[3] Her father Paul successfully mobilised economically disadvantaged people in neighbouring villages to fight for their rights to land that they'd been living on for generations.
Manorama has dedicated her life to battling a host of interconnected issues related to oppressions arising from caste, gender and class hierarchies.
Among the issues she has fought for are the rights of domestic workers and the unorganised labour sector, slum dwellers, Dalits, and for the empowerment of marginalised women.
Manorama is an integral part of many organisations working for the rights of Dalits, women, slum dwellers, and the unorganised sector.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Manorama led processions of over 150,000 people to protest against ‘Operation Demolition’ by the State Government of Karnataka, which was a forced eviction campaign.
[7] Manorama also established the first trade union in the country in 1987 for domestic workers in Bengaluru and strove for inclusion in the Minimum Wages.
In more than 120 slums, she has been responsible for the mobilisation, training and empowerment of women to deal with the discrimination and violence that they face and to take leadership within their communities.
[10] In the 2014 Indian general election, she was named as the Janata Dal (Secular) candidate from Bangalore South (Lok Sabha constituency) which constitutes fairly upper-class and literate voters.