Sarbani Das Roy

Co-founder

Sarbani Das Roy is the co-founder of Iswar Sankalpa (2007)[1], an Indian non-profit working on mental health and human rights from Kolkata.

Sarbani Das Roy is an Indian mental health worker who founded Iswar Sankalpa in Kolkata in 2007. The organisation works with homeless people who have psycho-social disabilities, providing street-based treatment, shelter and rehabilitation.

Her approach rests on recruiting people who are already present on the street — vendors, shopkeepers, rickshaw pullers, police constables and students — as informal caregivers who identify and support individual patients, so that treatment can begin where the person already lives rather than in an institution.

Career

Iswar Sankalpa was founded in 2007 by Das Roy with a small group of colleagues. Its city-wide outreach programme, Naya Daur, provides psychiatric care, medication and follow-up to homeless people with mental illness on the streets of Kolkata; the organisation states that this pathway of care has reached more than 3,000 people.

In partnership with the Government of West Bengal she established shelters in Kolkata for homeless women and men with psycho-social disabilities, which the organisation reports have served more than 600 women over ten years and about 175 men over five years. With the Kolkata Municipal Corporation she also developed an integrated mental health service at municipal primary health centres for residents of the city's poorer wards.

In 2015 she was appointed to the state Social Welfare Department's committee reviewing the Bengal Vagrancy Act, and in 2021 to an Election Commission committee on accessible elections for disabled voters.

Recognition

Das Roy was elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2017. In 2019 she received the West Bengal State Award for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities in the outstanding individual category, the Hope Humanitarian Award from The Hope Foundation, and an appreciation award from the Vikas Anvesh Foundation. In 2021 she received the Aparajita – Saluting Womanhood award for CSR and social work.

Iswar Sankalpa's work has also been recognised institutionally: the organisation received a HUDCO award for best practices in training and health services for the urban poor in 2014–15 and the West Bengal State Award for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities in the outstanding institution category in 2016, and in 2021 the World Health Organization listed Naya Daur as a best practice in rights-based community mental health.[2][3][4]

Iswar Sankalpa

Iswar Sankalpa is a Kolkata-based nonprofit, founded in 2007, working to empower people with psychosocial disabilities and mental-health conditions to attain their rights with dignity. Its flagship Naya Daur programme provides community-based outreach and psychosocial intervention for homeless persons in mental-health crisis, backed by therapeutic shelters, an urban mental-health prevention programme, and vocational reintegration training — work recognised by the WHO as a best practice in rights-based community mental health.

Iswar Sankalpa reports the following, on its own site:

2,64,780+ persons reached through awareness camps on mental health
7,706+ persons from low-resource settings and slums accessed mental healthcare
3,277+ homeless persons with psychosocial disabilities supported through the community outreach programme
607+ homeless persons reunited with their family