Gram Anubhav
Purely experiential, which here means you are not shown a village. You stay in one, eat in one, and do a day's work in one.
What we do
Four to five days in rural Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Gujarat or Himachal.
What it sets out to do
Stay, rather than tour
The objective is a few days of ordinary life instead of a circuit of one. What makes the difference is arriving as a guest and not as an audience.
Hand the week to the host
The people whose community this is set the four days. Our job stops at getting a school group there and staying out of the way of it.
Put the work at the centre
Shramdaan is the part we will not cut. A day spent doing the work is a different thing from a day spent being told about it.
Strategy and activities
The host is always local
Over a hundred grassroots organisations and social movements host these journeys in their own communities. We arrive with a school group. They decide what the group is shown.
Four states, four different water problems
Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh. A hill village's water problem and a desert village's water problem are not the same problem, and four days is long enough to stop treating them as one.
The rest of how it runs
Nobody comes back with a project
There is no deliverable at the end of it. That is deliberate, and it is the hardest part to sell to a school: the journey is the exposure, and what a fifteen-year-old does with it is theirs.
Shramdaan
A day of physical work beside people who do it every day. It is the part nobody expects and the part everybody remembers.
Village interactions
Time with the people whose community this is, on their terms and at their pace. The host organisation decides what that looks like.
Home visits
Inside a house, at a hearth, eating what the household eats. The smallest room on the journey and the one that changes the most minds.
Cultural evenings
Run by the village rather than for it. That distinction is the whole difference between a journey and a package.
Who it is for
School groups from cities
A cohort travels together for four or five days. The group arrives already knowing each other, which is what makes the evenings work.
The host villages
The journey happens in somebody's community and is run by the organisations inside it. It is their programme as much as ours, and they are the reason it is not a tour.
Students who have only read about it
Water scarcity is a chapter until you carry some. A few days in one village is the shortest way out of the abstraction.
Impact
60+
Journeys organised
100+
Grassroots partners in the villages themselves
More than sixty of them
Over sixty Gram Anubhavs organised, run with over a hundred grassroots partners in the villages themselves.
Get involved
Bring your school
Straight to a person
This goes to Vimlendu Jha, Swechha’s Executive Director.
Or write to vimlendu@swechha.in.
The hosts are the hard part of this and they are already in place; what a journey needs is a school willing to give up five days.
Journeys
Yamuna Yatra
Twelve days and a thousand kilometres, downstream, from the source to Agra.
30+ yatras run
Journeys
NatureScapes
Two to five days in forest, mountain, desert or mangrove.
60+ journeys organised
The evidence
The record
Every reading the situation pages are built on, in one place.
Every situation, side by side