Ashif Shaikh

Founder

Ashif Shaikh is the founder of Jan Sahas [1], an Indian non-profit working on anti-trafficking and human rights from New Delhi.

Ashif Shaikh (born 18 October 1982) is an Indian social activist who co-founded Jan Sahas, a human rights organisation working against caste- and gender-based violence, and Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan, a national campaign to end manual scavenging.

His work has focused on the liberation and rehabilitation of women employed in manual scavenging, on support for survivors of sexual violence, and on the rights of internal migrant workers.

Early life and education

Shaikh was born on 18 October 1982 in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh, into a Dalit Muslim family. He took a postgraduate degree in political science from Vikram University, Ujjain.

Career

Around 2000 Shaikh and a group of colleagues founded Jan Sahas with twelve volunteers. The organisation has since grown to several hundred staff and thousands of volunteers, working across districts in several Indian states on manual scavenging, caste-based sex work, forced labour and trafficking.

From 2000 he worked with women engaged in manual scavenging in villages of Madhya Pradesh, and in 2006 co-founded Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan, a membership organisation of women who had left the practice. The campaign encouraged women to burn their cane baskets and demolish dry latrines publicly.

Between November 2012 and January 2013 he led the Maila Mukti Yatra, a march that began in Bhopal on 30 November 2012, covered about 10,000 kilometres across 18 states and 200 districts, and ended in Delhi on 21 January 2013. The campaign contributed to the passage of India's 2013 law prohibiting the employment of manual scavengers. From 20 December 2018 to 22 February 2019 he led the Dignity March, which brought together survivors of sexual violence and their families across some 200 districts and ended in Delhi.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 Jan Sahas carried out relief work among migrant workers, and in October 2020 Shaikh helped establish the Migrants Resilience Collaborative. He also helped form the Lawyers Initiative Forum, a network of practising lawyers from socially excluded backgrounds.

Recognition

Shaikh received the M. A. Thomas National Human Rights Award in 2012 and the Social Bravery Award in 2013. In 2014 he received the Times of India Social Impact Award and the Star Impact Award in the United Kingdom, and was nominated for the Human Rights Tulip in the Netherlands. He was elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2015, named Social Innovator of the Year by the World Economic Forum in 2020, and received the India CSR Impact Leader Award in 2021. In 2022 he received the Gleitsman International Activist Award from the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School for his work protecting migrant workers and combating sexual violence.[2][3][4][5]

Jan Sahas

Jan Sahas is a community and survivor-centric civil-society organisation, founded in 2000 in Madhya Pradesh, working across 12 Indian states to end violence against women and children and to secure safe migration and worker protection for excluded social groups. It runs a Safe Migration Project tracking and supporting tens of thousands of migrant labourers, alongside rehabilitation programmes for survivors of manual scavenging, bonded labour and caste-based sexual exploitation.

Jan Sahas reports the following, on its own site:

More than 5.8 million migrant households registered under Safe Migration and Workers Protection
5,50,000 children benefiting through early childhood care and education in 3,109 ICDS centres
48,000 people engaged in manual scavenging supported and rehabilitated
Working across 12 states of India