Visiting DEHAT and Sadbhavana Trust

This blog is written by Tushaar Carvalho, Shinjini Singh and Ustati Gujral from Dasra.
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Dear everyone,
We are happy to share field notes from our site visit to DEHAT and Sadbhavana Trust in Uttar Pradesh this week. It was a first for Tushaar & Ustati, and we couldn’t have asked for an experience better than this one.
The field visit brought us in close contact with two entirely different vulnerable communities: one classified as “Other Traditional Forest Dweller communities” in Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary, in eastern UP near the villages of Bahraich, Shravasti and the Nepal border; and women & girls from low-income religious minority communities living in old Lucknow. 

​Shinjini, who is more familiar with NGO field visits, is also from Lucknow – and was kind enough to host us and introduce us to the local, famous Lucknowi cuisine.
While there is so much to cover and share, below are a few personal highlights from our visit:

Interacting with DEHAT’s leaders: two young adults, following the footsteps of a charismatic leader & father

The moment we walked into DEHAT’s main office, it was clear that Jitendraji (the founder of DEHAT, who had passed away last year) still had a commanding influence and presence on the organisation and the communities they serve. Left to pick up the reins are Devyani and Devyanshu (pictured leftmost) in their late 20s – who have been involved with the organisation through their childhood and youth, but were initially reluctant to lead DEHAT, hoping to chase their own aspirations instead. With advice (and firm lecturing) from Gagan Sethi, they have seemingly settled into their leadership roles within the organisation.

However, their journey comes with its own challenges. Even one year after Jitendraji’s passing away – Devyani and Devyanshu still admit to challenges of building trust with the communities their father had served for decades, who now are still slightly reluctant to follow their leadership. In similar fashion, they have also experienced the lack of trust from their own team questioning their ability to lead the organization (in some cases leading to exits), specially Devyani’s who was expected to take a back seat and let her brother take on her father’s role. Within the funding community, they have experienced a trust deficit due to an age bias, with funders backing out, after resonating with DEHAT’s work, only to question the ability of “young leaders”.
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What we realised is that this was merely a perception and trust building issue – after having spent over 12 hours in constant conversation with them – gauging their passion, knowledge and drive to support their communities in eastern UP – expanding all the way to the Nepal border. Devyani and Devyanshu are determined to continue working for the communities, just as their father did decades ago. Their main focus right now is to build an effective second-in-line leadership – one they can enable to lead their own programs/verticals (like we have at Dasra) – enabling them to spend more time with the communities and work in collaboration with them.

Bhanmati's song

At the surface, Bhanmati seems like just another woman from the forest-dwelling community, who runs a roadside tea shop in village Kediya. But do not be fooled – she is a President medal awardee, who has galvanised over 3000 women to participate in the Other Traditional Forest Dwellers’ people’s movement.

She expresses her pain and the realities of exclusion, being a Dalit woman with no formal proof of identity through her songs. While sitting by the roadside, she broke into one her songs to explain what is different between us “humra” and bhai ji “the others/the wealthy/those with knowledge and power”. Between the sounds of cars passing, goats bleating, cows returning from the field and children playing, she counts the ways in which her community is excluded ‘bade log chote log se baat nahi karna chaahte’, ‘powerful/wealthy or big people do not want to talk to small/dalit/marginalised people’.

Listen to her song recorded by us here.

A few lines translated from her song:
Your son studies and goes to ‘vilaayat’ (abroad) bhai ji
Our children don’t see books, they try to find them but they are unable to…
 
There is no question about your rules (your governance) bhai ji
 
Your house has ‘bijli’ (electricity)
Our thatched roof does not have kerosene oil (to burn a lantern)..
 
Your old lady puts cream on her face
My grandchild has nothing to eat
There is no limit to my torture and sadness bhai ji
 
There is no question about your rules (your governance) bhai ji

Digital champions at Sadbhavana

Watching women and children express themselves in safe spaces is deeply inspiring and rewarding.  We interacted with digital trainers- confident young Bushra and Samreen, who were once students at the computer and ‘perspective’ training classes at Sadbhavna for building leadership. We were amazed by the creativity and fervour with which they were creating content for Sadbhavana’s Lucknow Leaders instagram page and more recently, consulting for and training other NGOs (Jan Sahas, Sahajani Shiksha Kendra, Point of View) and young women’s collectives on using social media for communication, designing campaigns, photography and videography. Every quarter the duo organise competitions or ‘pratiyogta’ for women to express themselves through poetry, art, songs and food- a recent competition on recipes using minimal ingredients was an effort to collect recipes from limited kitchen rations in the lockdown.  

​In one of Sadbhavana’s community centres, we got a chance to witness the confidence and determination of young adolescent girls, attending various free classes set up by Sadbhavana (digital photography, English language, computer training, perspective building), to keep fighting their daily fight of changing the mind-set of their family members (parents, brothers and relatives) towards the expectation from a girl child which in many cases is driven by the path set out by a girl’s family- completion of primary schooling, early marriage and running households as a “bahu”. Their rigour and patience to focus on learning how to command their own space within their house without threatening anybody else’s authority- a key element of each program of Sadbhavana- was truly inspiring and pushed us to reflect on the need and importance of such a skill in any environment. 

Please do have a look at the social media handles of both organizations as they have some really interesting content.

Sadbhavana Trust:
https://instagram.com/sadbhavanalko12?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
https://youtube.com/channel/UCm3ckMeo-d6bj2FfNnO6tPw
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DEHAT:
https://instagram.com/dehat_india?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=