Seva Mandir

Seva Mandir encourages community health workers who work to improve maternal and child health. It has trained traditional birth attendants (TBAs) to live and work in villages where they perform deliveries and care for pregnant women pre and post-delivery.

These attendants encourage women to deliver at hospitals when possible and accompany them, handling medical complications that may come up on the way. In addition, Balsakhis counsel new mothers on critical aspects of newborn care including breastfeeding and appropriate nutrition, monitoring child growth and treating basic illnesses.

The organisation also conducts regular immunization camps, which it promotes by offering incentives to parents in the form of lentils for every shot of vaccine their child receives.

Seva Mandir encourages villages to take ownership of development projects. Thus, it first forms an elected village forum, providing a platform for citizens to meet regularly and address local issues. Then, Seva Mandir helps form a village fund, managed by the Forum and audited by Seva Mandir. The village fund collects financial contributions from the community.

On a larger scale, Seva Mandir has helped create the Citizens’ Development Forum, a system of 18 neighbourhood-based committees and a central Executive Committee, in Delwara village, to direct development across the peri-urban town.

The organization runs youth centres operated by local youth mobilizers, where young people are enrolled annually. These centres serve as a hub where youth receive job training, participate in community issues, and engage in educational, cultural, and sports activities.

Through these centres, numerous young people have been sent to vocational institutes for livelihood training in vocations such as mobile phone repairing, tailoring and hotel management. These centres also provide the youth with a chance to mobilize and address issues in their community. For example, the youth launched “Learn Without Fear,” which was a campaign to end corporal punishment in government schools, that reached over 400 students.

Another initiative persuaded child drop-outs to enrol in open school, a Government distance-learning programme. Additionally, these centres hold sexual health and gender camps, educating the youth on HIV/AIDS, STDs and contraceptives.

It helps empower women by facilitating them to come together; its Women's Forums recruit, train and invest authority in women leaders, allowing them to take unified action on community issues. Its 9 Women’s Resource Centers, community courts run by local women leaders give women the chance to seek justice and avoid backlogs and corruption in the state legal system.

Further, it has set up almost 600 Self Help Groups and savings and credit groups, which provide economic security and independence to women. Each SHG receives training on the fundamentals of financial planning besides having an accountant and annual external audits.

The organisation also has a shelter in Udaipur City for women who face domestic violence or other abuse at home. "A Short Stay Home" provides child care, psychological counselling, remediation services, legal advice, and livelihood training.

The organisation runs 160 community preschools or Balwadis, for children from 1-5 years, that are run by local women trained by Seva Mandir. The Balwadis are monitored by cameras to ensure that teachers attend school. The curriculum aims to prepare the children socially and academically for primary school.

The preschools provide 2 daily meals, ensure deworming of all children, monitor growth and hold immunization drives. Village Development Forums contribute financially to their Balwadis, and others in the community contribute through monitoring and teacher evaluation.

It also runs a Child Representative Program that sends children to school and promotes the participation of children in the community development process. Its Children’s Forums in 30 villages give children seats in the Village Development Forums, allowing them to develop leadership skills and express themselves while sensitizing community leaders to children’s needs and concerns.

Seva Mandir works in a region which is highly vulnerable to climate change. A World Bank Group report in 2018, on South Asia’s Hotspots, classified the region as a moderate hotspot zone. Evidence from various climate science studies points to the negative effects which a rise in average temperature has on people’s living standards, and shows that inland areas like southern Rajasthan are particularly severely affected. Our work area is located in the Aravalli hills. This hilly region receives an average annual rainfall of 630 mm which is not evenly distributed throughout the year, and it experiences drought every three to five years. This is a high water-stress zone with the supply of water from rainfall not meeting demands for agriculture, household consumption and other uses. 60% of the land in the region is common land, in the form of forest, revenue wasteland and pastures, which are not privately owned. With the increased human-induced pressure on the environment over decades, and now the threat of climate change, the commons is under serious threat. This leads to deforestation, encroachment and conflict, with the result that land and water sources have been degraded and social fragmentation deepened. 67% of the land is undergoing rapid degradation and desertification. Since 95% of the people in rural areas are dependent on land and water for their livelihood, this constitutes an imminent threat to their livelihood security. 80% of people in the region we work in live in rural areas and depend mostly on subsistence agriculture and livestock rearing. 84% of the farmers are small and marginal farmers with two hectares of land or less, with only about half fit for cultivation. Most families cannot produce enough food grains from their farms to last them for the whole year. A report by the UN World Food Programme states that Udaipur district is the least food-secure area in Rajasthan. Seva Mandir has been working for decades to tackle these challenges.

Over half of the children in the rural areas of southern Rajasthan where Seva Mandir works do not attend school, and over a third have never been to school. Rural government schools are often far from tribal communities, and, when reachable, are often under-resourced, under-funded or, in some cases, closed. When they operate, classes are large, teacher absenteeism very high, pedagogic methods poor and very little learning takes place. Education was the first area in which Seva Mandir became involved, beginning with adult education. It soon became apparent that we would need to extend our work to children, the majority of whom had no access to schooling and were illiterate. Our response today is to provide quality education for children who have dropped out of or have never been to school, or who cannot attend school because of financial constraints or family obligations. Through our 148 Shiksha Kendras (bridge schools) and Residential Learning Camps, we offer 6,000 out-of-school children access to quality primary education every year, whilst our scholarship programme offers access to quality secondary education. We have also begun to work with government schools to improve the education they deliver. At a deeper level, by educating thousands of first-generation learners and striving for equal enrolment of girls, we are slowly transforming the demand for quality education among families from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, empowering young people to achieve their best.

In order to protect natural resources, Seva Mandir has developed 16,800 hectares of common land, made sustainable watersheds for many families, and helped farmers improve their agricultural yields across more than 400 villages. It has constructed 76 anicut dams and 47 irrigation lifts in 108 villages and has also worked directly with over 10,000 farmers to improve agricultural yields through eco-friendly practices.

Seva Mandir also works on research and advocacy for common lands and is leading a coalition of six partner organizations in a study, “Safeguarding the Commons,” which will provide an in-depth status of common lands across five Indian states. In addition, it founded and collaborates closely with Van Utthan Sansthan, an award-winning network of forest protection committees across 240 villages. It has also helped develop numerous national policies in the space of agriculture.