Candida Moraes

Over the past 25 years, SRUTI’s Fellows have been developing community
initiatives to leverage a better life for the marginalised sections of our society

The meek can, and shall inherit — this has been the driving principle behind the growth and evolution of the Society for Rural, Urban and Tribal Initiative (SRUTI). Community development and people’s movements have been the mantra practised by SRUTI’s members and workers over the past 25 years.

The range of activities of SRUTI’s Fellows is immense: community development initiatives in rural and urban areas throughout India, ranging from forest protection provision of health services, non-formal education to restoring mortgaged land, fighting corruption to ensuring fair rehabilitation of those displaced by dams and other development projects.

This developmental organisation was founded in 1983 by the late Tara Ali Baig, Ela Bhatt, Bunker Roy and Dr Samir Chaudhuri, among others, who believed that the poor and marginalised sections of society need to
organise themselves to collectively assert their rights and break the existing shackles of poverty and castebased discrimination.

And that is why SRUTI works on the process of community organisation. It also supports fellow organisations in terms of partial financial assistance,
information dissemination, strategic planning, legal aid and capacity
building. The main thrust of the activities of SRUTI’s Fellows is focused on
breaking old habits of indifference and culture of silence, and inculcating a new culture of assertion and non-violent resistance among the youth of communities that are vulnerable or need support.

“SRUTI came about at a time when we were facilitating and supporting groups of young people with a desire to work with marginalised communities. We guided them through the various processes of doing the work and also getting financial support among the other teething problems,” explains executive director Rohit Jain.

The fellowship of the committed
The backbone of the organisation is the SRUTI Fellowship Programme —a programme to support committed young people or SRUTI Fellows, as they are called, who strongly believe that it is their mission to help the underprivileged. “The thrust of the programme has been to strengthen the
struggles of the marginalised communities for a just and equitable society,” explains Jain.

Today there are 31 SRUTI Fellows who reach out to over 400,000 families in 4,500 villages from 10 states in India. Anita Juneja, one such Fellow, is one of the mainstays of Delhi Shramik Sangathan in Vikaspuri, New Delhi, that works in 35 urban clusters with 35,000 families. The issues that are addressed include eviction of slum dwellers without any rehabilitation programme, inadequate basic amenities in slums, irregular PDS, labour problems, livelihood, education, unorganised labour, etc.

The Fellowship programme has been growing over the past years and the Fellows are in the range of 25-35 years of age. A new Fellow will work in one area for a year, and then move from a village to a block and then gradually expand activities depending on the area.

Knowledge and awareness is the key
The organisation believes that the increasing marginalisation of tribal, dalit and vulnerable communities stems from faulty agricultural policies that
are making agriculture unviable in this country. In addition, the government’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act does not really address the core issues arising from the changes in the economic polices. This, coupled with shrinking democratic spaces has led to a lot of discontentment among the marginalised community.

To combat this, SRUTI is concentrating on identifying the threats to people’s organisations, giving broader all-India perspectives to various local issues and exploring novel ideas of getting the protests registered. The main work lies in building local and community awareness by
circulation of draft policies, and the circulation of papers produced by the SRUTI team on various issues of immediate importance through the Fellows’ own network or other networks.

Keeping the momentum
From its inception SRUTI has stressed on raising its own funds for the Fellowship programme. This belief led to SRUTI experimenting with different fund raising initiatives. One of them has been to develop various
products that are easy to market, for example, bags. In the year 2005-06, the total turnover of the SRUTI bag manufacturing unit (SRUTI Foundation and SRUTI) was around Rs34.96 lakh and it made a profit of around
Rs8.25 lakh. In the year 2006-07, the turnover increased to Rs44 lakh. The organisation also raises money from scrap collections; in 2005-06 the scrap collection funds reached Rs35,000 per month by the end of the financial year and this amount has increased to Rs42,000 per month in 2006-07.

To meet the other administrative and programme expenses, SRUTI has also tapped various institutional donors — the current partners being the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, Novib and Oxfam CAA. SRUTI also collects funds
from individual donors. “We began very modestly in 1983 with around Rs700-1,000 which was generated from a contribution of about 78-80 individuals. Today we are grateful for all the support that our donors provide and we are grateful for the faith in the work that we do,” says Jain. The association of SRUTI with the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust began in 1985. For the period 2005-08, the trust has allotted Rs160 lakh for SRUTI.

What makes the efforts of SRUTI and its members remarkably successful is that they are aimed at building community awareness and community programmes for development and improvement. SRUTI’s Fellows are
determined to make a difference in the lives of the marginalised communities so that they and their families may live in a decent today and an even better tomorrow.

Uploaded on July 4, 2007