The Day Durgesh Decided to Speak Up

📍 Kalipeeth, Rajgarh, Madhya Pradesh

He left studies after Class 12. Within a year, his village had started calling him when the system failed them.

In Kalipeeth, the ration register told a perfect story: wheat and rice, distributed every month, on schedule. The homes those grains were meant for told a different story altogether - no ration for three months. People in the village knew the gap existed, and Durgesh knew it too, but for a long time he believed there was nothing to be done about it. 

Eventually, he learned otherwise.

The ration that never reached home 

Durgesh had left his studies after Class 12 and moved on to other work when Ahimsa Welfare Society came to Kalipeeth in 2025, looking for volunteers. He took their test, cleared it, and trained with them. He remembers exactly who he was in his volunteering days: someone who found the back row and stayed there.

“Earlier, I used to sit right at the back and hide. Today I can speak openly”

His time with Ahimsa Welfare Society changed the way he looked at things. Encouraged by the organisation’s founder, Arun, he resumed his studies and enrolled in a Bachelor of Social Work. He also started looking at the problems in his village differently. The ration issue, which had sat quietly at the back of his mind for years, no longer felt like something he simply had to live with. 

A later training with We, The People Abhiyan gave him the piece he was still missing: how to actually act on what he knew. He learned how to write an application, where it needed to go, and which office was responsible for responding to it. 

“In the training, they taught me how to file an application, and what needed to be included in it”

With that, he began asking questions in earnest, going door to door across Kalipeeth to find out who was receiving their ration and who was not. What he gathered turned into a list, and the list turned into signatures, and the signatures turned into a formal complaint filed at the Food Office in the Collectorate. Nearly a hundred villagers walked there alongside him. As a result, officials visited the village and checked the register against what people were actually receiving. When investigation happened, it turned out that the man running the fair price shop did not release grain on time. He got fired and the families in Kalipeeth started receiving their share every month, rather than waiting several months and getting it all at once.

The person people now look for

The ration issue turned out to be only the beginning of what Durgesh took on. He has since walked school dropouts back into their classrooms, worked alongside farmers on organic methods, and now runs free coaching classes every Sunday in a nearby village.

But the clearest sign of how much has changed is a simple one: when someone in Kalipeeth runs into a problem, they call Durgesh.

 He estimates he has worked directly with 700 to 800 of the village's roughly 2,000 residents, alongside a group of twenty young volunteers who now work with him the same way he once looked to Arun. The boy who used to hide at the back of the room is no longer waiting for someone to ask him to speak.

These days, he is the one people go looking for.

The above story has been written and published with the explicit consent of the individual involved. All facts presented are based on WTPA's direct interaction with the individual, ensuring accuracy and integrity in our reporting.