Mumbai’s Barefoot Researchers
Available in English and Marathi
The Barefoot Research is an in-house publication that comes out of a sustained conversation over six years at PUKAR about the relationship between documentation, research and citizenship in today’s “mega cities”.
Barefoot Researchers is a term based upon the famous Barefoot Doctors of China, people who were minimally trained yet provided the most critical, at times, life saving services to those who could not access it, they being at the margins of society.
PUKAR’s Barefoot Researchers, a term coined by Arjun Appadurai, represent similar cadre of youth who are trained over a period of a year to do basic social science research. With this knowledge, they explore many aspects of their own lives, families, neighbourhoods and produce new knowledge about the city which is anchored in their living experiences.
This publication is the first opportunity for the general reader to learn from this experience and help to make it an even stronger experiment in democratizing the means of knowledge.
Paach Prashna Shambhar Uttare
This book documents the experiences of the Tarunaee initiative undertaken by PUKAR in 2004-05 for the youth of Mumbai.
From her vantage point as the coordinator of this initiative, Vandana Khare writes about the five research projects – the themes, the end products and more importantly, the process itself – from looking for partner organizations who would participate in this experimental initiative, to helping the participants arrive at research questions, to organizing various workshops to help them achieve their goals.
Tok, written in Marathi, is a must-read for anhe boyone who wishes to learn about running a research-action project in the urban context.
Lokyaspeeth
This book describes the successful interaction between youth, local policy makers and the community which took place in ward 202 and ward 203 of Mumbai in 2007-2008.
This project was born out of the prevalent political system where the creation of second, third tire leadership is not fostered.
This attitude combined with that of youth who seem to carry a large spectrum of negativity towards policymakers and politician has led to a continuous crisis of younger leadership in the country.
This project created a forum where the local community, the PUKAR Youth Fellows and the policy makers came together for an open dialogue at multiple places and at multiple events. This gave the opportunity to the community to present their difficulties to the policymakers and allowed the youth to learn about the difficulties encountered in governance. In order to disseminate this interaction to all members of the community and to overcome the language and low literacy barriers, many of the findings of the research were shown in form of combination of quantitative pie charts and bar graphs combined with illustrations depicting members of the community.
