the ant  works at two levels:

1. Directly, in the villages of District Chirang (newly formed Bodo Territorial Administered District) of Assam .

2. Indirectly, advocating certain issues and providing training support to NGOs & networks anywhere in the northeast.

Direct Village Work: We have programmes running in 90 villages in nine Village Council Development Commitees that are within 4 hours cycling distance from Bongaigaon. We are trying to put together demonstrable programmes that could serve as low-cost and sustainable models run by the community. Besides, we try to help the community to demand their entitlements from the State in order to improve governance and reduce corruption.

a. Jagruti Groups & Dals: Trying to reach a state of awakening or “Jagruti,”the focus is on training & awareness building of these women’s groups on different issues. Their social position is also strengthened by economic benefits from using their monthly savings for income generation. One of them produces desktop products from the leftover cloth from our weaving programme.. Yet another buys paddy from its poor group members to cushion them from the low prevailing rates and then sells it at a higher rate in the market and redistributes the profit among them. Others are into pig rearing, poultry, silk rearing. Ninety percent of the members would classify as people belonging to the poorest sections of the village.

b. Village Pharmacists & Barefoot Doctors Programme: Women volunteers selected by the village are trained to handle about 30 medicines for common ailments. Working as barefoot doctors and some as village pharmacists, they sell high quality, low-cost generic medicines that benefit the poor, especially women and children who get to access and afford essential and rational medical care at their doorsteps. Although we have stopped training more health workers in our own area, thirty odd health workers are still active and provided low-cost generic medicines to their patients.

c. Community Laboratory Technicians: Of the 11 barefoot technicians that we trained between 2006 and 2008, eight of them still continue giving excellent technical quality for malaria. The National Institute of Malaria Research cross checked their slides to find a 95% correct identification of species.

d. Community Monitoring of the National Rural Health Mission:

c. Expanding Income Opportunities: Turning available skills and resources of the most resource- poor such as women and the landless into livelihood opportunites, programmes of weaving, banana cultivation, mushroom cultivation etc. have been implemented with modest results. The weaving programme started with poor women of the Bodo tribe in 2002 has steadily expanded and has doubled its sales every fiscal year. It involves more than a hundred women weavers of which more than 80% of who were very poor and debt stricken when they entered the progamme. By March 2008, more than INR 15 million of sales (since the beginning of the programme less than 5 years ago) have generated wages of more than INR 5 million for the rural people! A weaver administered Trust called the Aagor Daagra Afad has already been formed that sells its products under the brand name Aagor. The money and stocks have already been transferred and we hope to transfer complete management to them within a short time. This is complemented by a Store in Bangalore that sells not just the products of Aagor, but also sells products of other not-for-profits from the northeast region.

Enlightenment to Entitlement Programme: At one of its annual meeting the members of the ant voted for starting work on sensitizing people to know and fight for their legitimate entitlements. Given the advantage that one of the founder trustees had accepted to play an advisory role (for the state of Assam) to the Commissioners appointed by the Supreme Court in response to a PIL in 2001, the ant  helped in carrying out surveys on various food and poverty related schemes and reporting back to the Supreme Court to put pressure on the government to improve its performance. It has utilized its association with other credible NGOs in the State to get good grassroots information on the implementation of the Mid Day Meal Scheme, the Public Distribution Scheme (Ration Fair Price shops), the National Old Age Pension Scheme and the Integrated Child Development Scheme. It has also made posters about the new Supreme Court guidelines on the said schemes and conducted awareness workshops which have drawn very good attendance. It also is part of the People Rights Forum that is a platform for NGOs wanting to work on the issue.

IDP issues: the ant started working in one of the camps of Internally Displaced Persons a couple of years ago. By now, although the camp has been wound up by people coerced to take a measly ten thousand rupees as rehabilitation grant, the inmates are worse off than before on the nearby forest land that they have occupied. From a status of victims, they are now forest encroachers and deemed criminals, just because they do not have any other place to go to. Apart from all other programmes that we run elsewhere, this cluster of villages of IDPs necessitates special attention and we swing between the Rights mode and the traditional charity mode.

Indirect Work: the ant  plays a supportive role for organisations in other parts of the northeast who are engaged in development acrivites. It has worked chiefly in four ways:

a. Training: We have been invited as a resource group for training NGO personnel on issues in which we have expertise - community health programmes; malaria prevention and management; essential drugs;social analysis; NGO management; research methods, self help groups etc. This role has become formal with our Institute of Development Action, IDeA that provides low-cost training on such issues to various NGOs.

b. Consultations & Evaluations: From helping organisations in conceptualising a plan of action to assistance in evaluation of projects of other organisations has been a role that the ant uses to guide agencies towards community driven sustainable development.

c. Publications: In order to reach out to a larger audience, the ant has published material that has been translated into various languages, some of it by others. Some of these include: · A to Z of Malaria ....and more (English, Assamese, Bodo) · Your Medicine Box (easy to refer manual on 27 essential drugs) · Health Diary cum Manual · A Three Phase manual to train village health workers. We are trying to build our own capacity building manual that can be used by other NGOs .

d. Fellowships: the ant helps committed young people interested in working with village communities by giving them or helping them get a small fellowship through its relationship with the Bhoruka Charitable Trust to enable them to continue their work.                                                                                                                          

e. Design Support: Knowing that almost every woman in the northeast can weave, the ant  feels that this skill can be harnessed to increase the income of people in the low-monetisation economy prevalent in the northeast. With good design inputs, it is possible to reach out to the burgeoning middle class in the cities of India . Our design support center, Ishaan has helped improve the designs of some NGOs to make them marketable. Some of these groups have made remarkable progress in marketing their products.

Apart from these, some members of the ant   have been called to play a role in making larger policy changes on issues such as malaria, rational drug policy etc.