The other two prototypes were Paani mera jeevan (public tap water collection queue alert) and Padai mera haq (a self-learning tool for school dropouts).(If you wish to donate money to the campaign, please log onto: https://www.generosity.com/community-fundraising/help-tech-girls-rebuild-after-a-devastating-fire)