She Has Never Spoken a Word, But She Found Her Voice

There is a woman in the villages of Jharkhand who has never once spoken a word. Not as a child calling out for her mother. Not in the schoolroom where she sat through twelve years of education. Devanti has never had a voice, not in the way the world usually means it. And yet she is the person that more than a thousand others have chosen to speak for them.

She was born with a speech impairment. In the villages of Gurudih and Rupru, in Angara Block of Ranchi district, that kind of difference tends to push people to the edges of life. Disability here is not a medical category. It is a social sentence, one that strips away opportunity, dignity, and belonging.

Devanti did not stay quiet, she just communicated differently. She learned to write. She learned to listen with the kind of attention most people never develop.

In 2017, the Gram Nirman Programme, implemented by Caritas India with support from Caritas Australia, arrived in Angara Block carrying an idea that was simple and, in this context, radical: persons with disabilities are not objects of charity. They are holders of rights. And the goal is not to deliver services to them. It is to dismantle the barriers that kept those services out of reach.

Six people came together for the first meeting. Devanti was one of them. She began attending regularly. She noticed things others missed. She remembered everything. As the group grew, from six to dozens, from dozens to hundreds, spreading across 21 Panchayats, it needed a Secretary. Someone to keep the minutes, maintain the records, hold the institutional memory. Someone reliable. Someone who paid attention. The members looked around the room.

They chose Devanti. A woman who had spent her life being overlooked because she could not produce words in the expected way was now elected, by people who knew exactly what they were doing, to lead.

Then the group went one step further. When it came time to give themselves a name, they did not reach for a slogan or an acronym or an aspiration. They named the group after her. The Devanti Divyang Samiti. By popular demand. Because she had become, quietly and without announcement, the person who held all of them together.

Today, Devanti writes the minutes of every meeting. She helps her fellow members navigate the government systems that were always supposed to serve them but rarely did. She accompanies people to block and district offices. She sits in Gram Sabha meetings, the village governance forums where persons with disabilities were once invisible, and she makes sure they are not invisible anymore.

Outside the group, she has built a livelihood of her own. She took up tailoring. Every day she sits at her sewing machine and stitches cloth into garments, earns her keep, and does not need anyone’s pity to do it.
Gram Sabhas that once conducted their business without a thought for who was absent are now hearing from people who were always absent before. The shift is from charity to rights, from pity to respect, from exclusion to something that is starting to look like belonging.

The Gram Nirman Programme did not fix Devanti. What it did was create a structure in which she could be exactly who she had always been, and where who she had always been turned out to matter enormously.

In a region where persons with disabilities were once barely visible in public life, Devanti’s name is now on the letterhead of a movement that is making sure they cannot be ignored.