Fellowship Project: Document the educational work created with women, girls, and women prisoners. Assist with website designing, report writing and proposal writing.

Highlights: Amiya is serving as an American India Foundation (AIF) Clinton Fellow with Prajwala Sangham in Hyderabad, Telangana. For her fellowship project, she is documenting the educational work that has been co-created with women, girls, and women prisoners. Amiya’s interest in gender and caste developed during her undergraduate studies in Sociology. She conducted ethnographic research on the Dalit community in Bangalore and Delhi and presented her work at conferences organised by Shiv Nadar University as well as the University of Toronto. To better understand these social realities, she spent her summers working in rural India. Her first internship in rural Telangana involved training the underprivileged students of a women’s college with English language and communication skills, while also encouraging them to pursue various career opportunities. Here, Amiya began to understand how gender and poverty stood in the way of equal accessibility and exposure. Her second experience was as a research intern at The Timbaktu Collective in Andhra Pradesh, where she helped ideate and implement an impact assessment project for the NGO’s Mogga Sangha initiative. Here, she interacted with 300 children by travelling to over 20 villages, during which she witnessed harsh realities such as child marriage and gender imbalances in rural Indian schooling. The collective’s successful organic farming and sustainable livelihoods initiatives also piqued her interest in these areas. Since Amiya aspires to pursue a career in development, the AIF Clinton Fellowship is a tremendous opportunity for her to learn, grow and make an impact. She has been placed with Prajwala Sangham, in Hyderabad, an organisation that pursues critical interventions in gender and caste sensitisation as well as women and child rights. In her free time, Amiya reads, bakes and plays basketball. As a Bengali raised in Bangalore, she is perpetually caught in a dilemma between eating kosha mangsho and paper dosa.