Meet the team

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Archana has more than 18 years of work experience in the areas of gender and education. In Nirantar, along with steering the organisational projects, her major involvement has been in researching and writing on issues of women’s empowerment and young people’s education and empowerment from a feminist perspective. Her engagement on these issues has further been strengthened by the work at the field level with women and girls belonging to marginalised communities. She believes in making research accessible to grass roots organisations and thus transcreates this research into training and learning material for facilitators, field-based activists and organisations.

Nishi did her post-graduation in Psychology, PG Diploma in Guidance and Counselling from NCERT (New Delhi), an MBA with specialisation in Human Resource Management. She has more than 15 years of professional experience in working with women empowerment, education, and health. She heads the Women’s Literacy, Education, and Empowerment work in Nirantar, under which she plays a crucial role in visualizing and planning the women’s education program and project operations, conducts training of the project staff and teachers of partner organisations. She is also involved in the other organisational trainings conducted by Nirantar.

Santosh brings with her nearly three decades of experience of working with rural-poor women in some of the poorest pockets in India. She has extensive grass-roots experience of working with women’s groups in the tribal pockets of Rajasthan and Bihar (Jharkhand) through the decade of the nineties. Santosh helped in building capabilities of the women’s groups in organising their microfinance business, availing livelihood support from commercial banks, and the government, and also accessing their due entitlements from the state. Building the sense of agency of the women in order to enhance their space and voice in society was a major focus for Santosh in her engagements.

After over a decade in the villages, Santosh moved on to head the Capacity Building division of the Community Development Finance network Sa-dhan. While in Sa-dhan Santosh focused on the smaller institutions working in the under-served States in the country, especially those working with rural women. Subsequently, Santosh spent a short period of time with the Micro Insurance Academy, working on developing insurance products for the poor. After this, Santosh took over as the National Consultant of the Mahila Samakhya Programme. In her 7 years' stint, Santosh was able to express her passion for women’s issues and use her deep experience in gender mainstreaming and building leadership of women and girls. She also brought in her capabilities in networking and mobilisation for managing the smooth functioning of this national programme by mediating skillfully between the centre and the state.

Presently, she functions as a Senior Facilitator, anchoring institutional strengthening of women’s federations in Bihar. Santosh holds a Master's degree in Political Science from the University of Rajasthan.

Prarthana completed her MSW from Jamia Millia Islamia University. She has been working in the development sector for the past 10 years on issues of quality education, inclusion, curriculum development, gender equity, teachers' training. Before joining Nirantar in 2015, she was associated with Bodh Shiksha Samiti, Jaipur and UNICEF, Jharkhand. She has worked intensively for education of out-of-school girls and coordinated KGBV project in different districts of Rajasthan. She also worked as UNICEF Consultant to lead state level Monitoring and Evaluation programme in Jharkhand. Currently, Prarthana is working as Senior Facilitator of the Young People's Education Programme (YPE). Under this programme, she is working with Parvaaz Adolescent Centre For Education (PACE) Project and Tarang Programme team under partnership with different community based organisations. She works closely with Delhi- and UP-based partner organisations to provide access to alternative quality education among out-of-school girls. She is actively involved in developing learning resource materials and curriculum, along with building capacities of the facilitators around inclusive education, pedagogy, gender from the lens of marginalised communities. She has been passionately engaged in collecting stories of young people from the field and including those in different curriculum and learning resource materials. Poetry and music are close to her heart. She loves writing her field experiences in the form of a diary and as poetry.  

Purnima is a Feminist and Women’s Right Activist. Since 1998 Purnima is working in Nirantar Trust. Since 2002, she has been responsible for setting up Nirantar’s community-level work (Sahjnai Shiksha Kendra, Lalitpur, UP) on women’s literacy and education and empowerment. Between May 2008 to 2011, she set up an eight-month residential school for women and adolescent girls - “Janishala”, in Lalitpur. It has been envisaged as an institutional learning space for women and adolescent girls who have either dropped out of school or have had very limited opportunities for education. Purnima coordinated women’s literacy work at Nirantar between 2011–14. She has with more than 80 organisations across the country on intensive capacity building, through training and follow-up support for community-based partner organisations to enable them to design and implement women’s literacy programmes. She was a senior fellow in Nirantar and an advisor for women literacy and PACE programme between January 2015 to August 2018. After this, until March 2021, she worked as Programme Director of the Women's Literacy and empowerment work in Nirantar. Presently, she is working as a Sr. Programme and Pedagogy Specialist. Besides this, Purnima also conducted a 1.5-year course with Madhavi Kukreja on "Feminist Leadership Programme" for emerging new grassroots feminist leaders during 2015–2017. She has conducted several trainings on Gender, Education, Caste and Sexuality for both government and non-government organisations. She has also developed teaching-learning materials for Nirantar’s adult literacy programme and documented some of the grassroots programmes. She has expertise in review, evaluation, research and advocacy. She is one of the founder members of Sahjani Shiksha Kendra and of Nazariya Foundation. Purnima holds a masters degree in clinical psychology from BHU (UP).

Nandini has been working on issues of gender, sexuality, education and labour for over 5 years. She has previously worked in the areas of advocacy and research, primarily working with workers in informal forms of employment, like sanitation workers, waste pickers and home-based and factory-based workers. She has completed her Bachelors in History from Hindu College, University of Delhi and her Masters in Development and Labour Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is currently pursuing another Masters in Sociology from Indira Gandhi National Open University. 

At Nirantar, she is part of the Learning Resource Centre team and has been involved in training and capacity building of different stakeholders, coordinating and conducting sessions in the institutional courses—Yuva, Yaunikta aur Adhikar and Gender and Education course—developing advocacy notes and carrying out research on issues around gender and sexuality. She is always excited at the idea of having to do research, learn new concepts and write about them.

Other times, she loves to paint and to experiment with different ingredients to cook various dishes (and then eat them!). She is trying hard to bring back her habit of reading books (fiction and nonfiction), which she has not been doing in the recent past.

Neharika is an intersectional feminist, with nearly eight years of experience working in India and South Asia, on various aspects of gender, sexuality, feminist capacity building, prevention of sexual and gender-based violence, rights, access and collectivisation of informal sector women workers. She specialises in capacity building, knowledge management, program management and advocacy. Having worked with non-profits, INGOs, academia, trade unions, women and youth collectives and law enforcement agencies, Neharika's praxis is firmly located within a feminist-intersectional lens, where learning processes should lead to social and political transformation; and women, girls and youth should have the knowledge, skills and tools to lead this transformation. 

At Nirantar, Neharika works as a Senior Trainer-Gender and Sexuality and anchors the work of Nirantar Resource Centre. On a daily basis, she finds herself dabbling with tools of feminist learning; mulling over training sessions with different kinds of participants; working with different institutions to incorporate a gender and sexuality lens within their programming; identifying and synthesising new aspects of institutional knowledge building. Currently, she is very excited about working on masculinities. In the future, she imagines herself somewhere at the intersection of feminist learning, masculinities and sustainable development.

Neharika holds a Master’s degree in Women’s Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University. She is a cat-parent, who loves to cook, buy handloom sarees, read feminist fiction and poetry, and think about how food and food history are the key to climate change solutions.

Shubhika is a reader, writer, cinephile, and social media addict who believes in conversing in memes. When she is not juggling between being an introvert and an extrovert, she can be seen writing feminist stories for children. Shubhika has over 4 years of experience in the development sector and she specialises in capacity building training programmes on gender sensitisation and film making workshops with adolescents and youth. She has directed over 30 short campaign films. Shubhika has been writing for blogs, columns, and newspapers for a decade. She has a special place in her heart for teaching—she has taught Film Making, Theatre, Direction, Screen Play Writing, English, and is currently teaching Punjabi. A linguaphile, Shubhika has a fascination for learning new languages and new words. A trained dancer and actress, she is the happiest when she is acting or directing. Shubhika has done her graduation in English, post-graduation in Film Studies and English, and is currently pursuing her second masters in Psychology. She is a friendly person even if her face suggests otherwise.

With an academic background in History, Social Work, and Women’s Studies, Sohnee is a feminist researcher and aspiring educator. Currently, she leads the communication strategy work at Nirantar and The Third Eye. By combining research with dynamic communication tools, Sohnee imagines an accessible and visual future for text. 

Sohnee was part of the founding team of Economic and Political Weekly’s digital initiative Engage where she was involved in creating new knowledge formats to demystify social sciences research. Before that, her work at the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at TISS, Mumbai involved building and strengthening academic resources in Indian languages. Her fieldwork experiences with marginalised women in rural Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and with forest-dependent communities in Gujarat have shaped her feminist consciousness and desire for collaborative work. Sohnee feels particularly invested in thinking about sites of knowledge production through questions of gendered labour, climate justice, language, and memory. 

As a person with many creative interests, Sohnee considers herself a champion of to-do lists.

Dipta Bhog has worked on gender and education for close to three decades. She has worked as a journalist and women’s rights activist. She co-founded Nirantar, a Centre for Gender and Education in Delhi, and has extensive experience of working on women’s literacy, adult and girls education and rural journalism at the level of program design, implementation, policy and impact. She coordinated a five-state study titled Textbook Regimes that analysed school textbooks from a feminist lens and has worked on writing textbooks for both national and state governments. More recently, her research work focused on women leaders from rural areas and small towns who run non-governmental organizations. She redesigned and presently conducts CREA’s Institute on Feminist leadership and Movement Building in South Asia and East Africa. Dipta Bhog was instrumental in initiating Khabar Lahariya, which started as a newspaper in 2002, and has been involved in training the team of rural women journalists. Her research on young girls and their collectives resulted in Birdbox, an audio-video installation in the shape of a re-engineered bioscope, where you can bear witness to conversations of young girls from Bhopal, Lucknow and Karvi, on desire, love, shame and freedom. Dipta loves walking her dogs and dreaming of living next to the sea.

Madhuri revels in storytelling and uses it as a tool to create dialogues between different communities and generations of women. When she is not recording or taking interviews, she is at her Kahaniyon Ka Adda on YouTube, finding and documenting everyday acts of rebellion. As a learner and a practitioner from the field of humanities, she constantly pushes to critically examine structures around her till she finds a way to talk about it over a cup of coffee.

Nisha Susan is a writer and editor. She grew up in India, Nigeria and Oman and lives in Bangalore. She is the co-founder of two award-winning media companies, The Ladies Finger and Grist Media. She currently writes Cheap Thrills, a column on millennials, time and obsessions for Mint Lounge. She was formerly Features Editor, Tehelka magazine and also commissioning editor for Yahoo! Originals, a longform destination for Yahoo! India. Her non-fiction is focused on culture, gender and politics. Her fiction has been published by n+1, Caravan, Penguin, Zubaan and others and often explores the intimacy and strangeness that the internet has brought to India. Her first collection of short fiction The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook & Other Stories was published in August 2020.

Rizwana is pursuing her Ph.D from Delhi University, and trying to understand the impact of travel in women’s writing. She has been part of Raschakr, a collective that presents public readings from women’s writings. Some of her public readings include Ham Khawateen, Haqeeqat aur Khwab, Mohobbat Zindabad and Har Qatra Toofan. She has worked with CARE as an assistant editor, and her articles have been published in various magazines.

Ruchika is a filmmaker and educator, with an interest in critical and creative pedagogical practices. Her films include Two Autumns in Wyszogród, Every Time You Tell A Story, Malegaon Times and ML 05 B 6055. She also works with sound and text based forms. She has been awarded artistic residencies at Khoj Studio, Delhi, Parco Arte Vivente Experimental Centre for Contemporary Art, Turin and Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski, Warsaw, and is the recipient of Charles Wallace India Trust Short – Term Fellowship, 2016. Ruchika taught in a documentary film program, the Creative Documentary Course (Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communication, New Delhi) from 2015 to 2019, and occasionally teaches film at the Ashoka University, Sonipat. Processes, methods, mediums excite her much more than their end results.

Sadia is a post-graduate in Library and Information Science and joined Nirantar in 2002 as a librarian. Gradually, she started handling all Nirantar publications from design assistance to writing to translations to proofreading. Deeply interested in new and emerging technologies, Sadia shows the team what self-directed learning can do, and is always found between new plugins, software and fonts. She is probably any food delivery app’s favourite customer.

Shabani is a writer and filmmaker, making non-fiction text, sound and images in various media since the year 2000. Her work engages with changing socio-political realities, volatile subcultures and intimate personal histories in an India-in-transition. A graduate in English Literature, Delhi University and post graduate from Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, her feature documentaries include Being Bhaijaan (2014), Gali (2017) and Out of Thin Air (2009). She is an INLAKS Fellow, and worked at The Sundance Institute, Los Angeles and the Documentary Filmmakers Group, London, as part of the fellowship. She was a core editorial team member of Delhi’s First City magazine for over a decade. She has worked extensively with adolescent girls and women in rural India on social disruption through digital storytelling. She is a desktop art collector, and you can contact her for cutting edge screen savers.

Shivam is a photographer and filmmaker, who is constantly trying to make sense of the world from behind the camera. A graduate in Journalism & Mass Communication, IP University and post graduate from Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, Shivam has previously worked with Film Companion and Memesys Culture Lab. You can find him archiving light and everyday frames that he captures on Instagram. He also likes not having to talk about himself in the third person.