Meet the team

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Archana has more than 20 years of work experience in the areas of gender and education. At Nirantar, along with steering 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 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 these researches into training and learning material for facilitators, field-based activists and organisations.

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

Santosh has nearly three decades of experience on 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 1990s. She has helped build 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. Santosh moved on to head the capacity building division of the Community Development Finance network Sa-dhan, where she focused on the smaller institutions working with rural women. After a brief stint with developing insurance products for the poor at the Micro Insurance Academy, Santosh became the National Consultant for the Mahila Samakhya Programme, GoI's flag-ship programme on women’s empowerment through education. Currently, at Nirantar, Santosh is a Senior Facilitator, anchoring institutional strengthening of women’s federations in Bihar. She holds a Master's degree in Political Science from University of Rajasthan.

Prarthana has been working in the development sector for the last 10 years on issues of quality education, inclusion, curriculum development, gender equity, and teachers' training. Before joining Nirantar in 2015, she was associated with Bodh Shiksha Samiti, Jaipur and UNICEF Jharkhand. Under Nirantar's Young People's Education programme, she works with the PACE and Tarang teams in partnership with different community-based organisations in Delhi and UP to provide access to alternative quality education for school girls. She is actively involved in developing learning resource materials, along with building capacities of the facilitators in inclusive education, pedagogy, and gender from the lens of marginalised communities. Poetry and music are close to her heart and she loves journalling about her field experiences. Prarthana completed her MSW from Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi.

Purnima is a feminist and women's rights activist. She has been working with Nirantar Trust since 1998 and has been involved in various aspects of training and capacity building of community-based organisations working on women's literacy. She has an expertise in developing teaching-learning material for adult education programmes, review and evaluation of programmes, and research and advocacy. Purnima is one of the founding members of Sahjani Shiksha Kendra and Nazariya Foundation. She has a masters degree in clinical psychology from BHU (UP). 

Neharika is an intersectional feminist, with nearly eight years of experience of 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, programme management and advocacy. At Nirantar, Neharika anchors the work of Learning Resource Centre. In the future, she imagines herself working at the intersections 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 an important key to climate change solutions. 

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.