Bharathy Tahiliani

Founder

Bharathy Tahiliani is the founder & managing trustee of Kshamata [1], an Indian non-profit working on women & children, anti-trafficking and livelihood from Thane.

Bharathy Tahiliani is the founder and managing trustee of Kshamata, a Mumbai-based organisation that works on the rehabilitation and social reintegration of women and adolescent girls who have survived trafficking, sexual exploitation and gender-based violence. Kshamata was founded in 2011.

She had worked in the rehabilitation of survivors of exploitation for more than a decade before starting the organisation, and has described the moment that prompted it: while working on health and HIV among women in a brothel in Thane, one of them asked for help to leave.

Career

Tahiliani has worked with UNICEF, with government bodies and with anti-trafficking organisations, on the protection and empowerment of women and children. She designed rehabilitation programmes for shelter homes in and around Mumbai and Thane and has supported the rescue of several hundred women and girls from brothel areas.

She founded Kshamata after concluding that rescue alone was not enough and that survivors needed a structured route back into independent life. The organisation's model has three parts: trauma-informed care and mental health support; economic empowerment through skills training, education and employment; and social reintegration. Kshamata reports having worked with more than a thousand women and girls.[2][3][4]

Kshamata

Kshamata works with women survivors of violence, trafficking and exploitation, walking with each woman from crisis to independent living through its 4E reintegration framework — Engage, Equip, Empower, Evolve. Spanning more than two years and paced to each individual, it combines a residential centre, counselling, education, vocational and digital skills training, job placement with sensitised employers, semi-independent shared homes, and continuing mentorship and alumni networks.

Kshamata reports the following, on its own site: