About US
Our Collective
Chinhari is a collective of young rural women (largely Gond Adivasi) from Dhamtari, Chhattisgarh. We work on grassroots-led concerns. Chinhari’s foundation was laid in 2016. In the past, Chinhari undertook gender issues like division of labour, traditional farming with heirloom seeds to nourish the health of young women and the ecosystem, as well as cultivated lac to support biodiversity in local forests.
Over the years, the young women of Chinhari have learnt from their past traditions and reimagined sustainable Adivasi futures. The collective registered itself under the name of Hamar Chinhari Welfare Society in 2024. In 2025 Chinhari members chose education as a means to create such futures. They envisioned Chinhari to be a space of co-learning. Further, guided by Gandhi and Tagore’s vision of education, which emphasises equitable education within the womb of nature to holistically develop a child, Chinhari’s young women started two ‘Hamar Srijanshalas’ or open learning centers for young children.
Hamar Srijanshala translates to, our creative abode of learning. Here children learn about their village, culture and the environment through play and enquiry. Chinhari aims to build a strong foundation for sustainable futures by reconnecting with the local culture and environment.
Our Story
This grassroots-led initiative started when Swarnima Kriti, a MPhil researcher, came to Mardapoti for an immersive fieldwork for approximately one year. She was part of a unique MPhil programme at The Centre for Development Practice, Ambedkar University Delhi’s (AUD). In collaboration with the national level NGO, PRADAN the MPhil program offered a one year immersion in rural contexts. As part of the programme, Swarnima Kriti, worked with the women in Mardapoti, a village in Dhamtari, Chhattisgarh. She started living in the village in January 2016 for her immersive fieldwork. In February 2017, she was supporting women’s concerns of “pani ke samasya” or “water problem” in the village. Over discussions we collectively learnt that “pani ke samasya” was a twofold problem - gendered division of labour highlighting “pani lane ki samasya” or “who fetches and carries water home” and infrastructural issue of having working water sources far away from home. Consistent discussions among a youth group in the village led to street play on division of labour and regular communication to the government authorities for infrastructural upgrade. Swarnima stayed back after the MPhil and continued meeting the youth group.
The youth group slowly emerged to become a young women’s group. In 2018, a health check-up revealed 38 out of 40 girls of Mardapoti and Dokal, two villages in Dhamtari, were anaemic. In response, the girls decided to modify their food plate by increasing their intake of leafy greens. For this, they began cultivating vegetables collectively using heirloom seeds, valued for higher nutritional content. This hands-on engagement brought the Chinhari girls closer to the environment. Building on this experience, the girls experimented with lac cultivation in 2020 to improve local biodiversity and ecological balance. They also started a seed project with financial and moral support from a friend Ashutosh (a PhD student at Groningen University), collecting seeds, flowers, fruits, bark and roots from the local forest to create a repository. Village elders helped them to document the traditional knowledge associated with these materials, deepening their understanding of their cultural heritage.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, two movements happened in Chinhari. When the girls could not meet each other, because of the lockdown, they found an innovative way to at least be together. They started painting in their homes. Painting not only became a way to calm anxious minds of the girls in difficult times of Covid, it also made them attentive to their surroundings. This tracing of one’s own environment - women working in the field, children picking mahua flower in the forest, festive rituals etc - on the paper became a form of self-work connecting their mind, body, culture, environment and spirit. Meanwhile, when the lockdown was lifted but schools were still suspended, Chinhari members helped local schools by teaching children in their villages. What started as a response to an immediate need gradually took the girls back to deeper questions about education – its purpose, its methods, and its relationship to the lives of children. Through these engagements, they saw many children required additional support, not only because of weak learning outcomes but also due to a learning environment that felt disconnected from their lived realities. The girls could not see an appreciative connection between their culture, nature and education. These reflections led to the establishment of Hamar Shrijanshala in January 2025 as a more intentional space of ecological and cultural learning. It is run by the young women from the community with some support from non-Indigenous advisors, Aditi Mitra (Early Childhood Educator), Swarnima Kriti (PhD scholar at Massey University), Prof. Anup Dhar (Professor of Philosophy, BML Munjal University; Permanent Fellow, Hans Kilian and Lotte Köhler Center for Cultural Psychology and Historical Anthropology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum) and Sumit Verma (Independent Finance Consultant in Animation and VFX).
Our Structure
At Chinhari, we view ourselves as a banyan tree. Just as it begins from tapering roots, reaching to the ground, so does the idea of Chinhari. The roots are weak and need the support and nourishment from each other in the initial years. The banyan tree with its cool shade and a strong trunk hosts many within its foliage and branches. It supports an entire ecosystem where the differences of the many come together for each other. Soon the prop roots are strengthened and nourished, ready to bear and share the responsibility of those who need it.
Chinhari, the group and the members of the group, has been akin to that imagery, supporting, nurturing, uplifting, holding and carrying one another. Becoming stronger in their roles as an individual and a part of a collective. Each having their own identity, sometimes one and mostly many, having different ideas, aspirations, challenges and opinions but holding onto the philosophy of being rooted to the context of indigenous culture, and care as the language of expression.
Our Vision
To support and encourage grassroots initiatives by young rural women that promotes equitable and sustainable futures.
Our Mission
To enable young rural women to lead community-based initiatives by fostering co-learning, cultural awareness, and ecological restoration.