Fellowship Project: Identify the factors affecting the health-seeking behaviour of tribal communities in Shahdol district in Madhya Pradesh and recommend interventions to improve the coverage of ANC/PNC services and quality of interactions by Front Line Workers.

Highlights: "Sivakami Prasanna is a social science graduate who aspires to understand how gender intersects with different socio-cultural and economic inequities, aiming to work at the intersection of academia, action research and policy making. She completed her Bachelors in Social Sciences from Tata Institute of Social Sciences and later pursued a Post Graduate Diploma in Liberal Arts from Ashoka University as a Young India Fellow. The writings of Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze in advocating for participatory models for development that focus on the reflective participation and agency of people resonate deeply with her. Her engagement with communities while working in rural Maharashtra and Kerala awoke her to the large gap between policymaking, academia and ground reality. To further explore this, she interned with the Centre for Public Policy Research to understand the nuances of policymaking and its implications while also working with women from rural Ernakulam through Goonj and with migrant labourers through Let’s Reach Out Kerala. A firm believer in the might of the pen, she has published articles on the Rights Collective blog, Café Dissensus, Countercurrents, Feminism in India and the CPPR blog on several issues relating to identity, culture and social justice. "