SoochnaPreneur’s Drive to Bring Greater Change

SoochnaPreneur is an initiative with a vision of supporting, strengthening and enhancing the capacities of grassroots communities to access and avail information and entitlements in critical areas of health, education, social and financial inclusion, livelihood and employment.

A 28-year-old SoochnaPreneur from Ranikhatanga village of Jharkhand, Tarana Nazmi wishes to become the Sarpanch (Village Head) of the village soon. She adds that as a Sarpanch, she would want to address the schools in the village first as she sees no education being provided there. As children are the future generation, she wants to ensure they are well educated.

She has graduated from a degree in Psychology along with a BCA and MA in computers. She has learnt stitching and used to teach in a private school. After getting married, she was a housewife and because of the encouragement from her husband to take up a job instead of just looking after household chores, she attended some more computer classes through which she got to know about the SoochnaPreneur program. She started her centre with a computer, printer and tablet that was given to her. Over the last four years, she has bought a lamination machine and she has been learning 2,000 rupees per month. She shares that apart from her centre, there is no photocopying machine in a 5 kilometre radius. Surveying the houses in her village has allowed her to understand the needs of the people. With this understanding and the support of many women whom she has helped become more aware and trained to use computers. She says that, “Even after filling out the forms myself, I have to travel a kilometre to get them signed. Instead, I would prefer to sign them myself and continue providing the services without them stopping me from doing more work. They ask me to do little work and create many obstacles to ensure that I don’t do much”.