I am sitting at a friend’s place because I cannot go home. I’m sitting here not because I am afraid but because I am apprehensive. I am wondering how corrupt one of the world’s largest democracy can be. On 8^th May, 2012 I filed an RTI and any day now, I can go to jail for it.

I am Mukesh Rajak from Madhupur, Jharkhand. For the past two years, I have been representing the issues and concerns of my community through my videos and I have actively worked for social change. Over the two years, with the support of Video Volunteers and the people around me I have helped re-opened shut schools, stopped corruption and bribery and reported on some of the most difficult issues in the region. Today I am asking for your help and support.

I had heard of rampant corruption in the manner in which the MNREGA scheme was being implemented in Madhupur. To find out the truth behind the situation, I followed the legal constitutional procedure by filing a Right To Information Application at the local Block Development Office. As soon as I filed, I began hearing about how much of a furore my action was causing. Well-wishers asked me to expect a backlash.

On 12th May, 2012, the Rojgar Sevak, Mrs. Vandana Kumari filed an FIR with the Madhupur police in which she accused me of blackmailing her, threatening her, abusing her and snatching a gold chain. She mentions that the event occurred at around 1 pm on the 8^th of May after seemingly waiting for a suspicious 4 days to put the blame on me. Around the supposed time and date of the offense, I was at a local NGO and I have witnesses to attest to the fact.

I have been threatened and verbally abused over the phone. The caller threatened that not just me but my whole family will have to bear the consequences. In the meantime, I have also been receiving offers of making a compromise i.e. I keep the RTI report a secret and they withdraw the FIR.

This is my story. This is the story of how a common citizen of country who decides to seek out the truth is harassed, made an outcaste, defamed and framed by the authorities. And the sad part is that it is a common story.

I have witnesses, records and proof that I have been falsely accused and that my reputation has been wrongly maligned. My work speaks for me. The camera doesn’t lie. I stand my ground.

I am asking for simple solidarity. Please share my story. Tell me what else I can do.

Sincerely,

Mukesh

I am Anand Pagare, Community Correspondent with Video Volunteers  from Malegaon dist., Maharashta.

Today I was covering the corruption among the traffic police officers in Malegaon town during which I was assaulted by them. Five traffic police officers attacked me, seized my camera, deleted the footage and threw the camera on the street. They accused me of fabricating the news and threatened to end my career if I continued to make videos.

The deleted footage contained evidence of rampant corruption along the daregaon highway, of how the concerned officers let off vehicles and drivers openly flouting traffic rules and regulation after collecting a bribe. The officers would never make a receipt or file a case. The money would go straight into their pockets.

When I attempted to remind the officers of their responsibility, the told me that they were not bound by duty to the citizens or the constitution. They told me that they themselves had paid bribes for their jobs to politicians and higher officers and hence they considered themselves above the law.

This is the day to day reality of Malegaon which is increasingly turning into a lawless state where the police themselves are the goons.

As a common man, I find myself caught helpless in the situation. I cannot fight these goondas on my own.

Please tell me what I can do? And if the police itself is threatening me, who do I rely on for my security.

regards,

Anand Pagare

Community Correspondent, Malegaon

Video Volunteers

Because it can be replicated, is it no longer an innovation?

Replication is very hard, and one of the things that have made it hard for us is the disinterest in funders to fund things that are not new.  Precisely because it can be replicated and scaled, it is no longer an ‘innovation,’ and so funders aren’t interested.

Video Volunteers started a dozen ‘Community Video Units’ with different NGOs in India, all of whom were in essence replicating our idea. There were numerous more NGOs who wanted to start them also, but by this point, the funding for these projects was essentially saturated and so these other NGOs couldn’t get funding to do it.

So we had to switch gears. We thought, okay, if there is no more funding for this kind of project, let’s modify it so we can pitch it again as an innovation – and so we came up with our IndiaUnheard model, where we have about 40 community correspondents working in different districts. It is very like the Community Video Units, but at lower cost and without reliance on NGOs’ success at finding additional funding.

The upside was that this lack of funding forced us to become more cost-effective, and that will in the long run help us scale. I think the whole process of thinking about replicability forces NGOs to think about reducing costs, and that is a good exercise. Read more here.

“As a child, I had experienced untouchability at school where I was forced to sit and eat separately from the children of upper caste families,” says 24-year old Community Correspondent Neeru Rathod from  Gujarat, one of the many trained by Video Volunteers who participated in the project. “We wanted to gives viewers the responsibility, as witnesses, to end this age old oppression once and for all.”

For all those who believe that untouchability practices are a thing of the last century, these videos will relate a different story. On April 14, VV will release at least 20 short videos from across the country that will make it difficult to for anyone to deny the continuance of this inhuman practice. Viewers will be urged to petition the National Commission of Scheduled Caste to take cognizance of these videos as evidence of offenses, and to take all steps to put an end to untouchability practices. In affected communities, Video Volunteers will screen these videos and mobilize people to petition the state offices of the NCSC. Watch a preview video of VV’s ARTICLE 17 Campaign.

Appeal to Rights Activists/Campaigners/Social Sector
We need your help in spreading this message globally so that enough pressure can be built on public institutions like NCSC. Please email your suggestions to Stalink@videovolunteers.org or call him at 99235-94636.

About Video Volunteers
Video Volunteers identifies, trains and empowers grassroots media producers who create change in and for voiceless communities in the developing world. With 100 community producers currently working with salaries, Video Volunteers is one of the largest social change media networks in the world. More than 500 videos on topics like child marriage, temple prostitution, insurgent conflict, atrocities against Dalits and peace between Hindus and Muslims have been produced, and more than 17,000 people have taken direct action after seeing one of our films.

Video Volunteers’ work has received awards or funding from Ashoka, The Knight News Challenge, Echoing Green, TED, UNDP, and many others; our content has been seen on Al Jazeera, NewsX, Nickelodeon, MTV Iggy, as well as in countless villages and slums during night time open air screenings and discussions. Viewers can visit our IndiaUnheard website to watch one new community-produced video posted daily.

After five years of doing community media in India, we’ve come to understand what Video Volunteers is good at. We’re great at training — the people we work with keep doing this for a long time after they’re trained. And we’re great at getting impact in the villages. We know how to produce the content that people in rural India want to see; the evidence for this is that people turn up in large numbers for the screenings and actually take action.

Community producers trying out their camera skills.

The Indian government has several major programs to bring Internet and information to rural areas — one is the Common Service Centers, a program to bring fiber optic cables to every 10th village; another amazing one is the $35 video-enabled tablet computer.

We think these new government programs can give a huge boost to community media in India, and they can help us scale, provided we create the right partnerships. We’re thinking about things like web channels for content aimed at rural audiences for the tablets, and citizen journalism reporting apps. The public screenings on projectors that the people in our Community Video Units do are immensely powerful, but in time, a similar effect will emerge as people are able to share videos in villages over their cell phones and watch them on computers.

So far, these programs are conceived as a way to push information out to the rural areas, so the poor get information on government programs and plans. We come in, because we can reverse the system — we can bring the knowledge and ideas of the poor to the government. We can enable people to produce content for these new distribution pipelines. No one will use them if there is no locally available content.

So when we meet government officials, our message is this: Enabling the poor to produce content, to be heard, and to share their own knowledge is crucial for democracy.

Why funding matters

In Part 1 of this series, I focused on Video Volunteers’ work with IndiaUnheard, our flagship rural feature service. But many other projects have kept us busy this year: We did a series of trainings for tribals in Gujarat, India on documenting local culture for a local museum; we provided support to a community radio station called Sramik Bharti; and we launched a very exciting program with UNDP in Eastern UP where 20 rural women are trained to use video to monitor their self-help groups and the use of funds that are earmarked for their investment.

We received visits from Semester at Sea, the University of Nebraska Journalism school, and several Indian NGOs (non-governmental organizations). We spoke about our work and showed our videos in numerous places: the WSSCC international water conference; the Dalit Solidarity Network Conference in Kathmandu; TEDx Mumbai; the India government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting conference; and the University of Nebraska where I was an “Innovator in Residence.”

Funding has continued to be hard, and we haven’t been able to take on as many new community correspondents as we would like, because for the last year we’ve relied a lot on smaller donations that are harder to come by. We find that the obsession with “something new” is making it hard for us to fund projects that we’ve been running for more than a year, such as our Community Video Units program, which is 5 years old.

However, I’ve recently met with several foundations that seem to really see the value in creating a model to bring content out of all rural areas, and so I hope we’ll be able to make the leap from a $300,000-a-year organization (where we’ve been for the last five years) to an organization with twice that budget. As I’ve said in the past, the costs of maintaining rural stringers for all of India are relatively low (around $400,000 a year), and we hope that someone will see the value in being able to make information flow from remote areas in a rational manner.

Watch a few of our best videos from the year:

In August, the Video Volunteers staff attended an amazing program called the Global Social Business Incubator at Santa Clara University, where we developed a new business plan focused on income from the mainstream media. Our idea is to have one rural reporter in each of India’s 645 districts, set up like a rural stringers network, to deliver a pipeline of high-quality, low-cost human interest content to television stations. The maintenance costs of such a network, once it’s set up, would be relatively low — about $300,000 a year for 645 rural correspondents, or about the cost of 20-30 television producers in Delhi.

Ultimately, we feel that the recruitment, training and generation of impact will need to be supported by philanthropy, but that production and distribution should be taken care of by the market.

We made significant progress in 2011. In May, NewsX, the Indian network, broadcast our 13-part series called “Speak Out India.” We sold them eight stories a week, and they produced a show around it. It was the first time we know of where a mainstream news company has paid for content produced by people living at the so-called base of the pyramid, and the successful run of that show has given us a successful track record with the media. The problem was, they only paid us the stringer rate for the stories, so about 1,500 rupees ($30) when our costs of production are more like 8,000 rupees ($160).

Our next goal was to see if an Indian TV channel would sign a contract with us for a similar amount of content each week (about 30 minutes) at our fully loaded cost of production for a 3-minute story. Hence, Video Volunteers’ earned income goal for the end of this year was $100,000, or about 40% of our total budget. This would still be significantly lower than the costs of a TV station doing these stories themselves.

In the last three months, we’ve made two trips to Delhi and Mumbai to meet the TV channels, and the response has been very enlightening. So far, we’ve met about half of the top 20 English or Hindi news channels. They all like the content. They find our community correspondents full of energy, and feel that our flip cams are generating adequate quality.

The fact that India is in the throes of an anti-corruption movement is a really good thing for us, because we have lots of great corruption stories that they want. So far so good, in that they clearly are saying, “We’ll run this content.” This is a big step from a few years ago, where everyone we spoke to said we were crazy to think TV stations would run stuff produced by poor villagers.

Jessica Mayberry with tribal community media producers in Andhra Pradesh, India.

The Rural Newswire

As for the idea of a “rural newswire,” they also get the concept. One senior person at CNN IBN said, “It’s a well-known secret in Indian media that abysmal stringers are a huge problem.” The chief executive of CNN IBN has talked in media interviews (including when he’s been interviewed about Video Volunteers) about the “tyranny of distance,” and how the remote areas of the country are often prohibitively expensive to cover. Someone at a government channel even told us that our idea couldn’t work with the government channel “because all our stringers are political appointees!”

But despite all this, we’re not sure they’re ready to pay for quality. One producer at a news channel here who was really championing us internally said, “I’m pitching this as a high-quality stringers network. Everyone knows our stringers are awful, but the problem is they are OK with bad quality.”

Bottom line at the end of our first 10 TV station meetings: Stations will take our stuff for free. They would probably also pay us the stringer rate — but not necessarily the fully loaded cost. So now we’re working with one station that’s going to try to find a corporate sponsor, and will probably be the first mainstream media contract to materialize for us next year.

Online Distribution Helps

Thankfully, the Internet is a space where we can produce and publicize our content without depending on a broadcaster. We are currently publishing one video a day on our site, which is searchable by issue, region and community correspondent. The good news is that we’ve doubled our viewers over the last six months. The less good news is that the numbers are still low. We’re going to start tweaking our format to show the back story and the trials and tribulations of the community producers more.

We’ve set aside one day a week, Wednesday, to publish impact videos — this will have an impact on us in terms of fundraising! And we hope to start producing our own podcasts where we club together videos on a particular theme and have someone in our office as an anchor. We now have more than 450 edited 3-minute videos on every conceivable issue of human rights, poverty alleviation, and local culture. We’re sitting on a gold mine of content, and now the fun starts of repackaging it and seeing what themes emerge and getting others to comment on the content.

We’re confident this will work, because when our content is on other platforms that get traffic, it does very well. We’re now partnered with several online companies, namely MSN, Rediff, Viewspaper and ViewChange.org. The partnership with Rediff is particularly promising; our first video with it got 100,000 views and loads of comments.

We also reach greater numbers of people through commissioned film projects. We’ve been hired this year by several organizations to gather stories or footage, such as: the one day on Earth project; YouTube’s Day in a Life project; and the Red Cross, for whom we produced 12 videos on hunger in rural India that they’re using in campaign events around the world. We’ve also gathered stories of climate change for our partner organization Laya; stories of development-induced displacement for Witness; stories on domestic violence for Breakthrough; and on local farming for the Gene Campaign.

Our correspondents gathered “recce” footage on caste for one of India’s major production companies, and got answers from dozens of people to the question, “Are You Happy?” for a film project replicating Jean Rouch’s seminal 1961 movie “Chronicle of Summer.”

Are you happy? – from Jharkhand from Video Volunteers on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for our fourth and last post of the blog series, in which we’ll discuss our other activities and programs and our vision for the future.

(This blog first appeard on PBS Media Lab)

Part 2 outlines new ideas we implemented into our training programs in 2011. For instance, we set incentives for our community correspondents in India. This triggered a series of valuable positive changes for the communities concerned.

Video Volunteers’ community correspondents focus on activism.

Incentives work

In October, we held an advanced training session for our strongest community correspondents which focused on activism and getting “impact.” (To us, “impact” means that the community correspondent is able to resolve the problem the video addresses.) We told them we had decided to incentivize impact.

They would be paid 5,000 rupees (approximately $100) — more than twice the regular stipend — for an “impact video,” which means they would make a video; show it locally to get the issue solved; and make another documenting that process and proving the impact actually took place — and for that second video, they would get the 5,000 rupees.

Some amazing impacts happened this year: In Orissa, illegal timber smugglers were stopped by local villagers. In Mumbai, a factory was forced to clean its pollution. In Assam, politicians released desperately needed water to villagers. Rather than be turned away, Dalit children got help in village child centers. Expectant mothers received folic acid which had previously been withheld. And, in one area, some 600 women for the first time were paid minimum wage.

These are just some of our stories. You can watch our impact videos here.

Recruitment is challenging

Our goal is to have 645 community correspondents, or one in every district of India. We had to think hard about how we could quickly scale up if we needed to.

Our first two rounds of recruitment for IndiaUnheard was through our existing network. We sent emails asking people to nominate someone from the villages they work in and then to help them fill out the online application. We got a few hundred applications that way and thought we could keep doing it like that. But when we tried for the third round, the number of eligible applications was low (though the overall applications were higher than previous years). Maybe we had tapped out our existing network.

So how could we quickly scale up? Possibly through big non-profit institutions (like microfinance). We are reaching out to them now.

Choose the right geographies

For our first two rounds, our goal was to get one or two people in every state. Now that we’ve almost done that, we’re going to focus on key regions we feel are “unheard.”

Last month, we took about 20 new community correspondents from Jharkhand. We chose Jharkhand because it is part of the so-called Red Corridor where there is a Maoist insurgency taking place. In the future, we’ll look at the North East where other separatist movements are taking place, and Kashmir. (Those two areas were out of our budget this year.)

My colleagues Kamini Menon and Stalin K. spent two weeks traveling around this area meeting the activists and doing the recruitment; this live recruitment is making recruitment easier and will also make retention higher because the 13 new correspondents, each representing one district in the same state, can support each other.

Partnerships are challenging

Two years ago, when our Community Video Units were our primary focus, we felt that we could scale this network through investments from NGOs (non-governmental organizations). We’ve realized that co-ownership is very difficult and can at times be a hindrance to innovation.

We now feel that we can scale better through partnerships with the mainstream media, rather than NGOs, and so for that reason, a huge focus this year has been on ensuring the content can work for both a local community and outside audience.

From our Community Video Units, we’ve learned a few other things: One is that a model where people are paid only when they perform is better than the Community Video Units model, in which the six or seven people who work together on a film are given a monthly wage.

Women produce more

Two observations we are thrilled to see: Women produce more, and retention is higher with the underprivileged. It suggests that journalism really is an appropriate livelihood for the poor. We started to see that with online recruitment, we had selected certain people whose incomes were clearly higher than they had told us on the phone. Live recruitment in extremely remote areas of Jharkhand will help get the correct balance.
The amount they can produce is low

We ask correspondents to produce two videos a month. They produce on average one or less. One reason is that being a journalist is difficult; it takes a lot of personal courage to confront officials and ask people private questions. They can spend a whole day on a bus getting to an official who then won’t see them. They have to take care of their families, too.

I learned this year about the concept of “businesses in a box” and franchises, such as rural women selling solar lamps or soap sachets, and I discovered that we should make the process as simple and step-by-step as possible.

But journalism is simply harder than selling soap. We also ask them to produce tough stories that they have to research and which take time, unlike stringers, who are told to “go film this event and send us the footage.” This means that our “cost per story” is higher than we would like. But we also aren’t taking huge steps to increase their productivity right now, because we don’t yet have enough buyers to support a huge level of production.

Choose the right people to train

The fact that we put such effort in selecting interesting people to train is a huge asset for us. Our new batch of correspondents includes people whose personal stories are, in some ways, the story. We have two boys from Kashmir who have seen the insurgency; a young man whose sister was the first dowry death in his state; women who have experienced sexual violence and have the courage to speak about it; and a good representation from the North East, including one young man who got the first footage of a particular insurgent camp because he’s from that area.

In our training, we teach them that their power as a community correspondent will come through using their personal experiences and connections to the issues. This is what they have that no professional, no outsider, can ever replicate. They learn that they themselves must speak out, and speak personally, if they want their communities to do so, too.

Good training is not necessarily scalable. (That’s another thing that we learned in 2011 — that the training aspects of our work will always be expensive because education doesn’t have a lot of economies of scale.) But it is the most valuable investment.

You can watch a video from our trainings here:

Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series, which will focus on our modes of online and offline distribution and our experience with earning income from partners and the mainstream media.

(This Blog first appeared on PBS Idea Lab)

The state of technology today means that nearly every village in the developing world could have someone — a local changemaker — who broadcasts his or her issues to the world. It’s commonplace today to hear people say the world is flooded with content and that “everyone” can now be a producer.

At every community video training that Video Volunteers conducts for people from marginalized communities in India, more and more people are showing up with $15 Chinese-made video-enabled cell phones. It’s now possible for rural people without data connections to send tweets via SMS. In India, the government has ambitious programs to bring the Internet into the villages.

Everything seems set for a mass of content to be coming out of rural areas — which brings us to our problem: the fact that it is not.

The mere presence of information technology, like the 800 million cell phone connections in India, does not ensure local content creation. If you search the names of most remote Indian villages on YouTube, nothing will appear. If you search them on Google itself, never mind YouTube, most of what appears is raw government data. Content is produced by a small group of people, and the world’s poor, in particular, are producing virtually zero digital content. Content continues to be made by the “drivers” for the “driven.”

Video Volunteers is seeking to change this one-sided status quo; we’re posing as a question the statement with which I started this post: What would it take for every village in the developing world to have someone — a local changemaker — who broadcasts that village’s issues to the world? How can one provide the training, support and human connection for some of the world’s most underprivileged communities to feel that their voice matters?

Over the last year, we’ve re-strategized our programs and revamped our business model in the search for a truly scalable model of community media. As part of a 4-part series, I’ll be sharing what we’ve done over the last year, our experiences, and what we’ve learned. This has relevance to people interested in numerous issues, from improving the quality of journalism, to understanding how communications between government and its citizens can be two-way rather than one way, and increasing the quantum of good ideas the world has for tackling poverty.

In this post, Part 1, I’ll be giving a basic introduction to IndiaUnheard, our flagship rural feature service. In Part 2, I will share what we learned in 2011 on how to make community media a sustainable enterprise. Part 3 details our distribution plans and strategies to earn revenue from the mainstream media. Part 4 looks toward the future.

A network of community correspondents

IndiaUnheard is Video Volunteers’ network of community correspondents. In February 2011, we took in our second batch of IndiaUnheard community correspondents, bringing the total number of community correspondents to 52, 45 of which are still with us. They now cover 24 states in India and 45 districts.

The basic model is as follows:

• We recruit grassroots activists through a network of social movements and NGOs (non-governmental organization.)

• The basic criterion is that the candidates be economically poor and also have a history of volunteerism and a strong sense of belonging to their community. This is to ensure that they’ll stay committed to producing the videos of the stories their communities say need to be told.

• We only work with socially marginalized and oppressed communities — Dalit, Tribal, religious and sexual minorities, and women.

• We train them for two weeks at an intensive training camp in video activism, journalism ethics, and television news-style production.

• We give them each a low-cost HD video camera. Cisco has recently donated 500 of them, and we are very excited.

• They return to their villages and produce at least two videos a month.

• They come up with stories from their own village and in neighboring villages in their district.

• They each work with a mentor in the Video Volunteers office. Every senior staff member mentors 5-7 community producers, advising them once a week by phone on their stories.

• They shoot their stories, go to an Internet cafe, and transfer the footage to DVD, which they snail-mail us to our office in Goa.

• It’s an entrepreneurial model where they are paid on a per-video basis. We pay them what we know the Indian media pays its stringers, or its local freelance reporters.
  A team of editors in the office edit the stories.

• They are then posted on our “website:”http://www.indiaunheard.videovolunteers.org where we broadcast one video a day, accompanied by an article, which is generally written by a research intern.

Once the video is online, the community correspondent can download it from the Internet and start using it to get an impact in her village. Meanwhile, from our office, we can start the next level of distribution to mainstream media and other NGOs.

In the longer term, this low-cost, innovative model is a way for every village in the developing world to have someone trained to use the latest technologies to advocate for their rights. There are now video-enabled cell phones in all corners of the world, and a model like IndiaUnheard can enable these technologies to be used to capture human rights violations and bring them to the attention of the world.

Here’s a video compiling different sound bites from the community correspondents. You can watch more videos here.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, in which we’ll discuss what we’ve learned about what makes community media a sustainable enterprise.

(This blog first appeared at PBS Idea Lab)

“When I am speaking for the dalit, I am a dalit activist. When I am speaking for sexual minorities and women, I am a gender activist. When I’m reporting a gross violation of human rights, I am a human rights activist. And when I have a camera in my hand, I am a videoactivist.”

If ever the world started turning to the perfect harmonious tune of humanity, justice and equality, Varsha Jawalgekar hopes to become a poet and a painter. Until then she would prefer to dabble in the arts whenever she has the time and the inclination. Until then she has a lot on her mind.

Varsha is first and foremost an activist, the kind of relentless crusader for community and society who has decided to spend every living moment working for her fellow people. She has been associated with various people’s movements since the age of 14. She is now the leader of a people’s movement called ‘Parivartan Janandolan’ which she founded with the vision of organizing Dalit, Muslim and other women from marginalized communities and religions in the Vaishali district of Bihar to fight for and achieve their rights. It is her conduit to the grassroots of the nation, into the hearts and minds of her community and her people. This is where she belongs.

Varsha is part of a network of citizen journalists from across the country called IndiaUnheard, a hyperlocal news feature service which reports everyday from some of the most remote corners of the country. She is the Community Correspondent representing the communities in Vaishali district. In her hands, the camera becomes a tool for her activism. She uses it to document, archive and intervene in local issues.

In a recent incident, the damning footage that she captured of the corruption by a public distribution system official was used as evidence to get the official suspended. People who have suffered silently for years have opened up to her camera and Varsha has managed to share these powerful stories with the world. The videos give her access to a larger, global platform. Thousands of people across the world watch her videos. Her voice has bypassed and breached the narrow confines of the mainstream media and speaks out for some of society’s most disadvantaged individuals.

“My work as a grassroots activist and my work as a Community Correspondent are mutually inclusive,” says Varsha. “They are not in conflict which the other but each is tool and a step towards my ultimate vision of justice and equality.”

If Varsha rejects easy categories, she credits it to the life she has lived. Born in a middle class family in the Latur district of Maharashtra, she reckons that her activism was born early when the women in her house used ask her to help mediate their domestic issues. But it was the earthquake of 1993 which ravaged her district that shook her to the core. “It was an earthquake in mind,” she says. Barely 14, she volunteered as a humanitarian aid worker at ground zero and she was made responsible for the assessment of loss.

“It was a very sensitive time. I was meeting people who had lost almost everything they had lived for,” she recollects. “I worked among the community; I was studying and gradually understanding their loss. But at the time, I was witness to the corruption in the government. I understood the misery of being the underprivileged and I resolved that I would do something about it. It was a time of my social awakening.”

Varsha then joined a local people’s movement by the name of Bharath Gyan Vigyan Samuday which used a science based approach in dealing with issues of education, awareness and health among marginalized communities. All through her university years, Varsha describes herself as being in the constant process of participation and learning. She describes these years as the formative experience of her life, the time when she began to feel the call from within. Even after she completed her masters and became a lecturer she continued volunteering with NGOs and people’s movements until one day when she made the decision to forego her career as take the plunge into full-time activism.

She completed an 18 month course at the National Centre for Advocacy Studies and decided to travel across the country. During her travels, she found that Bihar beckoned. She loved the place and the people as much as she decided that her work was needed there.

“Bihar was the place where Buddha was born. It was a place of learning and ancient universities. Vaishali was the seat of the world’s oldest republic,” says Varsha. “But inspite of this culture and history of enlightenment, Bihar seemed to be moving steadily into the dark. It was poor and undeveloped. The caste system was rigid and there was little tolerance. The marginalized had no access to health, sanitation, education, justice and other basic amenities. The very land that they lived on was being snatched from beneath their feet. Worst of all, they had no voices. I realized that this must be the place where I have to do my work.”

She lived among the people. As a woman she had access to spaces that men couldn’t venture like the kitchen of a dalit woman. She stayed in the villages to weeks on end. She studied their issues first hand  and began to speak to the women about their rights. It was a gradual process but she stuck to her vision and a movement was born. In the process, Varsha found her community.

“The older people and the younger, the men and the women, all call me ‘didi’ (elder sister),” says Varsha “Every time I visit their villages, they say that didi has returned back to her ‘naiher’ (the matriarchal native place).”

When she looks back now, Varsha confesses to feeling a degree of surprise as to where she has reached in this one life but she credits every experience- good and bad, that helped her make the person that she is-an activist, a woman, a poet, a painter and everybody’s didi.

“I prefer the word ‘manvi’ to describe myself. It simply means a ‘human being’.”