Gradually SARTHI has moved to rights based approach from a service delivery model. As per the need of the area and requirement of the people, SARTHI decided to focus on awareness of the people about their rights and entitlements and to create models for macro policy advocacy to influence the agenda in Traditional system of health for tribal especially women. By the process of rethinking on the perspective, SARTHI also decided to expand its work though field centres and sub centre in 294 villages in 12 Taluka if 3 states to address the need to work on various issues at Micro, Macro levels.

The approach of SARTHI has been to mobilize the tribal communities and make them aware about their rights and entitlements by forming and strengthening their Community Based Organization (CBOs) such as women Self Help Groups (SHGs) and Village Development Committees (VDCs). These CBOs raise various issues that are the root causes of the disempowering and marginalization of the tribal community of the area. The local resource persons were identified for providing issue-based awareness to the CBOs (VDCs, SHGs) were identified and the leaders were trained on related issues like NREGA, Food entitlements, right of women to own land and property, etc. By regular meetings with the SHGs, we also found that there are some more deprived women who are not getting support from Government Schemes and society. These CBOs raises the issues of women with particular focus to the issues of single women, women and land right etc.

SARTHI strengthens these CBOs through capacity building, skill based trainings and sensitizing workshops, involving them with their issues and continuous process regular meetings and contacts.

The most significant achievement of the SARTHI has been to organize the rural and tribal women to take up their issues such as of gender, violence against women and girl child, land and property right for women to improve the economic condition, sensitization men regarding the reproductive health, active involvement of women in Panchayat, Gram Sabhas, legal aspect for women right etc. For these women institutions, to get more support from the local community of respective villages, SARTHI also formed the Village Development Committees (VDCs) ensuring the representation of men and women. Most of these VDCs are now aware of the various issues related to women and Development.

These CBOs are also taking steps towards active participation in the Gram Sabhas and encourage the women for active involvement in Panchayati Raj.

So at present we are working with three types of village level groups: SHGs (Self Help Groups), VDCs (Village Development Committees), and the forest management committee and each of these groups know about their roles very clearly and the VDC is conceptualized to be the apex body to represent all the groups in the village. These institutions are now having enough exposures to work with various government programs or as a pressure group.

SARTHI’s efforts at networking with the other partners like the WGWLO, Dai Sangha, PRAVAH, JANPAT, VIKSAT, MSA(Mahila Swaraj Abhiyan), also started yielding results whereby tribal women started getting mobilized around issues of ownership of property and also demanding various other entitlements from State like that of good quality of PDS and MDM in their respective villages.