A half-way home for the mentally challenged will be set up at Samali, on Bakrahat Road, in Bishnupur, on the southern fringes of the city, next month.

Spread over a four-bigha plot, the home will be a ?model? treatment and rehabilitation project that will promote awareness about the human rights of the mentally challenged in society and of those housed in custodial homes.

The project will be funded by SEVAC (Sane and Enthusiasts Volunteers? Association of Calcutta), Goal ? an Irish voluntary organisation ? and Development Co-operation of Ireland.

?Our salient objective is to spread knowledge about human rights. Our home will work for the promotion of human rights of mental health patients languishing in correctional homes across the globe. We are planning to launch different educational programmes on human rights and mental health through this centre,? observed Prativa Sengupta, chief psychologist and co-ordinator of SEVAC.

Apart from a 40-bed indoor unit, the half-way home will have an outdoor clinic and a crisis intervention, child and adolescent mental health promotion and geriatric mental health promotion units.

Based in Thakurpukur, SEVAC was launched in 1988. While assisting a few mentally challenged patients, the institute?s members noticed that where there was mental illness, there were human rights violations as well.

SEVAC is a voting member of the World Federation for Mental Health and runs programmes funded by the National Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Women.

?The existing building of SEVAC is not big enough for implementing our ideas in reality. We are striving to see that our centre comes up fast so that upgraded services can be provided,? said Tapas Roy, secretary of SEVAC.