Deepa Pawar

Founder

Deepa Pawar is the founder of Anubhuti (2016)[1], an Indian non-profit working on human rights, tribal welfare, mental health and women & children from Mumbai.

Deepa Pawar is an Indian social worker, researcher and writer, and the founder director and managing trustee of Anubhuti, a Maharashtra-based organisation working with Nomadic and Denotified Tribes (NT-DNT). She belongs to the Gadiya Lohar (Ghisadi) nomadic community, one of the communities that was listed under the colonial Criminal Tribes Act.

She began working with girls and women in her own urban community in Mumbai at the age of fourteen, and after roughly sixteen years of grassroots work established Anubhuti formally in 2016. The organisation describes itself as women-led and works on gender, mental health, sexual and reproductive health and rights, leadership, constitutional literacy and community development across Maharashtra.

Early life

Pawar belongs to the Gadiya Lohar nomadic community, traditionally itinerant blacksmiths, and grew up in and around Badlapur in Thane district, Maharashtra. She began social work at fourteen, partly to support her own education after her father's death.

Career

Anubhuti, which Pawar founded in 2016, works with youth, women, communities, colleges and local and state government bodies. Within the organisation she handles visioning, direction, training, module-making, networking and advocacy.

She developed the idea of 'mental justice', which places individual mental distress in the context of caste, gender and social hierarchy rather than treating it as a purely personal matter, and the associated 'Mann Mela' mental health fair, which uses games, songs and discussion to reach young people. Anubhuti also runs a constitutional literacy programme, Hum Samvidhani, which teaches marginalised young people about their fundamental rights through debate, art and theatre, and programmes on domestic violence and early marriage.

As a Samvaad Fellow she worked on documenting the iron tool- and weapon-making traditions of the Gadiya Lohar nomadic tribe, and as a fellow of the Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters mentoring programme she carried out research led by a young Nomadic Tribe woman on the sexual and reproductive health and rights of NT-DNT women.

Recognition

Pawar was selected as an Ashoka Fellow, a decision Anubhuti announced in August 2024.

She received the Martha Farrell Award for Most Promising Individual in 2021 and was named a Plan India Awards Last Mile Champion for Girls' Rights in 2022. She has also been a Collective Impact Partnership fellow and a Goalkeeper Youth Action Accelerator fellow, won the grand prize in the University of California, Berkeley 'Tell Her Story' contest in 2018, and was a finalist for the CII Foundation Women Exemplar Award in 2018.[2][3][4][5][6]

Anubhuti

Anubhuti is a non-profit formed and self-led by women who have faced discrimination based on caste, class, gender, language and ethnicity, and who use those experiences for change. Founded by Deepa Pawar and formally started in 2016, it works out of Mumbai and across Maharashtra with nomadic and denotified tribe communities, on mental justice — including its Mann Mela mental justice fair — youth leadership, community development, research, advocacy and campaigning.

Anubhuti reports the following, on its own site:

Anubhuti Charitable Trust reached 48,583 people directly (extensive engagement) and 30,000 indirectly in 2021-22, with 335 people in daily or weekly intensive engagement; over 98% were from NT-DNT, Dalit, Adivasi, tent-dwelling, LGBTIQ+ and other vulnerable backgrounds in Maharashtra.
In 2021-22 Anubhuti's Community Counselling Centres helped 80 people with cases of domestic violence, medical issues, civil rights, career counselling and mental health, and 35 NT-DNT and Bahujan youth from Kolegaon, Rahtoli, Kalyan and Ambernath received scholarships for further studies.