Dharamjeet Kumar

Founder

Dharamjeet Kumar is the founder of Ayang Trust (2017)[1], an Indian non-profit working on education, livelihood, tribal welfare and women & children from Majuli.

Dharamjeet Kumar is one of the three founders of Ayang Trust, a non-profit based on Majuli island in Assam, where he directs the livelihoods programme. The trust works with the Mising community on education, community libraries and weaving livelihoods.

Early life and education

Kumar is from Patna. He completed an MA in Development at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, in 2016.

Career

After his MA he held a year-long fellowship from the William J. Clinton Foundation and worked with an organisation operating on Majuli, where he found that skilled handloom weavers had little access to markets for their cloth. He joined Bipin Shivaji Dhane and Aswathy Preetha Jayakumar in registering Ayang Trust under the Indian Trusts Act in November 2017, and serves as co-founder and director of livelihoods, running the trust's producers' collective and yarn bank for women weavers.[2][3][4]

Ayang Trust

Ayang Trust ('Ayang' means love in the Mising tribal language) is registered under the Indian Trusts Act, formed in 2017 out of the earlier Hummingbird School set up by 19 Mising villages on Majuli, Assam — the world's largest inhabited river island. It runs the Hummingbird model school, weekly community-library sessions now reaching 2,000+ children across dozens of government schools, and livelihood and disaster-risk-reduction programmes for women farmers and artisans, including flood-affected families, across Assam and into Arunachal Pradesh.

Ayang Trust reports the following, on its own site: