This NGO is sending young girls riding towards equality and a better future

“Everyone is speaking up about discrimination against women now. I started doing this 18 years ago. It was difficult to get people’s support back then,” says Dr. Mamatha Raghuveer, the founder of Tharuni Swecha, a non-profit organization that works towards the welfare of young girls.

Tharuni Swecha discovered that young girls in Telangana would refrain from going to school due to the rampant eve-teasing in the area. The lack of safety was pushing families to make their girls stay at home.

The NGO initiated a project to provide these young girls with bicycles that would help them reach school faster and with more safety. Their fundraiser on Impact Guru raised Rs. 2,49,000 and was able to provide bicycles to over 150 young girls in the area.

“We started with very small steps. We began with the maid in our home, who used to bring her daughter to work. We persuaded her to enroll her in a school and arranged funds for her education.” — Dr. Mamatha and her mother, the co-founder of the organization.

What began as a thoughtful gesture at home, expanded into a change-making organisation.

For sometime Mamatha worked with the World Bank as an Assistant Program Officer, on issues regarding adolescent girls in India which brought to her attention the dismal state of education amongst underprivileged girls and the high rate of child marriage.

“The World Bank program which focused on the education and welfare of young girls showed outstanding results. We witnessed the drastic transformation of these girls and that’s when I realized that we need to work more extensively on such projects. Soon after, I visited a village and saw increasing cases of child marriage and child labor. I adopted some girls from the village and enrolled them in a government school,” recalled Mamatha.

And since then, there has been no looking back for her. She started Tharuni Swecha , that has been active for 18 years and has been instrumental in stopping countless child marriages, providing education to girls, conducting campaigns to spread awareness about child labor, sexual abuse and rape, discrimination against women etc.

Mamatha, who pursued her PHD in biological sciences and was preparing for the civil services exam, assuming she would start a new journey, found her calling with Tharuni Swecha and took up studying law, which would help her in filing public interest litigations and understanding more about the legal procedures that are involved in social cases.

“My father was in the judiciary and was supporting me (with legal matters). But at the same time I knew that if I know the law, I can do better. I did my degree in law in 2008 and now I am a general advocate. I don’t practice law full-time but I do a lot of legal counselings. I used to work with the Human Rights Commission and law helped me in my work. Lawyers and advocates can question the government, nobody else can,” said Mamatha.

Over the years, Mamatha’s work has become more effective.

“One small message and I can stop a child marriage today. Earlier I had to go approach people and convince them for hours to support us. Now that we have brought about a lot of structural changes, these things are taken care of,” she said.

The amount collected will be put to use soon.

“We got delayed because kids are enjoying their summer vacations. We are planning a big program under which we will be giving 150 bicycles to girls from three rural villages in Telangana. We will be inviting all the donors. We are in the process of connecting with them and will be conducting the program in the first week of June.”

Ask Dr. Mamatha about her crowdfunding experience with Impact Guru, and she cheerfully adds, “The team members are really polite. We were sceptical about raising money. But once we did, it gave us a lot of confidence.”

“For getting grants we have to write proposals, and you don’t even know whether you will end up getting it or not. But crowdfunding was more of a certainty — that really helped us.”

The NGO is planning many more projects ahead. “We are working towards a campaign on gender sensitization of primary school boys. We want these boys to know that there should not be any discrimination between young boys and girls. We should educate them while they are young, something that happens in other countries but not in India.”

You can see and support Tharuni Swecha’s work here.

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