Baba Amte Centre for
People's Empowerment

Rather than directly expanding the scale of our own operations — and risking bureaucratisation — we have opted to remain a lean, learning organisation that builds on partnerships. In this way, we are able to retain quality while achieving scale, thus overcoming the oasis syndrome that most NGO work suffers from.

Our direct interventions are concentrated in the tribal pocket around Bagli. But we upscale the impact of this work through the Baba Amte Centre for People's Empowerment. The Centre has been set up to carefully select, train and hand-hold genuine grassroots partners for a few years, after which we believe they can do this work — potentially better than SPS could have.

The Centre also builds close partnerships with a wide range of research institutions and government departments, some of which are doing excellent but largely unrecognised work. We help bring this research out of ivory towers by linking lab to land, while also securing invaluable feedback for scientists from farmers. This beta-tested technology is then transmitted to our partners through the Baba Amte Centre.

Through this "creative, organic churning", R&D inputs are finalised. These are then disseminated not only in our area but also to people throughout India via our network of NGO and government partners.

We conduct a variety of training courses at the Centre, including a 2-month Basic Training Course on Watershed Development covering surveying and mapping, earthen and masonry engineering, hydrogeology, nursery and plantation, dryland NPM agriculture, double entry accounting, attitude behaviour change, PRA and conflict management. At the request of the Union Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), SPS has prepared watershed works manuals in the MGNREGA context (300 pages+ in both English and Hindi). The Governments of Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Himachal Pradesh have distributed these manuals to all their Gram Panchayats and concerned officers. We have also converted each of the 16 chapters of these manuals into stand-alone booklets.

The two campuses — Administrative and Training — of the Baba Amte Centre for People's Empowerment nestle in villages on the edge of the forest at the foothills of the Vindhyan range. The architecture of these campuses was imagined to harmonize with the magnificence of the landscape, whose colours dissolve from rugged ochre to verdant green through the seasons.

The domes, vaults, and arches reflect the undulations of nature. The pyramids and corbels echo the starkness of basalt. The exposed brickwork and stone are homage to the rough dignity of rural life. Embedded in these walls is the intricate effort of skilled artisans, because of whom the structures minimize the use of cement and steel.

Nivedita Banerji has guided the design, building and management of SPS campuses and facilities over the past 3 decades.