Introducing the Cohort : Part Three
When a young person leaves the village they grew up in, what are they actually walking toward? What do they leave behind that no city wage can replace? When a girl gets her first period, who is she even allowed to tell? What happens to everything nobody ever explained to her? When women finally get a seat at the table where decisions are made, whose voice does the room actually hear? When a woman wants to say no, who does she have to answer first, and what does saying it anyway cost her?
Part Three closes the introductions with four more fellows, and with them, the full cohort of twelve is finally on the page together.
Meet Manoj Madame, Mausam Kumari, Onam Tamut, and Shaivya Sahare. A young man tracking why his district keeps emptying out. A community mobiliser who has spent years getting girls to talk about something nobody wants to talk about. A practitioner working across Arunachal Pradesh on why women keep getting left out of the rooms where decisions get made. A development practitioner who spent years not telling people she was Adivasi, now working full-time with Adivasi women in Bastar. Different states. Different entry points. The same discipline underneath: stay long enough in one place to see past the symptom.
As with the fellows before them, this is where each of their pilots stands today, not where it will end up.
Manoj Madame, Gondia district, Maharashtra
Manoj has spent years working close to the ground in Gondia, a district in eastern Maharashtra where paddy is the main crop and migration has quietly become a rite of passage for young people. He comes to the Fellowship carrying one deceptively simple question. Why does a district with land, water, and forest keep sending its youngest and most able people somewhere else to survive?
The Problem He Names
Rural youth from Gondia, many of them from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households, are migrating to cities in growing numbers, and the migration has stopped being occasional. It now repeats every season, sometimes every year, following the same routes and the same networks that earlier migrants built before them.
What He Sees
The 2011 Census counted 455 million people in India as migrants. Manoj's own fieldwork suggests Gondia is adding steadily to that number rather than reversing it. Research on labour migration elsewhere in the country backs up a pattern he sees repeating locally, where landless and lower-caste households often turn to migration less as an opportunity and more as a survival mechanism inside a labour system already stacked against them. Paddy sold locally fetches around 1,700 rupees a quintal, a price farmers describe as barely enough to cover the season's costs. Landlessness runs deep in the Scheduled Caste households he has spoken with, and it pushes people toward daily wage work long before it pushes them toward migration.
What keeps the cycle going is not any single hardship but a quiet math families do every year. City work pays more. It arrives faster. And it carries a kind of dignity that agriculture in Gondia no longer seems to offer, at least not to a nineteen-year-old weighing his options. The destinations follow a well-worn map: Nagpur, Raipur, and Bilaspur for construction, Surat, Ahmedabad, and Hyderabad for textile mills, each stop paying just enough to make the route worth travelling again next season.
What He is Working Toward
Manoj's hypothesis rests on giving people a reason to stay that does not depend on convincing them agriculture is noble. If the paddy value chain gets built out locally, landless households gain access to work that does not require them to leave. If a skill development centre opens with real capacity, even a modest one built for a hundred students, some of that graduating cohort finds salaried work inside the district instead of outside it. Lac cultivation and a local agro-processing unit sit alongside these as smaller, faster bets. Government schemes for enterprise development already exist on paper, he has found, but banks routinely fail to implement them because of documentation gaps nobody on the ground is helping families clear.
An immersion visit elsewhere left him wanting to test two ideas at home: mapping Gondia's own natural water resources, and pairing that with the same lac cultivation and livelihood diversification he saw working there. None of this is framed as a single fix. It is a set of parallel efforts aimed at the same outcome, which is a Gondia a young person might choose to build a life in rather than leave.
Mausam Kumari, Nawada District, Bihar
Mausam founded and still leads a Kishori Samooh, a girls' collective, in 2016, and the group's first real act of collective will was rallying together to fund their own sanitary pad procurement when no one else would. That instinct, solving the problem yourself when the system will not, has carried through everything she has done since, including securing a functioning Adolescent Health Corner at a subdistrict hospital through sustained, documented advocacy.
The Problem She Names
Adolescent girls in rural Bihar, especially those from economically weaker households, lack access to menstrual hygiene supplies, reliable reproductive health information, and any real counselling on puberty at the Village Health Sanitation and Nutrition Days meant to serve them. The health system, as she puts it, remains largely unaware that adolescents have needs distinct from the rest of the population it serves.
What She Sees
The fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data puts safe menstrual hygiene practice among girls and women in Bihar at just under 59 percent, a number that tracks closely with what Mausam sees in the villages she works in, where cloth is still common and conversation about it is rare. The government has put real infrastructure in place on paper, from the Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram's Adolescent Friendly Health Clinics to one-rupee pads at Jan Aushadhi Kendras. Her own field visits found these clinics spend more time on family planning than on the adolescent health they exist to serve, with little privacy and few female staff for the girls who do show up. In her own conversation with stakeholders in the area, every single person agreed that menstruation still carries a stigma strong enough to affect a girl's schooling, and nearly nine in ten said men and boys should get the same information women currently struggle to get. Only about one in nine men, by her count, offer any regular support at home.
What She is Working Toward
Mausam's approach leans on making the conversation public rather than private, a deliberate inversion of how the subject is normally handled. She runs night chaupals, community gatherings held after dark when people are actually free to attend, screening films like Lapata Ladies and Padman followed by open discussion rather than a lecture. A myth-versus-fact exercise using ordinary household objects, a tulsi plant, a jar of pickle, a sindoor case, asks people to handle them during their period and then say what they now believe. She is building out a peer network she calls Mahavari Sathi, menstruation companions, women in the community trained to hold these conversations when she is not in the room.
The school is where she wants to plant her next flag, since it is where the largest numbers of adolescents already gather and where the dropout actually happens. The Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram already makes provision for this kind of in-school work, and her plan is to set up a dedicated room stocked with IEC material, books, basic medicines, and pads, so a girl has somewhere to turn before she decides staying home is easier than showing up. She wants to run the same effort in parallel for girls and women who never make it to school or college, so the same information and platform to speak reach them in their everyday lives. Girls who talk about this openly come out more confident and less likely to miss school over it, and she wants to work alongside the Population Foundation of India as she scales it.
Onam Tamut, Arunachal Pradesh
Onam works as a facilitator across Arunachal Pradesh, spending most of her time in direct collaboration with communities and the officials who serve them. Her Fellowship year has sharpened a question that most institutions prefer not to ask out loud. Why does a state with women visibly present in Self Help Groups and Panchayati Raj institutions still struggle to move women into actual leadership roles within them?
The Problem She Names
Women's inclusion in governance follows a pattern Onam describes as a vicious cycle. Limited education, financial dependence, and a lack of confidence to speak up in formal settings reinforce each other, and every time a woman is questioned or overlooked in a Panchayat meeting, the cycle tightens rather than loosens.
What She Sees
Globally, women hold only about 28 percent of national parliamentary seats. Onam's own research, pulled from state election data, adds specific texture to why that number holds locally too. Socio-cultural expectation and a lack of relevant knowledge came up as the two largest barriers women named when asked why they do not step into leadership, cited by over three-quarters and over four-fifths of respondents respectively, with family responsibility and low confidence close behind.
Underneath the numbers sits a global pattern the Gender Social Norms Index tracks directly, measuring bias against women across political, educational, economic, and physical dimensions all at once, and Onam sees each of those dimensions showing up locally in a different disguise. Reservation seats have opened a door, Onam notes. But mostly a narrow one. A woman can become the first lady mayor or the first Zilla Parishad chairperson on a reserved seat, and the underlying system around her rarely changes enough to encourage her toward a general seat next time. Leadership, when it is handed to women at all, tends to land in softer portfolios like women and child development or social welfare, rarely in the departments that hold real budget or authority.
What She is Working Toward
Onam's hypothesis flips the framing from what holds women back to what would move them forward, tracing a virtuous cycle instead: education leading to skill, skill to economic independence, independence to better health and confidence, and all of it eventually to leadership and real participation.
Immersions with organisations like SVYM, PRIME Meghalaya, and MHT shaped how she now thinks about entry points. The clearest lesson she took from those visits was that issues have to be identified by the community itself, through something as simple as a baseline survey, rather than diagnosed from outside and handed down. Collective leadership matters more than a single champion, and capacity building has to go further than one-off awareness sessions. On the ground, this takes the shape of a help desk built around existing community institutions, staffed to walk women through government schemes they are entitled to but rarely access. She is also exploring a simple offline-capable application, one built to work even where connectivity does not, alongside structured capacity building for women and youth already seen as informal community leaders. A community radio initiative, which she has named Inspire and Aspire, rounds out the plan, aimed at reaching women who may never attend a meeting but will listen to a radio in their own home.
Shaivya Sahare, Bastar, Chhattisgarh
Shaivya masked her Adivasi identity for years before choosing to work directly with Adivasi women in Bastar, a decision she does not treat lightly and one that shapes how she reads everything she now studies. Her research digs into a question with no easy villain attached to it. Why do women in Bastar, who are visibly present in Self Help Groups and community life, still struggle to have a real say in decisions that affect their own lives?
The Problem She Names
Paternalistic institutional behaviour, a near-total lack of personal income, rigid social expectations around what a "good woman" does and does not do, and the constant threat of humiliation or abandonment combine to keep women out of decision-making, whether that decision-making happens inside the family, inside a Panchayat, or inside a hospital.
What She Sees
Domestic violence affects roughly one in eight women in the communities Shaivya has mapped. That figure sits underneath a wider pattern of women having almost nowhere reliable to turn. One-Stop Centres and relatives' homes offer shelter for a few days or weeks at most, not the kind of standing option that changes a woman's actual leverage in a bad situation. Government hospitals will perform an abortion only when the mother's or child's health is at direct risk, which leaves little room for a woman making a different, harder decision on her own terms.
Nearly two-thirds of rural women in Chhattisgarh are anemic, by Shaivya's data, and roughly a third own a mobile phone, a gap that limits how much information reaches them independent of what a husband or relative chooses to share. Even where institutions exist on paper, from police stations to district courts, Shaivya has found something consistent. Women are routinely treated as incapable of making decisions for themselves, with staff defaulting to preserving the family unit over honouring what the woman in front of them wants. Language becomes its own barrier too, since outside doctors and officials often speak English, Hindi or use urban terms that simply do not translate.
What She is Working Toward
Shaivya's hypothesis is built in sequence rather than as a single lever. If the social cost of speaking up comes down, and if women gain some economic independence alongside it, institutions start behaving less paternalistically almost as a side effect, because there is less room left for them not to. Immersions with SVYM and the MHT sharpened this thinking. She came away convinced that social entitlements do more than provide material support. They confer a kind of institutional legitimacy on women that nothing else quite replicates, and hospitals designed with the patient genuinely at the centre change how women experience care long before any policy shift does.
Her leverage ideas run in parallel on purpose: double cropping and income diversification through livestock and tailoring to loosen economic dependence, twenty-four-hour public transport to loosen the mobility constraint, English classes to loosen the confidence gap that shows up the moment a woman has to speak to an outside authority. She is also exploring anonymous, collective ways for women to report safety violations without any one woman having to carry the risk alone, alongside a community radio channel built specifically for grievance redressal.
Some of her more ambitious ideas sit further out, like livestreaming Gram Panchayat meetings so decisions are harder to make quietly, or guaranteeing community champions an actual seat at the informal meetings where the real decisions tend to get made before they ever reach a formal one. None of these ideas depend on one dramatic intervention. They depend on enough small doors opening at once that walking through any one of them starts to feel possible.
In Closing
Twelve fellows, twelve very different entry points, and the same underlying practice running through every one of them: read the surface problem carefully enough that the deeper system reveals itself, then find the smallest lever that might actually move it.
Manoj is asking why a district with land and water still cannot hold onto its own young people.
Mausam is asking why a health system built for everyone still manages to overlook adolescents entirely.
Onam is asking what it would take for a virtuous cycle to finally out-compete a vicious one.
Shaivya is asking what happens to a woman's voice when every institution around her is quietly built to preserve the status quo instead of her agency.
Across all three parts of this series, that has been the real introduction, not to twelve individual problems, but to twelve people who refused to accept that the symptom was the whole story. The Fellowship gives them the room to keep testing that instinct against what the field actually shows them.
Stay Close to the Journey
This completes the introductions, but not the story. Each of these pilots will keep evolving as Residency 3 moves the cohort from planning into execution this September 2026, and this series will return to all twelve fellows as that work takes shape.
Follow the Centre for Systems Practice to stay with the cohort as their pilots develop. Share this piece with someone whose own work sits close to what Manoj, Mausam, Onam, or Shaivya are holding right now.
And if you are a practitioner yourself, or you support or fund this kind of work, get in touch. Systems like these only shift when more people are willing to look past the symptom with the fellows who are already doing it.
If you would like to know more about our Fellows or ask them specific questions, write to us at info@centreforsystemspractice.org!
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