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Case Study

Chaupal

Rs. 4,344,800 awarded over two years to Chaupal Gramin Vikas Prashikshan Evam Shodh Sansthan

Chaupal IN PAGE

Chhattisgarh is one of the poorest states in India, with more than 1.9m families in the state recognised as below the poverty line and a further 1.7m families classed as ‘poor’. The situation is worse in blocks with a predominantly tribal population, where there is chronic hunger and food insecurity, borne particularly by women and children.

Government schemes for the poor are often difficult to access for communities who have been traditionally suppressed. Support in the form of information and guidance and empowering them to demand their rights are critical to improving the situation.

Chaupal (which in Hindi means ‘the common meeting place in a village’) was set up by a group of tribal activists and young people with backgrounds in social work and rural management. The organisation has been working to strengthen local community-based mechanisms to ensure the effective delivery of state-run food and health services. It also supports women’s, disability and tribal groups to fight for their rights and entitlements, and works to strengthen local government institutions. Apart from grassroots action, Chaupal has promoted state-level campaigns and advocacy initiatives on nutrition, livelihood and health.

Our support for Chaupal is to build the capacity of health and nutrition surveillance committees in monitoring food and health entitlement in 200 villages. Though village-level monitoring committees have been regularly monitoring food and health entitlements, through this project they have been trained to monitor and intervene on critical impact indicators such as mortality, morbidity and nutrition. Chaupal has had considerable success in improving the coverage, access and quality of state-run health and food programmes. Our grant will help make these improvements more sustainable through community monitoring of provision of health and food entitlements, and enabling tribal communities to access grievance redressal services and negotiate for entitlements from village to district level. Building capacities of community organisations in research and documentation will add critical value to these efforts.