We started from Mumbai on the evening of 24th December on our Jagriti Yatra Train, and we are going towards Kanyakumari!
Confusing? It was for me as well. Jagriti Yatra is this fantastic two-week journey through various parts of India. The trip engages the young Yatris (passengers) or participants to develop social entrepreneurship ventures in hinterland India or middle India, as we call it Yatra (journey).
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Jagriti Yatra has gone digital and has engaged many more hundreds of participants than they were able to do in their physical train journey. I talked about this change in the mode in my article on fellowships earlier this year.
I first got to know about Jagriti Yatra in 2009 through one of my first corporate mentors, Mr Vidyadhar Prabhudesai, who himself is a globally awarded change maker. I was fascinated by it.
For an Indian engineering graduate, such things in 2009 were still unknown and mysterious. I couldn’t apply that year. I got selected as a Yatri in 2013-14 but couldn’t make it to the Yatra again as I fell sick.
This year, I decided to give myself a gift on my birthday. So I decided to take out time during the last week of December and the first week of January 2022. Not to go for a vacation or some party marathon and instead do the Yatra!
I sent the application on May’s last day of the first round of applications. In August, I received the selection confirmation as a facilitator on the Jagriti Digital Yatra (JDY) 2021-22, to be held between 24th December and 7th January. A facilitator guides other younger Yatris, students and working professionals here to learn, create ventures and build India.
I am so proud to be a facilitator out of some 100 other facilitators participating from India and abroad. There are some 800 participants who we shall be guiding and empowering during the next two weeks.
The facilitators and participants have been divided into groups according to skills and passions, and I am focusing on education. In my group, I am joined by another facilitator, an amazing social worker from Mumbai, Ms Madhavi Shah, who is currently working as a program coordinator with DigiSwasthya Foundation.
She has spent two decades working with people with intellectual disabilities and, more recently, with paediatric cancer patients before joining DigiSwasthya. She is also an artist who would like to sell her art to raise funds for a social cause. She applied as a participant but was promoted to be a facilitator.
My cohort’s participants come from different parts of India and have different backgrounds, age groups, education, passions, life stories and motivations. It is incredible to see people from such diverse stories be together on one forum. To think that we will be working and learning together is such a beautiful testimony for JDY and the Jagriti Yatra team.
I will have the privilege to mentor Jyoti from Jaunpur, working towards up-skilling young engineering diploma students. Pavan from Yavatmal district, currently pursuing Masters in Social Work from TISS Hyderabad and pursuing the Gandhi Fellowship. He wants to create ventures to change the farmer suicide tragedies in the region, as he lost his uncle in a similar incident.
Nithish, a recently graduated architect from Tamil Nadu, wants to design public spaces better and work towards protecting wetlands near Chennai. And Yashica from Delhi, Monanki from Mumbai, Nayan from Ratnagiri, Vaibhav from Yavatmal, Dr Darshana from Rajkot and so on.
I want to highlight one co-Yatri in every journal entry I do. Right now, we’re just absorbing the beautiful sessions conducted by the Mumbai Dabbawalas, Sanjeev Bikhchandani (Founder and vice-chairman, Info Edge), V C Sehgal (Chairman and Co-founder of Motherson Group), Dr Vanita Vishwanath (Board Member JY), Shashank Mani (founder of JY), Ashutosh Kumar (CEO of JY), Chinmay Vadnere (COO of JY) and just interacting with other Yatris.
See you in the following journal!