Anjali Borhade

Founder

Anjali Borhade is the founder of Disha Foundation (2002)[1], an Indian non-profit working on livelihood and tribal welfare from Nashik.

Anjali Borhade is an Indian public health researcher and practitioner and the founder president of Disha Foundation, a non-governmental organisation based in Nashik, Maharashtra, that works on the health, safety and livelihoods of internal migrant workers in India.

Disha Foundation was formed in 2002 with the aim of making labour migration safer and more productive. Beginning with sexual and reproductive health services for seasonal migrants, its work expanded to cover health care, education and social services for inter-state and intra-state migrant and tribal populations.

Early life and education

Borhade holds a bachelor's degree in English literature and a master's degree in social work from the University of Pune, and a diploma in labour law and labour welfare. She later took a Master of Public Health in international health at Tulane University in the United States.

She completed a DPhil in population health at the University of Oxford, where she was based at the Nuffield Department of Population Health and Wolfson College and was supervised by Premila Webster and Paul Aveyard. Her doctoral research examined the health consequences of rural-to-urban migration in India and compared migration and health policy across low-, middle- and high-income countries. She held a Wellcome Trust scholarship and support from the PHFI-UK Universities Consortium.

Career

Borhade has worked for more than two decades on research, programme implementation and advocacy relating to migration, urbanisation, urban health and livelihoods. She has been a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Public Health, Delhi, part of the Public Health Foundation of India.

She has served as an adviser to the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes on tribal livelihoods and migration, and as a regional adviser to the World Health Organization's South-East Asia Regional Office, providing technical support for the drafting of global and regional strategies and action plans on the health of migrants and refugees. She has also provided technical support to state and national governments in India and to United Nations agencies including UNIFEM, UNICEF, UNESCO and UNDP.

Her published work includes a study on addressing the needs of seasonal migrants in Nashik, Maharashtra.[2][3][4][5]

Disha Foundation

Disha Foundation is a Nashik-based nonprofit, founded in 2002, working for the sustainable development of marginalised migrant and tribal communities. It runs Migration Resource Centres across Maharashtra, Goa and Delhi NCR that have reached over 800,000 migrant workers, alongside the Shram Shakti portal tracking tribal migrant workers and a legal-empowerment platform addressing wage grievances with India's National Legal Services Authority.

Disha Foundation reports the following, on its own site: