For more than two decades, State Progressive Women's forum have been engaging in the education of marginalized women along with socio-economic empowerment. Subsequently, it has also been working towards the reproductive health rights of these women. Coming from an indigenous marginalized community, I witnessed how people were discriminated against on the basis of their social stratification. The society that we live in discriminates women for being a “woman” but at the same time, a woman of indigenous community faces prejudices and biases on several more level. I had read somewhere that “Man is born free but everywhere he is in Chain”. This quote had a strong and a lasting impact on me.
There was a time when I was mocked and heavily criticised for raising my voice on the importance of girls and women in education. Therefore, we started out by creating awareness and doing advocacies in community level which slowly brought about changes in the mind-set of the people. As someone rightly said “If we educate a boy, we educate one person. If we educate a girl, we educate a family- and the whole nation.” This became our driving factor and our organizational goal.
Moving ahead, we realized that there was a strong need for women to be economically empowered. Thus, in order to reduce poverty among the deprived women, we started a Self Help Group in the year 2000 with only 12 members of each group which have now increased to 3 Lakhs members as a whole . We hope that it continues to grow further by providing financial support to women. Along with that, several pieces of training were provided to women on stitching unit , Applique, vegetable farming, poultry farming as well as masonry. Within two decades, we