Justine Hardy

DRAG is not a pretty name – an acronym as with so many things Indian – but it is deliberately unglamorous. We are not trying to do a glossy sell. We are grass roots, trying to empower the disenfranchised and dispossessed.

The Development and Research Action Group started out working among the Adivasi tribal people in Maharashtra in 1988, a people whose children were not being allowed into government schools, and whose women were routinely abused. Now it is Delhi-based and working in three major directions: slum education of both children and adults; rural regeneration through the promotion to local farmers of a return to organic farming methods; as an action group lobbying on issues directly linked to the slums in which we operate.

The education system at DRAG is based on a method pioneered by the courageous South American educator, Paulo Freire. This works on the belief that the best way to educate those forced into slum conditions is to use teachers from within their own communities; people they can relate to who do not seem to be distant figures of authority in positions that they cannot possibly aspire to.

We also believe in educating the parents of the children in our schools, as one of the perennial problems of slum education is that illiterate parents feel threatened by the literacy of their children. They believe that education will take their children away from them, and for this reason they often stop them from going to school. By offering education to the parents as well we try to remove this obstacle. It is humbling for us to be able to watch parents learning to read at the same time as their children. Sometimes the children help their parents out with their studies, and this too is quite something to witness.

One of the several funding problems that we face is that of trying to constantly retrain our teachers so that they can continue to find new ways of engaging both children and adults. We are trying to set up on ongoing training programmes that will inspire them to use innovative methods of teaching, methods that will excite children, and their parents alike, about education.

Those who have given us money have given it in the knowledge that we spend all of it on the work. We do not have office overheads, we do not pay salaries to our directors or ourselves. We do not take expenses. The money goes to the school, the women’s centres and the farm.

Of the books that I have written based in India two have large sections about DRAG, Scoop-Wallah and Goat, both published by John Murray, and Scoop-Wallah has recently been republished by Summersdale Publishers. In Scoop-Wallah I was sent by the Indian newspaper that I was working for, The Indian Express, to write a piece about the upsurge in organic farming. This was when I met Gautam Vohra and became involved with DRAG. How could I not have been? It was the first NGO I had ever come across that had a sense of humour about itself, to the extent that it’s initials made fun of the whole acronym game of India.

The other book, Goat, is about starting The Goat Company, buying pashminas from weavers in Kashmir, where I was working as a journalist covering the long conflict there, and selling them among the ladies who lunch in London, the proceeds looping directly back to DRAG in Delhi. It is a dry look at the journey of luxury goods from where they are made to the end user.

If might be interested in donating to DRAG it is easily done through the GiveIndia website (www.giveindia.org). This allows single donations to cover things such as the monthly running costs of a class of 30 children, or the monthly salary of one of the teachers on our women’s courses.