Sahiyar (Stree Sangathan) is a community organization based in Vadodra (Baroda) that has been working for women's rights for over 20 years. Sahiyar undertakes a broad range of activities, like running awareness campaigns, providing legal and counseling help to women in crisis and to survivors of domestic violence, organizing group-counseling sessions for adolescent girls, raising funds for the education of economically disadvantaged girls, organizing women at the community level, working for communal harmony, training activists and professionals in gender sensitivity, and taking part in disaster relief.

      Sahiyar is an organic and autonomous women's movement; not a target-seeking NGO. Trupti Shah, one of the founding members, succinctly clarifies during one of the phone calls we had with her: "We do not want to artificially institutionalize Sahiyar, we do not want to employ people to satisfy some targets, as then we cannot take up new challenges, nor can we react to emergencies (like the ?02 Gujarat carnage)."

    "Let the daughters be born, blossom and touch the sky" - the alarming decline in sex-ratio and the rampant practice of sex-selective abortion prompted Sahiyar, in collaboration with other national groups, to lead a week-long campaign highlighting the issue. A short skit developed by Sahiyar, "Deekri chhu manav chhu, manvtane marsho shu?", (I am your daughter, I am human being... will you kill humanity?) was very well received and spurred a large participation from the local student and youth communities.

- Ravi Sankrit, JHU (Baltimore)