Satyarani Chadha

Founder

Satyarani Chadha is the founder of Shakti Shalini [1], an Indian non-profit working on women & children, human rights and lgbtq+ & inclusion from New Delhi.

Satyarani Chadha (1933 – 1 July 2014), also written Satya Rani Chadha, was an Indian women's rights activist and one of the best-known figures of India's anti-dowry movement. With Shahjahan Aapa she founded Shakti Shalini, a Delhi organisation for women facing dowry-related and domestic violence, in 1987.

Both women had lost daughters in dowry deaths, and both campaigned for decades for prosecution of such deaths and for changes in the law.

Campaign for her daughter

In 1979 Chadha's twenty-year-old daughter, Shashi Bala, also known as Kanchanbala, died of severe burns at her marital home in Delhi. She had been married less than a year and was six months pregnant. Her husband's family had demanded a scooter, a television set and a refrigerator.

Chadha reported the death as murder. The police instead brought charges under the Dowry Prohibition Act. The case was not heard until 2000, when her son-in-law was convicted of abetment to suicide; the conviction was upheld on appeal in 2013 with a sentence of seven years, but he did not surrender. The proceedings lasted more than three decades and Chadha became a public face of the campaign against dowry violence through them.

Shakti Shalini

Chadha and Shahjahan Aapa first organised bereaved parents as the Parents Association of Dowry Victims, and in 1987 founded Shakti Shalini. The organisation opened what is described as Delhi's first shelter home for women in distress in July 1987 and campaigned for the anti-dowry and domestic violence legislation subsequently enacted in India.

Shakti Shalini continues to provide counselling, crisis intervention, shelter, legal aid, health support and rehabilitation to survivors of gender-based violence, and runs community outreach and training in several low-income neighbourhoods of Delhi.

Recognition

Chadha received the Neerja Bhanot Award for her work on women's rights.[2][3][4]

Shakti Shalini

Shakti Shalini was founded in 1987 by Satyarani Chadha and Shahjahan Apa, two mothers who lost their daughters to dowry-related violence and turned their grief into one of Delhi's first support systems for survivors. It runs a 24x7 helpline, a crisis intervention and counselling centre, the Pehchan shelter home — which also shelters LGBTQ+ persons fleeing family violence — a child protection unit, skills training through Kushalta Vikas Kendra, and grassroots feminist mobilisation in five marginalised Delhi communities.

Shakti Shalini reports the following, on its own site:

15,000+ women supported over 36 years
2,000+ residents of marginalised communities engaged in grassroots feminist mobilisation
500+ individuals engaged in skills training and art-for-activism workshops