Overview

Disha Social Organisation is a grassroots non-governmental organisation based in Saharanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, the most populated state of India. Disha seeks to create a society free of gender, class, religious and caste discrimination. It primarily works with women, particularly those belonging to Scheduled Castes, OBCs and minorities, in five districts spread over Uttar Pradesh (Saharanpur, Shamli and Muzaffarnagar) and Uttarakhand (Dehradun and Haridwar) to achieve its mission. Together these districts form a contiguous area.

The most prominent field intervention of Disha is tackling violence against women and promoting gender equality in an area that has earned a bad name because of gender-based violence. It resolves about 200 cases of violence against women every year through para-legal volunteers in villages and women cell at the organisation level. It creates awareness among stakeholders like adolescent and young students, teachers, advocates, government officials, police officials, media persons, etc., to move towards gender-just society.

Disha provides non-formal education to those adolescent girls who could not get education at an age when they should have got it. These girls are taught curriculum equivalent to class 5 in three years and trained in life skills so they may lead a better life. The girls and their parents are motivated to continue education and roughly one-third of the girls continue education. Supplementary education is provided to girls studying in classes 1 to 5 in regular schools, so their level of learning improves. 

Livelihood opportunities are being created for women across the operational area using locally available resources. The initial point in this is organising women into self-help groups and building capacity of the women in group processes. This is followed by livelihood training, handholding and arranging finance to enable the women to set up their livelihood ventures.

As health is a neglected thing in rural areas, Disha creates health awareness among adolescent girls and women in reproductive age. Limited health services like haemoglobin test of girls and women and distribution of iron pills among the needy are being provided. Lack of menstrual hygiene is one of the biggest causes of suffering of girls and women. To tackle this awareness on menstrual hygiene management is being created among them.

Though women share a large pie of work in agriculture, they do not have the status of farmers as agricultural land is not in their name. Many women in the area also take agricultural land on rent and lease land and cultivate crops. Such women are being helped with agricultural techniques and exposure visits to enable them to adopt latest that is happening in agricultural sector. Because of the efforts of the organisation and other like-minded organisations the Government has made provision of joint ownership of women and men of the land.

Disha is helping rural people access benefits of government entitlements. Towards this end, it is creating awareness about the entitlements and how one can get their benefits. Awareness is created through a mix of methods like use of street plays and puppet shows, training and distribution of awareness material.

The organisation is working to promote social harmony for a long time and Constitutional values for quite some time. Work on Constitutional values seeks to establish such values among the citizens so fissures end, and more harmonious society is established. Though the work is still in an early stage, changes are visible as some situations that could have snowballed into major issues have been averted.

Disha has been part of several state, national and global campaigns. The organisation was a part of the ‘We Can’ Campaign with the goal of ‘reducing the social acceptance of violence against women’.  It was associated with Aaroh Campaign aimed at providing status of ‘Women Farmer’ to the women engaged in agriculture. It is a part of the global campaign One Billion Rising.

A mention may also be made of relief activities on which Disha worked according to emerging situation. It provided relief to earthquake victims in the mountains of Uttarakhand twice and flood victims once. More recently, it carried out relief work when the world was hit by Covid pandemic.

In its journey Disha worked on certain issues on which it is no longer working. The organisation worked on natural resource management through watershed development and afforestation. It trained construction workers in earthquake resistant construction technology. During the training the workers built a few homes and a community centre. It worked with artisans, particularly ringal (a kind of cane) artisans, to provide them better avenues. It worked intensively in agriculture sector with an emphasis on diversification of agriculture. It provided support to a few very small non-governmental organisations, community-based organisations and individuals to spread volunteerism.

So far, the organisation has touched over 1,50,000 people mainly women and girls directly and many more, almost 60 lakh people, indirectly through campaign and fellowship mode.