Fight for gender equality

Aditya Gupta’s NGO People For Parity uses technology and workshops to empower young people to curb gender-based violence

After his graduation from IIT-Delhi, Aditya Gupta was working as a senior associate with a private firm. But somehow wasn’t satisfied. He quit his job and started working as a volunteer with an NGO in East Africa. That is when India witnessed its most horrific rape case — the Nirbhaya gang rape in December 2012. It prompted him to come back to Delhi and start working towards gender-based violence. Thus came into existence a youth-led initiative called ‘People For Parity’ (PfP) that uses the medium of workshop processes for individual transformation journeys; and technology for large-scale institutional impact on the issue.

PfP works with young people to empower them to curb violence against women in public and non-public spaces, and to create technology that can be used for women’s safety. “Around the world, gender-based violence impacts the lives of thousands of women, girls and their families. It is one of the most challenging issues for populations affected by armed conflict and humanitarian emergencies. Thus, it is very important to make the youth of our country understand and find solutions to address this problem,” shares Aditya.

Aditya organises gender workshops that works with diverse communities like straight, LGBT, survivors and sex workers in different states. “Gender sensitisation is our problem-solving, long-term change programme where we do workshop-based interventions with teenagers, youth, school counselors and corporate employees to foster better communication and understanding around gender violence,” explains Aditya.

In addition to conducting workshops with volunteers on identity, masculinity, self, gender and power. Aditya and his team has also developed an App called ‘Pukar’ that women in distress can use to alert a trusted contact and police. “Our technology work is our immediate-impact initiative where we created a product that enables women in distress to reach out to the right authorities. Unlike other safety apps that mushroomed around the same time, Pukar tied up with the police to help people. With other apps, it seemed like the onus of providing a safe ecosystem was being shifted to people. But the police form an important part of the process, and it does not make sense to exclude them from it. So we created a technology that will help us link up with the police.”

Talking about his current campaign ‘SamjhoToh Express’ in association with Changeloom, he says, “We co-created the programme with Changeloom. In this we explore cross-border friendships and engage young people on the issues of social inclusion in order to build vibrant eco-systems across India to understand each other. We focus on various social constructs, be they gender, caste, religion, or socio-economic background and are in a way ‘borders’ that can prevent a natural interaction between human beings.”

Going forward, he wants to reach out to more communities and create a safer environment that provides a better understanding about the issue to the coming generation. He concludes, “My vision for the future is to establish a sustainable and scalable change program that is able to create measurable impact on the issue. A lot of the social work initiatives in India end up working with a very tight community. While that is often amazing and intensive work, we are looking to enable key stakeholders to be able to bring change to larger target audiences. The foundation also hopes to work with young people and enable them to be changemakers in the society.”