Srijan Foundation is a member of GAATW working in the state of Jharkhand, in eastern India. In November 2022, we interviewed Pooja Rajiv and Rajiv Sinha, two of the founders of the organisation, to know about the journey, work and approach of the organisation.

GAATW: Can you tell us when Srijan Foundation was founded, and what were its mission and goals at that time? 

Pooja Rajiv: The people who founded Srijan had done MSW (Master’s in Social Work) from various universities and had been working at various organisations and institutions. But most of them had their predetermined terms of engagement with a rigid structure and no flexibility. So this was a constant source of dissatisfaction for us and we wanted to work in a different way. We were keen to utilise the experience we had gained over time and implement our vision. So we registered Srijan Foundation on 7 February 2001. Seven of us – three women and four men – became the founding. It is registered in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand which is a state in the eastern part of India, where our head office is located. 

Our first few projects were on HIV/AIDS with female sex workers, on agriculture and livelihoods, and on women’s empowerment in Ramgarh, which is a coal-mining area. Gradually, this helped us formulate our four thematic areas: women empowerment and gender justice; child rights and protection; health; and sustainable livelihood and agriculture. 

Peer leaders training of self-help group leaders to promote social, political and economic inclusion in the coal mine area of Ramgarh.

With time, we realised the importance of outreach and we set up an office in Ranchi and initiated contacts with various government departments and NGOs and shared our models with them. That brought us recognition at the state level. We were invited to join different committees related to women’s and children’s issues. We also became part of bigger networks, like GAATW, and AMAN that works on domestic violence. 

GAATW: What are some of your current projects?

PR: There are specific programmes under each of our four thematic areas. Under Women’s’ Empowerment and Gender Justice, we have programmes on gender sensitivity, addressing patriarchy, working with adolescent girls, discussing gender-based violence and women’s migration, etc. Similarly with Child Rights and Protection, apart from working with kids and families, until about three months ago, we were also running a helpline. We also have an adoption agency, which facilitates adoption with care for legal requirements. If we talk about livelihood and agriculture, our initiative there is to promote women farmers - we seek women’s recognition as farmers. Currently we are working with 10,000 women farmers. Under Health, we work with female sex workers. Our role used to be limited to safe sex and prevention of HIV-AIDS but after meeting organisations like Sangram and VAMP, we started treating this as a human rights issue. Once we developed better understanding, we now also focus on how to safeguard sex workers against violence, what are their rights, what provisions the government accords to sex workers, what discrimination they face…

I should add that in Jharkhand there are no brothels. Here, sex workers are either street-based or home-based. That makes it more difficult for us to organise them in collectives. We were successful in forming one such collective Jwala Shakti Samuh. We discuss several issues with sex workers, from gender to violence and discrimination. We also conducted relief work with them during Covid-19. At the same time an issue came up, that people were not able to avail some government services, especially access to food, because they did not have the requisite documentation. Most such people were migrants from other states who had no identity here. Some did not have a personal bank account, or an Aadhar Card. We set up two help centres at Ranchi and Gumla where we helped women sex workers get such documentation made. One sex-worker is part of Srijan’s board as well now. 

GAATW: Could you tell us more about your work on migration and trafficking? 

PR: We have been working on issues of migration for the last 17 years, when Jharkhand Anti-Trafficking Network (JATN) was formed. Earlier, there was a network called the Jharkhand Women’s Network. In those days, newspapers started to report that girls were going missing in Jharkhand. So some organisations that were part of JWN, especially from the regions where girls were disappearing from, came together to form JATN. At that time, our understanding of migration and trafficking was quite limited. We thought that to stop trafficking, we had to curtail migration. We didn’t have a rights-based approach. The organisations worked by taking steps like stopping girls from moving to other places, if some were getting married outside, our organisations tried to stop that too. Our study had shown that girls and women were moving out of the state primarily for reasons of work or marriage, so our response was to prevent such migration to stop trafficking. But this obviously would not have worked out. 

We met some organisations, including WOREC from Nepal, who then acquainted us with a rights-based approach to trafficking and migration. Once we were exposed to these new approaches, we incorporated them and so JATN resumed its work in a reformed manner.

We worked in 12 districts at that time and helped in facilitating migration for work. The decision to go was their own but we would provide them with necessary knowledge, like pre-departure counselling. We asked them to inquire clearly into crucial matters of employment: If they were going, where they were going to, for what work, how much salary they would be earning, would they have holidays and what other provisions and facilities would they get. We also helped them to learn to negotiate with employers. 

So with such an understanding we also started working directly with women. In Jharkhand, unsafe migrations of women start as early as 12 or 13 years of age, usually as domestic workers. So we also involved young girls in our programmes and meetings. The choice of migration is their own, but if they do go, we would ensure they are prepared for what lies ahead. Our meetings helped us build a rapport with people many of whom came forward to share their own incidents with us. Most of them complained about their wages having been denied. There were some cases of suffering abuse as well, but they were reluctant to share or pursue it anymore. So we worked with them on recovering their wages.

International Women’s Day 2022

We also sought to sensitise the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit because they would berate the victims for being negligent. 

Rajiv Sinha: We are advocating for the Trafficking in Persons Bill for the last five years through the active engagement of community, development partners and others and proper implementation of the Labour Code. Recently, we conducted a study in five districts on “entitlement realisation” for the migrant community in the wake of Covid-19. Now we are looking to approach the Labour Department to work out how to ensure their entitlement is secured. 

At the community level, we have Bihan Samuh which is a collective of survivors of trafficking that meets every month and is also part of an anti-trafficking group at the national level. For the last four-five years they are managing their affairs independently, supporting other survivors, informing and educating. When these young girls, who leave at the age of 14, come back years later, there is often an element of stigmatisation associated with them. That’s a major issue. They have difficulty finding support or livelihood. So, the reintegration of a survivor with their family and community is an important task for us, we also enrol them in school so as to continue their education, we support their family with livelihood. At present, we have given around 2,500 families of survivors some kind of assistance with income generation avenues. In Gumla, which is known as a hub of migrant workers, we tried to set up a small enterprise, a kitchen-garden, and an animal husbandry. In Manoharpur, which also sees rampant migration, we have tried to provide livelihood to families. Our attempt is always to connect such families with an income generation programme in some way. Other than that, we try to connect them to the government’s income generation schemes. 

Whether it is workload analysis, or gender discrimination and violence, we have a number of interventions planned under our broader theme of Gender Justice and Women’s’ Empowerment. As Pooja said, we work under four broader themes, but they also converge in our goal to work for a better world for women and children. We don’t see our activities or interventions in isolation from their broader environment. If we are working with women we are working with kids, and if we are working with kids we are working with women. One thing that is important is to map out the vulnerability of the community before we start working with them. 

GAATW: How do you incorporate the voices of the affected groups in your programmes and policies? 

RS: This is a very important question. For most of our programmes, their design and implementation happen in collaboration with the community for which they are meant. Recently, we started a new programme with adolescent girls, so we got adolescent girls and young women from all over to discuss the project with them. Even prior to that, we conducted a Participatory Exploratory exercise in order to assess the aspiration needs of the people and figure out how the community is trying to address the issue. We tried to understand what their problems are and what the solutions are from their point of view and incorporated that in our project framework. After framing the project, we set up a project implementation committee and shared the details with the group. Since then, we have been meeting every quarter to keep the community appraised. In the meanwhile, we also continue our exploratory exercises so that we ensure we are working with and for the community, and that they are part of the programme’s design cycle. 

We believe in leadership by those whose fight it is. I mentioned Bihan Samuh… we had arranged for an interaction between them and the donors. We told the donors that this is the community that has been affected by Covid, so we acted as a catalyst or facilitator and the two spoke directly. 

Similarly with the sex worker community, we established a help desk in two districts. Bihan Samuh acts as our platform for intervention. We have created a federation of adolescent girls cascading down to the field level and through them the implementation of the programme reaches the ground. During the whole programme cycle, we ensure that the affected people we are working with have an active presence and participation.

GAATW: What are some of the challenges you face in your work?

A meeting of one of the women’s collectives formed by Srijan.

RS: Challenges are part and parcel of the effort when you work at the community level. Right now the whole legal system has been overhauled, so that is a challenge for NGOs. The laws have become stringent. Our mode of interaction with civil society has changed, the space has shrunk for civil society organisations. Till now we worked to strengthen or challenge existing systems, all those modalities have now changed. 

Secondly, as an organisation working at the ground level, meeting compliancy requirements of the donors can be a challenge. Every day there are new terms and jargons coming out, even though the work is the same. Expecting those meanings to get translated at the community level is quite a challenge.

In addition, hiring or holding on to good professionals is also difficult because we lack those kind of resources.

GAATW: How did Covid impact your work and the communities you work with?

Srijan Foundation distributed safety and hygiene kits (one sanitary napkin pad, two body soaps, one clothes washing shop, one face mask and IEC materials among 550 Adolescents girls and young women in 12 villages of Kimo Panchayat in Mandu Block of Ramgarh district.

RS: Covid has had a major impact. In fact, the work we had been doing with the communities over the last four years in many places suffered a great loss because Covid entirely ended our communication and interaction with the communities. It became quite limited or restricted to the online space. But working online is not the same, not everybody has a cell phone. Do the children and the women have phones?  No… So we need to understand the practical reality on the ground. We did what was possible but we observed that there is high drop-out level, children have lost interest, learning retention has eroded. Children don’t want to go to school. Cases of early marriages have risen… 

PR: One more challenge we face is that patriarchy exists not just socially, but also institutionally. Government officials have the same patriarchal approach to women and their issues. While we prepare our groups and communities to raise their voice to address their problems, they get demotivated by the response they receive from various departments. The officials repeat the same clichés to them: “what do you want to play and study for? Why pursue further education, why go outside looking for jobs? Get basic homemaking skills and get married.” So this is a big challenge, because people’s thinking evolves reluctantly, even if you make many efforts.

Srijan Foundation distributed safety and hygiene kits (one sanitary napkin pad, two body soaps, one clothes washing shop, one face mask and IEC materials among 550 Adolescents girls and young women in 12 villages of Kimo Panchayat in Mandu Block of Ramgarh district.

GAATW: These are all the questions I had. Is there anything you’d like to add?

PR: I would like to add one more thing about the idea of Safe Migration in Jharkhand. This idea came from JATN and Srijan Foundation. It is a massive achievement for us to have been able to introduce this idea to the stakeholders. Whenever there are any discussions around Safe Migration, they also acknowledge our role in it. We achieved this through the work we did over the last decade.

GAATW: Has Covid had an impact on migration in the region?

RS: Yes, migration has increased. Initially, people assumed that migration will either stop or reduce but that is not what happened. Migration has kept its pace, because ultimately unless your livelihood is secured, migration will always take place. It is not just a compulsion, it is also a choice. If you go to rural areas and talk to the community you will find that they prefer going to urban areas because there is better infrastructure and facilities available there.

GAATW: Thank you for sharing your experiences with us.