» List of Grants, 2006
» List of Previous Grants
» Grantee profile: Elgar
» Grantee profile: India's indigenous population wins landmark victory
» Grantee profile: Sangama
India has vibrant human rights movements in the southern part of the country that have helped to establish legal protections for marginalized populations and promote a fairly independent judiciary. Still, the country grapples with considerable inequality, injustice, and communal, gender-based and caste-based violence. Police violate human rights with relative impunity. Corruption is pervasive and makes it nearly impossible for the majority of people, millions of whom live in debt slavery, to escape poverty.
The Fund’s current strategy emphasizes support for dynamic human rights organizations seeking to promote the rights of India’s most marginalized populations such as Dalits, tribals, women, and religious and sexual minorities. The Fund supports a mixed portfolio of highly effective national organizations as well as state-based groups primarily in central and southern states, with a growing number of fledgling groups based in the north. Many of these groups are building grassroots movements, promoting legal and policy reform on issues such as land rights, the right to education, and the right to food, and actively participating in campaigns against such human rights violations as torture and bonded labor, a form of slavery.
The Fund’s increasing focus on the northern state of Uttar Pradesh—the most populous state in India—is influenced by the state’s high rate of human rights violations against Dalits and Muslims and patriarchal, casteist, communal and feudal practices that prevail there. Prospects for communal strife are significantly heightened by the lack of local civil society groups able to challenge human rights abuses. In a state lacking a history of social movements, and where awareness of human rights principles and the space to promote them are scarce, the Fund is supporting a fledgling women’s rights network and fostering efforts to gradually build a cadre of local activists to promote human rights principles, utilize legal and state mechanisms to defend their rights, and ultimately challenge discrimination and violence.
