Image vs Reality
Students and professionals arrive in Jhabua with a set of assumptions about tribal India. They live in the villages for a while. The assumptions do not survive, and a good number of the visitors do not leave.
Over a long time our country has missed a coercive model of knowledge sharing and working together between tribal and urban communities — a colossal loss on the path to the prosperity of the nation. Shivganga is bridging that gap, and Jhabua has become a platform where students and professionals from across the country work alongside tribal youth abuzz with traditional wisdom.
The traffic runs both ways. The visitors take away a lifetime’s experience of ground reality, which is what lets them make policy and innovation that fits — and the exchange generates social capital that neither side had before.
The image was at the diagonal end of the reality.
Which is not something anyone is argued out of. They have to come and stay a while.
The programme is a funnel, and it is meant to be: a first visit, a piece of real work, and for some people a year or two of their life.
Live in the village. Watch the perception go.
The tribal community of Jhabua has long carried an ill repute built on perceptions and images — sometimes at the diagonal end of reality. Under Image vs Reality, hundreds of students and a good chunk of the urban populace visit Jhabua every year. They live in the villages and experience the humility and the values of the tribal community at first hand, which breaks those perceptions for good.
Accommodation, food, transport and a guide who knows the ground
Shivganga facilitates research and study on subjects relevant to the tribal community of Jhabua and to rural development — providing accommodation, food and local transport, and the assistance and guidance of Shivganga’s volunteers and social leaders.
Two days a year, for everyone who came and stayed connected
Image vs Reality has left a network of more than 400 students and professionals connected to Shivganga. Every year it invites them to a two-day camp to work out, together, how they can contribute to the movement for holistic rural development in Jhabua.
Each of them first came to Jhabua as a visitor under Image vs Reality, then came back for a year or two, and several have not left since.
Friends of Jhabua connects volunteers from different cities and institutes, across fields of expertise, to the social movement in Jhabua. They hand-hold the ground team, assist projects with the knowledge of their own field, and play a key role in raising funds for them. They also organise events and the Image vs Reality visits.
At the same time it gives students a reliable point of contact — somewhere to seek input and guidance for an academic project, a platform to try an idea out, and a community to learn from.
Rural immersion programmes, theses, internships and research projects — run in the villages, with the villages.
Get involved with Shivganga to make these villages self-reliant and full of self-esteem. The quickest way to understand any of this is to spend a week in a village that is doing it.
