Much has been said, researched, opined post the pandemic and subsequent...
Swachhta Will Be A Dream If We Don’t Flush Out The Inequality In India’s Public Toilets
You’ve been running errands for the last two hours in your city’s local market...
Where Does Jaggery Come From? [A Photo Story]
For 40 years of his life, Lal Singh ji has been cultivating sugarcane in the...
The Different Shades Of Entrepreneurship
Facilitating one of the Entrepreneurship Development Trainings What do we...
My Definition Of Empowerment : The Inspiring Story Of Meenakshi Tai
A couple of months back, we had such an online session* on Empowerment by...
आदिवासी संस्थान ने खेती द्वारा किसानों को दिखलाया नया आजीविका मार्ग
राजस्थान मे उदयपुर जिले के कोटडा तहसील मे कोटड़ा आदिवासी संस्थान अलग-अलग...
The Human-Centered Pathway Aimed At Saving Lives
Explaining to a patient and his family, why and how to take the medicines,...
6 Things To Empower Women In Local Governance
In India, the participation of women in general, in politics and public life...
Ethics Of Teaching
Picture only for representation purpose (Clicked by Itishree, a 2018 fellow) Think about your favourite teacher. They can be your primary school teacher or your college faculty but all of us have had at least one “favourite” teacher who had a profound effect on our...
Friendly Spiders Of Agragamee
Imagine you have just woken up. You get up and open the door to step out, and the first thing you see is a spider hanging in front of your door, spreading its web. Thinking it might have gone, I took my first step to go out but the web stuck to my entire face. I...
Another Side Of It
I kept asking myself if I'm the optimist or the realist. Filled with self-doubt about what lies ahead in the unknown journey of India Fellow, I was visiting a village near Udaipur in Rajasthan, with a lot of judgement about the place and the people. Was it the right...
Moving Out, Moving In
Before I dive into my experiences on the ground and learnings from that, I'd like to introduce myself and what brought me here to India Fellow. Imagine this - You graduate amidst a pandemic, losing out a year and a half of college, attending online classes and...
Learnings From A Month On Field
It has been more than a month since I have been working in Maharashtra, and the least I can say is that it has not been easy. I remember being asked in my India Fellow interview about how comfortable I would be with moving to a rural setup in a totally new location. I...
Mautana: Dilemma Of A Dead Body
Tribal culture is the primitive culture of prehistoric era. Today, tribal groups are settled on different Padas (pieces of land). Even though the distance between the tribal people living in valleys and cities is decreasing with the increasing transportation...
Who Is A Karyakarta?
The word 'Karyakarta' literally means worker in English. I've been trying to understand it better. Who is a Karyakarta? Is it you and me? Is it a CEO of an organization? How often do we introduce ourselves as a Karyakarta? I have never had. In fact, I had always taken...
Working In Grassroots : Perspectives Versus Realities
Shakshi with the girls and women she is working with My dream of bringing a change into the existing system of our society and to adding value to it in an impactful manner was taking shape when my journey as an India Fellow started with my host organization, KMVS...
Getting To Know My Host Organization
“We are all a family here,” my colleague Shiney* tells me as we eat dinner. I was asking him if he could help me deal with some particularly persistent rats in the flat I had recently started renting in Jamui, Bihar. "We are family" is to say, of course, I will be...
Structures And Grassroots – My Observations
Disclaimer: My views are from a novice's point of view who just entered the social development space. From what I understand in the context of finances, the stakeholders in the system I am directly or indirectly working with, are: GovernmentOne of the most...
The School Where I Am Working
This is from a school in Sukma, a district located on the southern tip of Chhattisgarh. Sukma is well known for its dense forest and tribal culture. Before I came here, I had a visual of a school in my mind - with a big gate at the entrance, children standing in...
Good Governance Practices – An Initiative To Encourage Gram Panchayats
It has now been more than a month since I reached Setu Abhiyan, an organistion in Kutch, Gujarat. Setu Abhiyan works in the domain of local governance and promotes decentralized governance. After attending my orientation, I was amazed to know about the history of the...
Lessons In Development: Then And Now
On the second day in my current home, Khandar, a tehsil in Sawai Madhopur, Rajasthan, my idea of development took a major hit. After spending the day under hot sun, it started pouring heavily and the area was filled with water. Since the majority of the inroads I have...
Digital Mobility In Panna, Madhya Pradesh
Sajan Bai (on the left) glares as I (on the right) download WhatsApp on her phone The popularity of smart phones has radically changed the way people communicate and gain information. With a single device, one can browse a random question on Google, text a classmate...