students received tertiary scholarships.
manual scavenger households received COVID relief supplies.
In India, the caste system has exacerbated inter-generational poverty and systemic exclusion of Adivasis and Dalits. While the Indian Constitution recognized these injustices and put plans in place to set aside funds and programs to redress these wrongs. But these programs remain underfunded and unaccounted for. With our support, the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) switched up its strategy and trained a group of student leaders on budget and advocacy skills to make changes in the student scholarship system.
This is the first time I’ve participated in training that taught us how to understand budgets. Now I am able to link the budget of the government to my scholarship so that I, and others like me, can get scholarships to continue studying.
Abhishek, 12th grade student, Jharkhand Tweet
We also helped our partner SATHI to work with village groups, civil society groups and frontline health workers to identify the challenges behind poor implementation of the Amrut Aahaar Yojana program that the Maharashtra state created to address malnutrition among the tribal districts of Thane, Raigad and Gadchiroli.
Our work in India reaches back to 2010 when we helped the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) shine a light on corruption linked to the Commonwealth Games that year. The government admitted that INR 7.44 billion in resources slated to go to the Dalit community were diverted to the games and eventually redirected much of that money back to the Dalit community.