My Days with a Tribal Community

By Shweta Hegde

“Madam, you are coming from foreign. What will you do here? We are happy here, tell to your Government to not give any trouble to us. This forest is our home and we know how to protect it. We will not give any information to you. We know that the Government has sent you here and you will submit a report on us to the Government and they want to displace us. Go, and save your life.”

This was the scolding I got on my first day of my first fieldwork when I approached the village leader. The scolding came from the village leader’s wife, and the village they represented was truly an isolated tribal one. In fact, they did not even know that there was a country called India; even more, they did not know anything more of the world than Mysore and Bangalore!

A visit to Lohanipur Slum

Amarendra Kumar (PDM 11) visited Lohanipur Slum during his first fieldwork and had the following video to share:

Towards a new life

By Shanti Gupta

I have now spent four months with Tata-Dhan Academy. During this time, I got a number of opportunities to learn new things in formal classes as well as in “informal” classes. This is the first time I learned a new way of study. The curriculum of the Academy has given me many opportunities to learn from every second that I am spending here.

Upon returning from the field….

By PDM 11 Batch

Any field experience has its own importance for learning, application of theoretical concepts, and better understanding of poverty at micro level. The PDM 11 students from Tata-Dhan Academy got a chance after the first term to be exposed to the ground reality in different contexts. We were divided into three groups and studied in three different contexts: rural, tribal, and slum. Here, we are consolidating some of what we understood from our experiences.