Introducing the Cohort : Part Two
- Centre for Systems Practice
- 5 days ago
- 10 min read
Read Part One here.
When harassment happens at work, what does it turn into over time, and how does a person actually find their way through it? When a fund is set aside for a community, what route does that money take, and does it ever reach the people it was meant for? How does a child begin their journey into education, and who gets to decide what that journey looks like? What if a community got to choose what learning meant for itself?
Part Two picks up four more threads like these. Each one is carried by a fellow who has spent years standing close enough to a problem to notice what everyone else walks past.
Meet Nitya Sriram Srinivasan, Sanjay Kambale, Lochana Adivarekar, and Huidrom Boicha Singh. Together they cover an enormous range. One works across workplaces scattered all over the country. Another is looking closely at a single Gram Panchayat's books in Maharashtra. A third spends her days in classrooms and colleges in Mumbai. The fourth is questioning the two-century-old idea of school itself. The scale keeps shifting from one fellow to the next. The instinct behind the work does not.
As with Part One, this is simply where each of them stands right now. Not a finished diagnosis. Not a solution either. Just an honest read of the work as it stands, before it moves again.
Nitya Sriram Srinivasan
Nitya has worked inside India's formal and informal workplaces for more than six years. Garment floors. Retail stores. Malls. Gig platforms. These are the settings where a growing share of the country's labour force actually works, and where she has handled or studied more than a hundred cases of sexual harassment. Her view of the problem comes from sitting on many sides of it at once. She has worked with civil society groups, compliance teams inside companies, non-profits, and media organisations, in partnership with unions, embassies, and funders. She brings one hard question to the Fellowship. Why does the harm keep repeating, even where laws, committees, and audits already exist on paper?
The Problem She Names
Sexual harassment and gender-based harm in decentralised workplaces persist because responsibility for preventing them is scattered across too many hands. Power sits with intermediaries, contractors, and supervisors. Accountability sits nowhere in particular. Workers, especially women and other marginalised groups, are left to absorb the risk alone, negotiating it quietly rather than naming it.
What She Sees
The numbers back up what she has seen on the ground. Close to 90 percent of India's workforce operates informally. 82 percent of workers in non-agricultural sectors have no written job contract at all. Nearly a third of organisations surveyed have no Internal Committee, the body the law requires for handling harassment complaints (The Udaiti Foundation, From Intent to Practice). Two-thirds of gig workers report no grievance system to turn to. Underneath these numbers sits a set of beliefs that keep the system running, and Nitya has heard versions of each one repeated back to her in the field. Silence means safety. Workers are replaceable. Complaints disrupt more than they protect. Safety is an individual worker's job, not the system's. When a worker stays quiet, the system reads that quiet as proof that nothing is wrong. That removes the pressure to fix anything.
What She is Working Toward
Nitya's working hypothesis has two parts. The first is about consequences. If workers can collectively surface and respond to harm, the social and reputational risk to perpetrators and employers goes up. That chips away at the impunity currently protecting harmful behaviour. The second is about support. If workers build collective voice through shared spaces, they can co-design the mobility, childcare, and psychosocial support that isolation currently denies them. That makes them better placed to interrupt unsafe conditions before they escalate. The shift she wants is structural. Away from individual champions quietly absorbing the extra work of keeping others safe. Toward workflows where safety is built in, so it does not depend on any one person staying in the room.
Sanjay Kambale, Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra
Sanjay has spent years working at the grassroots across rural, urban, and tribal areas of Maharashtra, in education, health, entrepreneurship, and Panchayati Raj. In 2023 he contested the Sarpanch election in his own village, on a promise to build an ideal village. He did not win, but the campaign left him with a wide community network that he still draws on for this work.
The Problem He Names
India's Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan requires state governments to set aside funds for Dalit habitations. The amount is meant to match the size of the local Scheduled Caste population. This money is meant to pay for basic infrastructure such as water, roads, drainage, electricity, education, and health. Sanjay has found that it is regularly diverted elsewhere instead. Sometimes it goes to other departments. Sometimes it funds general schemes with no real connection to Dalit habitations. Sometimes it simply goes toward work that carries more political benefit. The consequence is not just bad roads or an unreliable water supply. It is the quiet, repeated confirmation that a community's needs come second.
What He Sees
Sanjay obtained records directly from the Ahmednagar Zilla Parishad's Social Welfare Department. He then cross-checked them against what actually reached his own village. The gap was stark. In the current financial year, of the 30 lakh rupees sanctioned for his village, 12 lakh has already been spent on other habitations instead. The previous year's records showed the same pattern. This is not an isolated case, either. CAG reports and RTI findings point to similar diversion across Maharashtra, Bihar, and Karnataka. A few structures make it easy for this to repeat, year after year. Decisions stay concentrated with the Sarpanch and local officials, rather than the community. Monitoring through Gram Sabhas and social audits stays weak. Grievance systems move slowly, even after a complaint is filed. Sanjay names the deeper belief plainly. Dalit habitations are treated as secondary. Information itself becomes a tool of power, withheld rather than shared.
What He is Working Toward
Sanjay's proposed shift centres on the 73rd Constitutional Amendment. This is the law that decentralised power to Gram Panchayats and Gram Sabhas, so development could follow local need. He argues that its implementation is still incomplete on the ground, and that fixing it has to work at more than one level. One idea is a structured fellowship that trains young leaders from SC and ST communities in governance, social audit, and advocacy.
Another is regular capacity building for Sarpanchs and Gram Panchayat members on transparent fund management. A third is a wider push for economic, social, and political empowerment, so communities can demand what is already legally theirs, rather than wait for it. An immersion visit to a Gram Panchayat in Karnataka sharpened his thinking here. He watched officers from several departments, including agriculture, revenue, and block development, show up at a single village once a month, just to hear people out on the spot. He calls it doorstep government. It is the kind of small, visible shift he wants to test back home.
Lochana Adivarekar, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Lochana is a gender and sexuality educator. She designs and facilitates learning spaces for adolescents, youth, educators, and institutions across Mumbai and Maharashtra. Her approach leans on arts and dialogue, not top-down awareness sessions. That comes from years spent with the Ubuntu Movement, OSCAR Foundation, MAVA, and The Gender Lab, alongside NSS networks across the city's colleges.
The Problem She Names
Violence and unsafe experiences in schools and colleges are widely normalised. They are also consistently underreported. This quietly erodes the confidence young people need to identify, respond to, and report what happens to them. The silence is not accidental. Families enforce rigid gender roles. Comprehensive sexuality education is nearly absent, because teachers fear backlash or are simply untrained. Media and peer culture treat aggression as normal, even admirable.
What She Sees
The adolescents Lochana works with say it plainly, in their own words. Nobody talks openly about sex. Boys are expected to act strong. Girls are constantly monitored. People use gay as an insult. The data backs up every line. Close to 9 out of 10 adolescents in her interventions say they rely on peers or the internet, rather than any adult, for basic information about relationships and their own bodies. Girls report far stricter surveillance of their clothing, mobility, and friendships than boys do. Very few LGBTQ+ students who face bullying ever report it to a school authority. Cases of cyberbullying and other crimes against children have both climbed sharply across Maharashtra in recent years. Schools keep sidestepping the conversation anyway. They cite fear of parental backlash, lack of training, or plain discomfort, even though national programmes like the Adolescent Education Programme already exist on paper. The mental models she keeps encountering are stark. Discussing bodies and sexuality is inappropriate. Boys should be tough and unemotional. Girls should adjust and stay within limits. Restriction is protection.
What She is Working Toward
Lochana's hypothesis rests on ownership. If students help design their own reporting mechanisms, she believes they are more likely to feel safe enough to use them. That, in turn, pushes schools to actually act. If young people are given real creative control over content and expression around these issues, rather than being handed messaging designed by adults, they are more likely to feel invested in solving the problem themselves. On the ground this already takes a few forms. Gender Champions cohorts, run with NSS and the University of Mumbai, certified to give the work real weight. A push to make schools measurably safer, with accessible reporting committees and a counsellor actually present. A folk art collaboration with schools in Ratnagiri, using a form young people already trust to open a conversation adults have struggled to start. She is also drawn to two lighter tools from her immersions. A gender champions channel, modelled on peer profiles that already work well elsewhere. A simple chatbot that can take in a student's concern and quietly point them to the right place to report it, without anyone else needing to know first.
Huidrom Boicha Singh
Boicha has spent more than seven years working inside decentralised, community-rooted learning ecosystems in rural and tribal India. He designs participatory programmes that sit outside the walls of formal schooling. He comes to the Fellowship connected to networks like the Indian Multiversities Alliance. His way of working stays consistent: alongside communities, never solutions delivered to them.
The Problem He Names
Rural and tribal communities are steadily losing their collective ability to solve their own problems and shape their own development. They are becoming more dependent on external institutions as a result. Younger generations keep moving away from local livelihoods, knowledge systems, and community life. They chase education, jobs, and recognition that only external, urban institutions seem to offer.
What He Sees
Boicha sees this as something inherited. A schooling model built somewhere else, for a different purpose, that was never really rebuilt for the community it now serves. The costs show up in measurable ways. Graduate unemployment stays stubbornly high, even after decades of education expansion. Creative, divergent thinking drops off sharply as children move through school and into adulthood. India's tribal languages are disappearing fast, and so is the ecological knowledge communities once passed down through generations. In one Toto tribal community, most working-age men now hold government jobs, rather than the traditional livelihoods their community once depended on. Underneath all of it sit beliefs rarely said aloud but consistently acted on. Formal knowledge is superior to local knowledge. Development simply means economic growth. Communities are beneficiaries of change rather than its authors.
What He is Working Toward
Boicha's hypothesis is simple to state and hard to build. If rural and tribal communities build permanent, community-rooted learning ecosystems, their collective agency to shape their own futures grows stronger. The idea rests on trust. It treats the community as a source of knowledge, not just a place where knowledge gets delivered. It is built on the belief that people are already capable of solving their own problems, given the right kind of space to do it in. That space motivates people, connects them to each other, and helps them engage more fully with their own realities. None of this is against outside knowledge. Outside knowledge is welcome too. The key idea is that knowledge and intelligence should stay with the community, rather than being pulled away by outside systems like markets or schools. These are spaces where people gather to play, experiment, and solve local problems together.
Learning stops being something delivered from outside. It becomes part of everyday community life instead. He is exploring this through three connected entry points. Hyper-local learning spaces, built around youth and women aged 25 to 50, who he sees as most likely to move first. A cohort of Community Learning Fellows, local people trained to convene and facilitate rather than teach, never to lecture. Partnerships with organisations already working close to these communities, who can extend the model's reach without taking ownership away from the people it serves. A handful of design principles run underneath all three. Fun before responsibility. Participation before instruction. Relationships before outcomes. Community before institution.
In Closing
These four fellows work at very different scales. One is fighting for a single village's development fund. Another is questioning the two-century history of how the world decided children should learn. What connects them is the same instinct that ran through Part One. Neither of them accepts that a symptom is the whole story. Nitya is asking why systems read silence as safety rather than harm. Sanjay is asking why a community keeps having to prove that funds meant for it were, in fact, meant for it. Lochana is asking what changes when young people are trusted to design their own safety, rather than have it delivered to them. Boicha is asking whether the idea of learning itself needs rebuilding from the ground up, starting with what communities already know.
The Fellowship gives each of them room to keep sharpening these questions, while doing the work they were already doing. Part Three will complete the introductions with the rest of the cohort. This series will keep returning to all twelve as their pilots take shape.
Stay Close to the Journey
Part Three will introduce the rest of the fellows. If the work in this piece speaks to you, there are a few ways to stay with the story as it unfolds.
Follow the Centre for Systems Practice to be among the first to read Part Three when it goes live. Share this piece with someone in your network whose work sits close to what Nitya, Sanjay, Lochana, or Boicha are holding. They might find a kindred mind in this cohort. And if you are a practitioner yourself, or you support practitioners, or you fund this kind of work, get in touch. The systems these fellows are mapping will only shift when more people lean in.
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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