National Convening Team

Prafulla Samantara is a noted Orissan environmentalist and President of Lok Shakti Abhijan Odisha Chapter. His vision is to replace the present economic model of gross consumerism and greed with an alternative development model that is sustainable. Prafulla, through his work with various democratic people’s movements, has struggled to protect the natural environment and the human rights and right to life of the people of Odisha and of India as a whole.

He has been involved in mobilising people and turning public opinion against the destruction of India’s forest, agricultural land and water resources. He has also directly tackled big corporations who are plundering India’s natural resources, being the first petitioner to the Supreme Court of India against the Vedanta Company.

As an activist Sri Samntara works as a coordinator, uniting various people’s organizations to support movements struggling to protect land and water from destruction and pollution by various corporate projects such as: Tata Steel factory in Kalinga Nagar, POSCO Steel project in Jagatsingpur, Birlas in Maliparbat, Arcelor Mittal Steel project and Sterlite steel project in Keonjhar. As well as supporting people’s protests against the pollution caused by thermal power plants and sponge iron industries in Orissa. Prafulla was an active participant in a successful movement in Gopalpur against Tata steel plant that saved the Rusukuliya river and Pipalpanka reserve forest.

Roma

Roma is a member of the National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers of India and works for the Kaimur Kshetra Mahila Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Samiti (KKMMKSS) which is a land rights movement in Uttar Pradesh. The KKMMKSS mobilizes Adivasi and Dalit communities to reclaim their traditional rights to live and work on forest lands. Roma, along with other KKMMMSS activists, has been at the forefront of protests and local actions against illegal mining, tree-felling and the loot of forest resources by a criminal nexus of upper-caste landowners, private corporations and forest officials. This work is increasingly important as reprisals by forward castes and the Forest Department have increased – in the last three years more than 3500 criminal cases have been filed against Adivasis - many of them under Goonda Acts.

D. Gabriele, (Tamil Nadu)

Gabriele Dietrich was born in post World War Two West Germany. An academic and member of the democratic student’s movement in Europe she moved to India to explore the interplay between its various religious and cultural traditions with socialist and Marxist options which fed into India’s freedom and democratic struggle. She soon moved to Madurai to work in CIS and put down strong roots in Tamil Nadu, becoming an Indian citizen. From the beginning of her time in India the focus of her life as an academic and an activist has been on supporting democratic people’s movements and women’s movements and working with and for the Adavasi and Dalit communities. with her adopted compatriots she has struggled against anti democratic forces, communalism, neo-liberalism and the politics of greed.

P. Chennaiah (Andhra Pradesh),

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Anand Mazgaonkar

Anand Mazgaonkar is a senior activist with the Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (PSS) and National Alliance of Peoples Movements (NAPM) in Gujarat. Anand started his work in the tribal village of Kantidra 65 km downstream from the Sardar Sarvoar Dam and stayed there until 1999. By this time, he had started taking on a larger role on issues such as tribal rights, economic policies and communal harmony. So he decided to move to Rajpipla from where travel and communications were easier. Now Anand is deeply involved with NAPM in Gujarat. He was in the organizational team for the fish workers campaign in Umbergaon and the agitation against Bhaskar Save's brutal killing at the hands of the police. Through the PSS he played a very active role at the Gujarat earthquake and riot relief.

Akhil Gogoi

Akhil Gogoi is a peasant leader and a Right to Information (RTI) activist from Assam. He is the general secretary of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samity (KMSS), a peasant organisation he formed in 2005. KMSS enjoys huge popularity in rural areas of Assam and launches agitations on patently non-exotic issues such as Public Distribution System thefts, construction of big dams in fragile seismic territories, non-implementation of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Rights to Information Act and so on. KMSS is not close to any political party and does not swear by any tribal, linguistic or religious group, something of a miracle in a region almost balkanised by identity politics. Akhil was awarded the Shanmugam Manjunath Integrity Award in 2008 for his relentless fight against corruption and attempts to bring transparency in the functioning of government. In 2010, he was awarded the national RTI Award by Public Cause Research Foundation (PCRF) fo his role in exposing the 1.25 crore rupees scam in Sampoorna Gram Rozgar Yojna (SGRY) and 60 lakh rupees scam in the Indira Awas Yojana (IAY) in Golaghat district of Assam by using the RTI Act.

Dayamani Barla

Dayamani Barla is an indigenous tribal journalist and activist from the Indian state of Jharkhand. She is the National President of Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF). Dayamani is known for her activism in opposing Arcelor Mittal's steel plant that tribal activists say would displace forty villages. Barla work in a popular Hindi newspaper called Prabhat Khabar attempts to bring attention to a myriad of problems facing the Munda people and other tribal communities in the Jharkhand region. Earlier her journalistic work was supported by a small fellowship from the Association for India's Development (AID). Barla won the Counter Media Award for Rural Journalism in 2000 and the National Foundation for India Fellowship in 2004.

Sr. Celia

Sr. Celia founded The Domestic Workers Union in Bangalore in 2003. She had been working with domestic workers for several years and realised that only through unionisation will true empowerment come to them. The union was formed so that domestic workers could support each other and represent themselves. A pivotal point in the union’s development was the successful case brought by one Papamma. Papamma is a woman in her later years who had been providing full time domestic help to a middle class Bangalori family for years. Her wages were a pittance and after an short illness she was dismissed abruptly with no provision for retirement. With the help of the union she took her employer to court and got financial redress. Her slow legal battle has also paved way for demands for better wages and treatment of domestic help in and around Bangalore.

Geo Jose, NAPM Kerala

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Bhupendra Singh Rawat

Bhupendra Singh Rawat is a farmer leader who was very active in the movement for the creation of a separate state of Uttarakhand. He has been heavily involved in the agitation against various land grabs from farmers perpetrated by development mafias in the National Capital Region over the last few years. He has also been very actively fighting evictions in Delhi’s slums.

Ulka Mahajan

Ulka Mahajan is a Core Activist for Sarvahara Jan Andolan (SJA). SJA, based in Raigad District, Maharashtra, is a organisation of the Katkari tribals and other oppressed people. SJA was formed in 1990 to fight for the rights of the Katkari tribals. Initial mobilisation took place on the issue of dali land - land on the hill slopes. This land has been wrongly classified as 'forest land' and the tribals labelled as encroaches. SJA collective efforts at pressurising the government led to the restoration of this land to the tribals. Over the years SJA have taken up other land issues like that of land alienation, forest right issues, labour issues, atrocities against tribals, issue of agriculture and food security through systems like the Public Distribution System (PDS). In this process, SJA have been successful at building up the collective strength of the Katkari tribals and other oppressed sections.

Suniti S. R., NAPM Maharashtra

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Sandeep Pandey

After completing his education in the US he moved back to India, to start teaching at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1992, later he founded a registered organization named Asha Trust which has several chapters across India. His team has launched a people's group named Asha Parivar in 2008 that focuses on strengthening democracy at the grassroots.

Sandeep Pandey's work at Asha Parivar is focused on Right to Information and other forms of citizen participation in removing corruption and improving the efficiency of governance. He leads National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), the largest network of grassroots people's movements in India.

Medha Patkar

Medha Patkar, was born on 1 December 1954 in Bombay. After earning an M.A. in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, she worked with voluntary organizations in Bombay slums for 5 years as well as tribal districts of North-East Gujarat for 2 years. She left her position on the faculty of Tata Institute of Social Sciences as well as her unfinished Ph.D. when she became immersed in the tribal and peasant communities in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat eventually organized as the Narmada Bachao Andolan. The Narmada Bachao Andolan began as a fight for information about the Narmada Valley Development Projects and continued as a fight for just rehabilitation for the lakhs of people to be ousted by the Sardar Sarovar Dam and other large dams along the Narmada river. Eventually when it became clear that the magnitude of the project precluded accurate assessment of damages and losses, and that rehabilitation was impossible, the movement challenged the very basis of the project and questioned its claim to "development." Medha founded the National Alliance of People's Movements to facilitate unity and provide strength to people’s movements in India fighting against all sorts of oppression, to question the current ‘development’ model and to work towards a just alternative.

Aruna Roy

She is an Indian political and social activist who founded and heads the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathana ("Workers and Peasants Strength Union"). Aruna served as a civil servant in the Indian Administrative Service between 1968 and 1974. She then resigned to devote her time to social and political campaigns. She joined the Social Work and Research Center (SWRC) in Tilonia, Rajasthan. In 1983 Aruna dissociated herself from the SWRC. She is best known as a prominent leader of the Right to Information movement, which led to the enactment of the Right to Information Act in 2005. She has also remained a member of the National Advisory Council. In 2000, she received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership. In 2010 she received the prestigious Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award for Excellence in Public Administration, Academia and Management.

Ram Bhau Patil

Ram Bhau Patil is the General Secretary of the National Fishworkers Forum (NFF). The NFF, established in 1978, is a national federation of trade unions and organizations of fishworkers in India. The formation of NFF was a direct result of fishworker struggles happening along the coast of India during the late 1970s, subsequent to the conflict between the newly introduced large-scale mechanized trawlers and the small-scale traditional and artisanal fishworkers. The forum has since then continued to represent the grievances and demands of artisanal fishworkers and has grown in strength and influence at the state and national level. Currently NFF is a member of National Fisheries Advisory Board of India, National Coastal Zone Management Authority and o on. NFF is now actively campaigning against the proposed Coastal Zone Management Notification based on the recommendation of the Swaminathan Committee, which is to replace the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification of 1991. NFF is also actively campaigning for a national-level legislation to comply with the International Labour Organisation Convention on Work in the Fishing Sector 2007.

National Organisers

Madhuresh Kumar

Madhuresh Kumar is one of three National Organizers for NAPM; he is based out of the NAPM Delhi Coordination Office. He provides central support for campaigns and movements across the country and coordinates activities of members of the alliance. He is also responsible for research and fact-finding, policy advocacy, program planning, communications and logistics. In 2011, in his role as NAPM National Organizer, Madhuresh has been involved in various campaigns such as for the repeal of the Land Acquisition Act 1894 and enactment of comprehensive national legislation on development planning; anti nuclear power, anti police & state sponsored brutality, anti AFSPA, strengthen Food Security Bill, slum dwellers right to housing and Anti-Corruption.

Rajendra Ravi (Delhi)

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Mukta Srivastava (Maharashtra)

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