The collective effort of Atmashakti Team to identify and train potential grassroots community leaders for effective collective action and community mobilization towards better grassroots governance. We are trying to put this in a framework with an efficient and effective mechanism wherein local community leaders would lead the process of sensitizing indigenous communities towards their rights and entitlements. This is how strong networks of indigenous communities can be created and sustained for better democratic spaces of dialogue and negotiations with local, districts and state administration vis-a-vis government. We are trying to create a team of 5000 very strong and independent indigenous leaders scattered in 15 operational districts, leading their communities in every civil society forums, escalating the issues of governance and marginalization with local, districts, state and central government.

We believe that human beings evolve with time, hence our 10 years intervention also compelled us to introspect past learnings and observations. Why and how such collective learnings can be converted into a blue print to conceptualise theoretical and operational model of Birsa Vahini.

Learnings:

• Changing nature of community’s need, their demand and participation in grassroots governance, lacunas and violations of constitutional entitlements and special provisions for indigenous communities;
• How indigenous community look at the process of social change and what is their idea of development;
• How are the indigenous community brining their customary knowledge and indigenous science with non-indigenous scientific approaches? How together, they contribute substantially to modern science and why there is a need to recognize their traditional knowledge and science;
• Why there is a need of having their own spaces for dialogue and representation with larger mainstream community so that stereotypes about indigenous community and their challenges can be dealt with some sensitivity and empathy;
• Why there is a need of having their own leadership while having a larger dialogue with all stakeholders responsible for constructive inclusive development.

In short why there is a need to have sustainable people’s collective so that community collectively mobilize themselves for a dialogue with all stakeholder and escalate their demands by using all constitutional methods and provisions. Hence we created institutional mechanism to train in house as well as community leaders to create and promote conducive environment for people’s movement through sustainable people’s collective or forums.