Widow’s work to be honoured with Neerja Bhanot award

International Widows Day will be observed on Sunday amid a special recognition for Kerala's Sifiya Haneef, who stood up against odds and refused to succumb to her ordeals.

The Neerja Bhanot Pan Am Trust has announced that Sifiya will receive the prestigious Neerja Bhanot Award, which will be conferred upon her on Neerja’s birth anniversary in Chandigarh this September.

The annual award, which includes Rs 1.5 lakh and a citation, was founded in 1990 in memory of Braveheart senior flight purser Neerja Bhanot, who fought and saved hundreds of lives while losing her own during a Pan Am plane hijack at the Karachi airport in September 1986.

Sifiya’s husband died when she was 20, just four years after her marriage.

She and here two kids were staring at a long daunting life ahead.

Today, this young woman helps and touches lives of more than 300 needy families.

Sifiya, who lives in Palghat in Kerala, helps families get shelter, constructing toilets in slums and colonies, providing medicines to the ailing and a lot more.

The award to Sifiya will be conferred by US-based Wendy Sue Knecht, who was working with Pan Am and as a Neeraj’s trainer in the eighties, Chandigarh-based Akhil Bhanot, managing trustee of the Neerja Bhanot Pan Am Trust said.

Akhil is Neerja's elder brother.

The UN observes June 23 as International Widows Day to draw attention to voices and experiences of widows and to garner support for them.

Sifiya picked up a part-time job to meets ends after she lost her husband and discontinued her studies, Akhil said.

Sifiya soon realised the magnitude of suffering of widows. On her Facebook page, ‘Chithal,’ she penned down and shared miseries and problems of widows, ailing mothers, elderly, cancer patients etc, garnering support for them through donations.