What is India Fellow?

India Fellow is a 13-month long fellowship program designed to expose young people to a diverse range of organizations in the social sector. It is a platform to help them understand development work as well as clarify their own paths in life through authentic grassroots experiences, a support network of mentors and advisors and regular tailored training sessions. It is meant to challenge fellows to leave their comfort zones and engage with uncertainly, to question themselves and the particular narratives they come into it with. It is also an opportunity to form meaningful connections with a diverse range of people both within the fellowship and beyond it.

What Impact it makes in the society?

The fellowship model is designed to create a wider impact as well – both directly and indirectly. It directly provides dynamic young individuals who bring a fresh – and independent – perspective to the organizations they work in. It also indirectly channels expertise into these organizations through the fellows by way of the training sessions and mentorship they receive from eminent people within the sector. The alumni who pass out of the program leave with a richer experience of the sector than a typical year of conventional work in it would have provided. They also leave with a clearer idea of their place in the development puzzle and, wherever they decide to move next, they take with them the classes, connections and character they developed in the fellowship.

Cohort 2014

About Travel Workshop

The travel workshop is a fellowship module designed to shake up the fellows from their respective assignments as they draw to a close and to give them a fresh perspective by exposing them to a new environment with its own set of challenges and opportunities. They get to see how the various organizations present in that setting have adapted to those challenges and made that environment their own. Where the fellowship period is meant to foster a depth of understanding of a particular region and development topic, the travelling workshop serves to augment that with a brief dose of a wide breadth of perspectives by exposing fellows to the whole range of organizations working in an area none of them have been exposed to yet. The fellows get to visit and interact with the people of those institutions in order to learn from them, besides also forming some valuable connections before ending their fellowship period. The workshop is not meant to be one-sided, however. The fellows are also expected to work on a problem(s) for the organizations present there, bringing the benefit of both an outsiders’ perspective and their learning’s from their year of work in the field. This year the location chosen for the travel workshop is Ladakh. This was chosen by the fellows themselves from among alternatives provided by the fellowship team based on both feasibility and on having interesting organizations to explore and learn from.

Partner NGO's

Alumni

Ashwini Krishna

from the 2012 cohort is working for her enterprise Nativefolks in Divar Island, Goa. She promotes Craft Tourism in the beach state made by the locals.

Saurabh Mehta

from 2010 cohort is working on providing clean energy solutions to underserved communities of India and Nepal for the last four years. He has been instrumental in setting up micro level energy enterprises in Odisha, UP and Bihar that sell clean energy products and services to rural communities, has worked with leading enterprises in the energy access space and also started a few initiatives on his own.

Field stories

Rohini

our in house travel writer, travels all over India capturing things about different NGOs. She was brave enough to go to Muzaffarnagar alone too. You can read more about her experience here, http://indiafellow.wordpress.com/2014/10/12/ruh-kay-liyay-khoj-muzaffarnagars-cry/

Nishant

is living in the remote area of Uttarakhand. Life is not all that easy for him on the mountains in the cold and rough terrain. To know more, http://indiafellow.wordpress.com/2014/08/19/nishant-consistency-of-jams-and-projects/

Abhimanyu

lives in a remote village near Chennai. He interacts a lot with school kids and enjoys doing that. To know more, http://indiafellow.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/kasuva-to-mars/

Vinay

is working with migrant laborers. He has a thing of randomly meeting people and striking a conversation with them. He has a good knack of describing about them. Read on to know more , http://indiafellow.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/red-teeth-high-cheek-bones-happy-consumers/