A short film. A clock turns once through her first eighteen years while her life is drawn as one line. Before she is born, her mother is still a child. At birth, she is already behind. At three, she cannot catch up. At thirteen, she is pushed out of school. At fifteen, she is married off. At sixteen, her marriage is a trafficker’s cover. At eighteen, she is the next mother, and the clock is back where it began. Unless every one of those years meets an answer. Rights and Entitlements answers the years before birth to five; School of Leadership, five to eighteen; Human Protection, eleven to eighteen; Climate Justice, every year. As each one arrives, her line rises over those years, until every year is answered and the clock keeps turning past eighteen.
This Cycle Doesn’t Break on Its Own.
DEHAT works on every one of her eighteen years at once: with the girl, her family, her village, and the public system that owes her.
That was her first eighteen years. Here is every turn, with its figure, its source, and what answers it.
Risks Don’t Occur in Isolation.
They reinforce each other across generations - unless systems respond in time. There is no fixed order: for any child, the trap can begin at any point, and each risk pulls the next one closer.
A Malnourished, Underage Mother
The girl in this picture is carrying a child before her own body is ready. In Lakhimpur Kheri, 56% of pregnant women are anaemic, already weakened before pregnancy even begins.
Each figure is the worst recorded value across seven districts of Uttar Pradesh’s Indo-Nepal Terai belt - Bahraich, Shravasti, Balrampur, Lakhimpur Kheri, Siddharthnagar, Maharajganj and Kushinagar. Sources: the National Family Health Survey 5 (2019–21) district fact-sheet dataset (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare / International Institute for Population Sciences) for health, nutrition and gender; Unified District Information System for Education Plus district fact sheets for schooling; the Sample Registration System for maternal mortality, which is state-level. Every health figure comes from a single survey round, so the districts are compared like with like. Spousal violence is collected in the National Family Health Survey state module only and is shown as the Uttar Pradesh figure. Four moments - child labour, the poorest wealth bracket, and infant and under-5 mortality - rest on records still awaiting re-verification, and say so. India publishes no official district series for infant or under-5 mortality. Every moment names its district and source.
Vision
A child-centred society where every child realises their rights and lives a safe, dignified, and fulfilling life.
Mission
To work with communities and systems to realise existing power, ensuring children’s rights are recognised, accessed, and upheld in everyday life.
Theory of Change
When communities act and systems respond in convergence, children’s survival, development, protection, and participation are realised and sustained.
When Communities Act, Systems Respond.
Four movements that feed each other. A system that responds changes what a community expects next, and the loop begins again - higher up. Tap a movement to follow it.
Behaviour Change
It starts with individuals and peer groups - Child Parliaments, Youth Groups - recognising a risk and recognising that they have a right against it. That recognition is what turns into organised pressure.
Four Fronts, One Converging Response.
23 Districts. 2 States. One Border.
We work across the eastern Indo-Nepal border in Uttar Pradesh and in Maharashtra - regions bound by a shared structural vulnerability. Tap a district to see the ground.
These are not sites of need alone but of leadership. Three districts - Bahraich, Shravasti and Balrampur - hold our deepest, most intersectional investment; Lakhimpur Kheri joins them from 2026, beginning with child protection. The rest mark programme presence alongside their communities since 2000. Open the atlas for the numbers behind each, and their sources.
“Jurisdiction was not used as a reason to wait.”
Thirty-Four People, a Founder, Two Boards, and a Story That Starts in 1968
This organisation is not a head office with a team posted out to the districts. Most colleagues were recruited in the districts they work in and come from the communities they work with, and the ones who came from outside stayed. Choose a face to see whose account you are reading, or follow the register from a cowshed in Champaran to four districts of work.
The Who We Are page holds all thirty-four colleagues, the founder, the Governing Board, the advisers, the value system and the full register of turning points.
DEHAT Across the Globe
This Isn’t Charity. It’s an Investment in a Society We All Share.
A donor gives and moves on. A partner asks what happened to the money the following year - and we tell them.
Every audited year since 2005–06 backs every rupee asked for here.