A gender lens to understand credit in rural India Microcredit = Lending to...
Did Covid-19 ‘Other’ The ASHAs From Their Own?
ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists) have been instrumental in managing...
![One Strand At A Time [A Photo Story]](https://indiafellow.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/IMG_20210906_114752-scaled-1.jpg)
One Strand At A Time [A Photo Story]
Having spent a major part of my fellowship in Maheshwar, Madhya Pradesh, it...
Bridging The Digital Gap In Rural India
Financial inclusion, in today's day and age is not what it was a decade or two...
Resilience, As I Understood It
Resilience and perseverance - the two virtues almost always attributed to the...
Education For Change
Imagine yourself as a child living in a small mud house in a green valley,...
Totes Amaze: How This NGO In Kutch Is Fighting Plastic With Plastic
Nine billion tons - that's the amount of plastic we have created since the...
Dialogue And Democracy: Understanding Theatre Of The Oppressed
Paulo Friere was a renowned Brazilian educator and philosopher. As a leading...
Hallucinations To Reality: Child Sexual Abuse And Parenting
There are only a few people to whom I'm really close. One of them is a classmate I know since 6 years. We met in college and graduated together. Socially, he is extremely awkward and an introvert who is fascinated by trains. I have never met him after college. In...
How Would It Be To Think Without Words!
Most of my last month was spent conducting Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with students of various skill development training programs. These are short term programs, from 4-6 months, focusing on skills such as Computer Literacy, Workplace Readiness and Basic English...
Lessons From a Temporary Illness : Looking Through a Glass
The last quarter of 2017 has been quite weird. I’ve been privy to something remarkably out of my comfort zone, and in turn, have put many people out of theirs. But, that's a debate for the more refined minds. India Fellow is like that freaky mirror in Lewis Carrol’s...
What Is Demographic Dividend And How It’s Related To Education
By 2020, India is set to become the world’s youngest country with 64% of its population in the working age group.[1] This demographic advantage can be translated into more production of goods and increased services, thus improving the overall GDP growth rate, a...
Why Farmers Are Growing Cotton When Water Is Scarce
“I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.” -Jimi Hendrix, 1970 YES, if the ‘whole lot of things’ were farmers wanting to form a band but a NO if it were racial conflicts and...
When Gender and Disability Discriminate Together
“What do you see yourself doing in 10 years from now?” This is one of the questions that I have asked repeatedly over the last two months, from disabled people I work with. I wonder if I have an answer to it but that's a story for another day. Each time, I ask this...
Victim Blaming – A Popular Culture In The Nation
“Bachchi ki samajhdaari ko bhi main thoda sa kehna chahti hun…saari bachiyon ko...ki already jab koi teen aadmi baithe hue hain uske andar…to aapko usme baithna nahi chahiye tha…I am saying this to protect the girls”, Kher was quoted as saying at the press conference....
What I Saw In Public Schools In Odisha
It was a bright day at a village in Odisha. At 9:30AM, I was going to facilitate a full day session about Malaria at the government high school which has a total strength of 160 students from 1st to 10th grades. The unique aspect of this school was that, on a typical...
The Times Of Non-Linearity
I don't think cat videos represent the funniest aspects of the internet. Let's be honest here. It has more to do with how seamlessly you can transition from Donald Trump to Donald Duck and watch two whole episodes of Uncle Scrooge before you ask yourself, "what am I...
Living In The Dark With Pedophilia
There was this one video of a man sodomizing a doll in a shopping mall surfacing for quite a sometime on social media. It was no surprise that people were going gaga over him. "Men can’t even leave dolls alone now" "Even dolls are not safe" With a preconceived and...
The Flight Of The Sparrow
On a rain washed sunny morning earlier this month, I found myself on a bus to Alibaug to visit one of our partner centres – Jeevan Jyothi Kendra. Having missed the direct bus to my destination, I was bound to take one that would take me only as far as Valkhad, from...
Poverty : My 1st Lesson In The Social Sector
How long has it been since you had your last meal? 17 hours for me, out of which 13 went by sleeping in an air-conditioned compartment of a train. My head is aching and I’m sipping water slowly but here’s why I’m tolerating hunger: Can’t leave the luggage unattended...
Of Disturbing Instances, Gender Disparities And Taking Charge
It was just another day in one of the villages of South Madhya Pradesh. A colleague and I were passing through the half-broken muddy roads, to reach our destination. As part of our project, the agenda was to talk to women collectively and motivate them to save a...
Freedom Of Expression – The Oxymoron
The idea of “Freedom of Expression” sounds so much like an oxymoron to me these days. Two contrasting ideas nestled together so beautifully. Apparently the term freedom and expression do hardly ever go together. At least in the current context of our society. The...