Durga

“Every woman should be able to draw her boundaries and not fear any space. A woman isn’t helpless. She’s just helped less. Durga is here to change that.”

Durga is an acronym for Dare to Understand behavior, Respond appropriately, and Guard ourselves Ably. Durga is every woman who is equipped to take control over her safety. Durga is a citizen-sector organization based out of Bangalore, working since 2013 with the ultimate vision of equipping women to deter sexual harassment and creating gender-equitable spaces in India. At Durga, we work with women, men, youth, adolescents, communities, street vendors, and corporates because women’s safety is everybody’s problem and the onus of making spaces safe is on each one of us in the society.

What do we do to enable safety and create safe spaces?

Through our flagship, Durga Safety Workshops, our team of facilitators equip women and girls across all segments of society to be aware and prepared to tackle harassment. The workshop integrates theatre-based techniques that allow them to transform from survivors of harassment to solution providers.

At campuses, we set up VOICE Labs (democratic student community) to equip students as socially responsible, gender-sensitive individuals. At schools, we interact with adolescent boys and girls, initiate conversations around gender, help them identify and bust gender stereotypes. Our program, Building Blocks, helps children from vulnerable backgrounds residing at shelter homes and observation homes identify different forms of harassment, gender roles, and stereotypes.

Active Bystander Intervention is the most effective way of reducing harassment in public spaces. We engage with street vendors who occupy a certain space in public for 8-10 hours a day. We convert them into DAREs – Durgas Are Real heroes Everywhere – who would intervene in cases of harassment against any woman. Likewise, on the online space, Durga’s Cyber Warriors (from the Voice Out program) constantly audit cyberspace for inappropriate posts, trolls. Our 21-day engagement with different communities such as Bruhat Bengaluru MahanagaraPalike (BBMP) Pourakarmikas& Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) staff in Bangalore, is thorough and addresses issues related to gender and women’s safety.

Durga’s footprint

Since our inception in 2013, we’ve created over 9,500 Durgas through safety workshops, and over 50,000 indirect beneficiaries. Our Durga Champions are spread across 10 VOICE Labs in schools and colleges, and 300+ DAREs are responsible for making the streets they occupy safer. Durga in partnership with BMTC set up the Durga Panic Alarms in over 150 buses. Durga has engaged with 60+ speakers & 650+ participants through the platform ‘Durga Listens’ – a fortnightly engagement to share personal experiences related to gender and women’s safety. Our Voice Out warriors had reported nearly 1000 inappropriate online posts in 2019.

Durga is an external member of the POSH committees of various organizations. Durga was awarded the Regional Winner in the Spirit of Humanity Annual Awards 2019 for contribution in the field of women empowerment.

In December 2020, Durga hosted the first of its kind online youth-centric forum on gender equity – NGAGE (NextGen Advocates for Gender Equity) – where we had young and seasoned gender justice activists from across the country addressing various issues on gender, safety, and laws to over 2000 youth participants from colleges and universities across the country.

In March 2021, as part of International Women’s Day, Durga launched the Box IT initiative in association with BMTC to increase reporting of complaints on safety. This is a simple box that will be placed in prominent places in important bus terminals. The idea was to provide women safe access to be able to raise complaints as and when they encounter any instance of harassment in a public space.

About the Founder

Priya Varadarajan is the Lead for Gender Justice and Persons with Disabilities Clusters within The Azim Premji Philanthropy.

Priya has worked with The Philanthropy for over four years now in various capacities – Finance, Programmes, Portfolio Lead, and now Cluster Lead for two of the largest clusters.

A Chartered Accountant by Profession, Priya has spent the first few years of her career at Deloitte, EY, and Infosys. She has also worked as a Financial Analyst in one of the start-ups of Nadathur Holdings. She soon realized that she has more interest in development issues and spent about 10 years with the British Government in India, working on Healthcare and Life Sciences as a National Lead.

Priya holds deep empathy and connects with the vulnerable particularly with women and girls who are survivors of gender-based violence and abuse.

An avid reader of the different waves of Feminism the world has seen, student of a Masters in Gender and Women’s Studies, TEDx Speaker and traveler, Priya tries to learn Carnatic music (intermittently) in her spare time. She feels she is able to follow every dream purely because of her dedicated fitness walks, exercise, and the Universal Energy – Reiki!