When Shivani Sahu’s father died of a snakebite in 2011, she was too young to understand what the loss would cost her. A small farmer and daily-wage labourer, he left behind a family with no safety net. The children’s hopes of cracking government recruitment tests seemed to die with their father.
Fifteen years on, Shivani, 20, a final-year B.Sc student, is in Jabalpur with her elder brother Surendra, 25, a B.Sc graduate who earns `9,000 a month at a private firm. For the past three months she has worked as a general duty assistant (GDA) at the city’s Shalby Hospital, drawing `11,000 a month.
“We are both dreaming of a secure future now, and an end to the tough days,” Surendra says. “My sister has vowed first to fulfil our father’s dream of turning our kutcha house into a pucca one. We are also making sure our youngest sister, Savita, gets a proper academic future. Shivani at the same time is also chasing her dream of joining the MP Police.”
What changed Shivani’s trajectory was a 420-hour skill-development course run by the Wockhardt Foundation in association with state forest department’s South Panna Division under the livelihood component of the Green India Mission (GIM).
Shivani is not alone. At the same hospital works Saraswati Gadari, 20, from Deori village in Panna district, a classmate of Shivani’s at her college in Panna. Saraswati lost her labourer father in 2022, when she was in Class X. Her elder brother took over the family’s tea shop to keep the household afloat, until a road accident last year injured his working hand and left him bedridden. Saraswati, a final-year B.Sc student, stepped in to run the shop and became the sole breadwinner. Then came the training, held in Shahnagar town. She walked 5 to 7 km each day from her village to attend.
“With the Rs 11,000 I earn, my first priority is to see my elder brother, who is under treatment at Jabalpur Medical College, become fit again,” she says. She also pays for her younger brother’s schooling.
The third young woman placed at Shalby is Pratiksha Dubey, the eldest of three sisters and a brother, from Aamaa village in Panna district. Her father is a small farmer and daily-wage labourer who somehow funded her education at a government college.
The three at Shalby are part of a larger group of fourteen other young women from similar backgrounds, placed at various hospitals. According to Divisional Forest Officer (South Panna) Anupam Sharma, the initiative has helped more than 80 young people across Panna district find jobs or start enterprises.
“Young women from rural and forest-fringe communities are earning their own incomes and, in several cases, becoming the sole breadwinners of their families,” Sharma says. The beneficiaries include about 70 other young men and women who have taken up jobs or begun their own ventures.