In 2021, when I lived and worked in Delhi for 8 months, I got to know an India of endless ingredients and flavors, of markets with entire streets dedicated to products I’d never known existed, and of car horns so constant your brain somehow learns not to hear them anymore.
In 2024, I returned to India to spend a few weeks at Musht Sansthaan, a grassroots NGO working in rural Central India. My goals were to better understand grassroots work, help the organization upgrade its website, and practice my Hindi. In this time, I have gotten to know a completely different India.
It is an India where the constant sound of car horns is replaced by goats, roosters, and two annoying ex-stray dogs named Jimmy and Simba. It is an India where endless flavors are replaced with shockingly spicy daal and plain white rice three times a day. Where you can’t waste a single bite, because you know that at least one of the people sitting next to you has lost a loved one to malnutrition.
Sitting on the floor, trying not to look like an amateur as I ate with my hands, I thought about the double edged sword of grassroots work.
One of the most impressive things about Musht Sansthaan is that it is made up of and run by the population it serves. One founder, Tousif, is from a working class family in Khandwa district, where he has lived his entire life. The other founder, Pramila, is a member of the Korku indigenous tribe, and fought both poverty and gender stereotypes to achieve her education. Pramila and Tousif recruit team members from local villages, and many of them are graduates of the organization’s education programs. Most of them speak in a Hindi which is heavily inflected with the accents of their mother tongue: an indigenous language called Korku.
Looking at their team, I see the beauty of grassroots work.
The beauty of grassroots work, is that when Sonu comes to Ambada village to do a session on child marriage, the community members show up. Why? Because they’ve known Sonu since he was a skinny eight year old, doing backflips into the local river in his underwear. Ambada village is his home.
The beauty of grassroots work is that when Jyoti speaks to the parents of a young girl, skeptical about the benefits of sending their daughter to a hostel in the city to finish highschool, she is able to tell them how it was precisely her eight years studying in a hostel that got her stable work at an NGO.
The beauty of grassroots work is seeing Laxmi, who dropped out of school at age twelve, write full-donor reports on her cellphone. Looking over her shoulder as she types furiously, I asked her, “How did you learn to do that, if you dropped out of school?” She told me that Tousif sir and Pramila di had taught her.
The beauty of all this work is the product of Pramila and Tousif’s vision and the ten years they have spent unceremoniously building their organization from the ground up.
My time in rural India showed me the beauty of grassroots work, but I also bore witness to its costs.
The challenge of grassroots work is losing most of your female team members when they get married, because they no longer have time to come to the office, or their family won’t allow them to.
It is having to explain to young people why they should show up to work every day at 9am when their teachers didn’t even show up to school half the time.
It is creating a website when your only internet connection is a hotspot, and when your electricity goes out so frequently that it is hard to keep your devices charged.
It is applying for a grant in English when in your village, even speaking Hindi is an accomplishment.
It is trying to explain the slow pace and sometimes un-obvious impact of your work to donors whose world you have only seen in movies.
Building an organization which is run by the community it serves requires a level of vision, patience, and resilience that is sometimes incomprehensible. That Tousif and Pramila’s organization is surviving and self-sustaining after ten years is a testament to their talent, which is rare and worth supporting.
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