Share this story
Going by the sheer impact of their interventions, RGCT's projects are, today, the fastest growing and largest social development organisations in North India outside of the government.
RGCT's primary area of intervention is Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's largest, most populous and backward state with some of the lowest human indices in the country. It has also recently begun work in the Haryana, focusing on Mewat, a rural district where 37 percent of the households live below the poverty line and the literacy rate is 56.1 percent.
Through its two programmes - Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pariyojana (RGMVP) and Indira Gandhi Eye Hospital and Research Centre (IGEHRC) - RGCT reaches out to some of the most excluded and underserved social groups in the two states.
In UP, 65 percent of RGMP's network membership comes from the poorest socio-economic category and 25 percent from the poorest of poorest. IGEHRC's outreach programmes too target the rural poor with quality eye care.
Over time, RGCT's experience has been that social development, especially in North India, is a question of demand and supply.
RGMVP has therefore developed a systematic programme of demand generation by the community by breaking social hierarchies so the last mile population can be provided a level playing field in access to service delivery. The Self Help Group (SHG) model has been innovated and fine-tuned to create an operating system to reach out to households to change behaviours, create an absorption capacity for the poor to assimilate new knowledge, and build behaviour change platforms to implement any new programme for the poor, and connect them to the world.
With eye care, the problem is not of demand but of supply. Unlike the South, which has several well-established providers of quality eye care, North India has hardly any such organisations or institutions. The focus, at IGEHRC, has therefore been on bridging this unmet need and providing quality eye care to the largest and an overgrowing number of poor who have been denied medical attention for centuries.
Going by the sheer impact of their interventions, RGCT's projects are, today, the fastest growing and largest social development organisations in North India outside of the government.
