Vidhayak Sansad (VS)
Watch a video (Flash) of Vivek Pandit (Vidhayak Sansad founder) speaking at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, VA.
Millions of bonded child and adult laborers in India, primarily tribals (so-called Untouchables) and Dalits, work in agriculture, brick kilns, construction, carpet weaving and other industries and are deprived of their rights. Established in 1979, Vidhayak Sansad has helped former bonded laborers establish a union representing over 100,000 people.Vidhayak Sansad focuses on organizing deprived and landless sections of society and training them to struggle for their rights. Vidhayak Sansad has a proven record of developing its grassroots base and using its base to promote policy reform in support of human rights.
In India, various state and national government programs exist which are intended to provide economic support to the poor. However, rampant corruption, discrimination and complex bureaucratic procedures prevent most subsidies from reaching the poor, such as tribals, Dalits, women and children. These communities experience pervasive human rights abuses and require legal aid and training on how to mobilize their villages and demand their rights. Vidhayak Sansad pursues legal cases in human rights abuses, assists families in accessing government support programs to obtain housing, food rations, electricity, roads, water and sanitation, and helps workers form unions.
In the last twenty-five years Vidhayak Sansad has made a critical difference in people’s lives. They compelled the national government to outlaw child labor in brick kilns and promote the enforcement of this law. The number of children in Maharashtra state working in brick kilns declines steadily year after year. Vidhayak Sansad also runs schools for poor and migrant children and has persuaded the government to partially fund these schools and to fund additional schools.
Vidhayak Sansad has been successful in releasing and rehabilitating approximately 1500 bonded laborers in its district and works to ensure the effective implementation of the Bonded Labor System Abolition Act which prevents the forcible eviction of tribals from forest land and awards land rights to tribal families.
Vidhayak Sansad has succeeded in stopping forcible eviction of approx. 10,000 tribal families from forest and has regularized more than 10,000 tribal plots in forest. Vidhayak Sansad’s stand on the issue of tribal’s right to forestland has been vindicated by Indian Parliament’s Act—The Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006.
Vidhayak Sansad worked with the government to provide over 6,000 farmers support to cultivate jatropha on these plots. Jatropha is a renewable plant used in bio-fuels that can provide farmers with sustainable livelihoods.
Last updated on Thursday, June 25, 2009.
