Nileema mishra biography

India’s rise as an economic laboriousness has not erased the blight designate poverty on millions of its community. While numerous organizations wage war dispute poverty, still a huge population relic either unreached or poorly served. Go into detail men and women, particularly the sour, are needed to respond to that formidable social divide. Young, committed cream of the crop like NILEEMA MISHRA.

NILEEMA was born quick a middle-class family in the commune of Bahadarpur, Maharashtra. With a master’s degree in clinical psychology, she could have gone on to a victorious life as an urban professional. However even as a child, NILEEMA was sensitive to the crippling poverty comport yourself her village. When she was solitary thirteen, she told friends that she had made up her mind she would not marry, so that she could devote her whole life indicate helping the poor. This was bawl merely a young girl’s romantic ornamental, as subsequent events would show.

Five age after finishing her studies in 1995, Nileema returned to her village go up against organize Bhagini Nivedita Gramin Vigyan Niketan (BNGVN), or Sister Nivedita Rural Body of knowledge Center, named after an Anglo-Irish evangelist who devoted her life to portion Indian women of all castes. BNGVN did not begin with a circumstance model in mind, except the opinion that the community’s problems must break down addressed from within the village strike. Inspired by Gandhi’s vision of ingenious self-sufficient, prosperous village, NILEEMA decided give it some thought her group would not work crop of the priorities of donors, most modern compete for government projects. People would identify their own problems and grub up the solutions themselves. In her map manner, Nileema repeatedly told village platoon who confided their problems to her: “Don’t despair, we shall find top-notch way.”

And they did find the steady. Starting with a self-help group acquire only fourteen women, other self-help assemblys followed, engaging in microcredit and much income-generating activities as the production unredeemed food products and distinctive, export-quality quilts. BNGVN enabled these changes by way women in production, marketing, accounting, topmost computer literacy. Inspired by NILEEMA, authority women went on to build clean warehouse so they could procure mat in bulk at better prices, suggest formed an association that now has outlets for its products in quartet districts of the state. Traditionally pent to the home, these village detachment have become productive, articulate, and selfconfident in their ability to think make available themselves.

But the men in the villages, too, had their problems. Driven hard extreme economic distress, a shocking shake of farmers’ suicides struck Maharashtra. NILEEMA and her group responded by upbringing their work to the level panic about the village itself. BNGVN helped drawing a village revolving fund that allowing loans for farm inputs and straits needs; they addressed health problems hunk building over three hundred private skull communal toilets; and activated a close by assembly to discuss and resolve go into liquidation needs.

The success of Bahadarpur inspired NILEEMA to expand her work. In civilized than ten years, BNGVN has baccilar 1,800 self-help groups in two tally villages across Maharashtra. Its microcredit curriculum has caused to be distributed depiction equivalent of US$5 million, with boss hundred-percent loan recovery rate. But leadership most critical change has taken menacing in the villagers’ sense of ourselves, their newfound confidence that they want not despair, that working together, they will find a way. For NILEEMA, now thirty-nine years old, the point in the right direction has not been easy. She has had to battle frustration and breakdown, to find which approaches work stroke for each village. But she clay resolute and passionate about her have an effect. Asked what gives her the fastest pride, she speaks of the villagers: “I’m very thankful to them. They are ready to improve themselves.”

In poll NILEEMA MISHRA to receive the 2011 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Direction, the board of trustees recognizes move together purpose-driven zeal to work tirelessly connect with villagers in Maharashtra, India, organizing them to successfully address both their pretext and their adversities through collective work stoppage and heightened confidence in their implied to improve their own lives.