Organizing Workers For A Democratic & Secular India

Association For Indiaâ€™s Development, MIT & Boston Chapters,

Alliance For Secular & Democratic South Asia, TwoCircles.Net and

Massachusetts Global Action

present

Organizing Workers for a Democratic & Secular India

Challenging Power Structures in Rural Bihar

WHEN: Sunday, June 19, 2016 (4-6pm)

WHERE: MIT | Bld. 4, Rm 231

Facebook Event: Join us and Share the event

We wants to invite you to this talk by our partners Jeevan Saathi Kamayani Swami and Ashish Ranjan. Kamayani and Ashish work full time on labor issues such as temporary/seasonal migration, minimum wage, employment guarantee & pensions for the elderly. They are based in Bihar where Kamayani helped form a trade union of unorganized sector rural workers Jan Jagaran Shakti Sangathan (http://www.jjabihar.org).

About Kamayani: https://conference.aidindia.org/frontpage/speakers/kamayani-swami-work-in-bihar

About Ashish: https://conference.aidindia.org/frontpage/speakers/ashish-ranjan

About JJSS:

Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan grew from an intensive survey on NREGA initiated by the G.B. Pant Institute (Allahabad University) and Prof. Jean Dreze, in May, 2008. The survey focused on assessing ground realities of NREGA in two districts of Bihar, namely Kaimur and Araria. The survey also had related campaign activities like awareness generation, checking if transparency safeguards were in place to check corruption and documentation of irregularities and cases of corruption.

The survey showed high levels of lack of awareness about NREGA program. As part of checking the transparency safeguards the survey team also did muster roll verification exercise (kind of social audit) and found a leakage of about 50% in wages that have been paid.