Key Expertise

Raktima has more than 25 years of experience in action research in the domain of Natural Resource Management, Joint Forest Management (JFM) and Participatory Water Management, ecosystem services and well being in particular with critical application of Participatory skills for community mobilization and sensitization, participatory planning, implementation and monitoring in different agro climatic regions covering more than 10 states of India. In her career as a development professional, Raktima has been experimenting with participatory methods and approaches through application of different social science methods and is applying them in large scale studies and in designing project implementation strategies. She is training the project team members of IBRAD and also student interns from different institutes on participatory research methods, designing research questions, developing the capacity for analytical skills and analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data. She has first hand knowledge about the natural resource governance issues with a focus on women empowerment process for managing forest, agriculture and fresh water ecosystems especially among the forest fringe indigenous communities. Her long ranging experience across the length and breadth of the country with different sectors has helped in developing her acumen to understand the intrinsic issues of socio ecological processes, power dynamics and gender equity issues in the context of natural resource goverance She has expertise in conducting Training Need Analysis (TNA) of different stakeholders, identify the training and capacity building needs, prepare training strategy, design and development of training modules based on the TNA for different stakeholders in the sectors of Forest, Agriculture and Water Resources. Raktima has been conducting training for the senior level government officials to the field staff of the departments of Forest, Water Resources, Agriculture and Horticulture, panchayat functionaries and the community members across different states since 1991. Her training modules include the array of topics Participatory methods, approaches and skills, Sensitization process for participatory development and conflict management, Microplanning and community mobilization, Women Empowerment and Gender Sensitization. As the Key Team Member of IBRAD she has provided her critical inputs in designing the strategy to facilitate the process of implementation of different large scale externally and internally funded multi stakeholder projects. One of the key areas of expertise of Raktima is design and development of methodologies for impact assessment/evaluation of different large scale projects and programs like National Horticulture Mission, Joint Forest Management, Tribal Sub Plan, Forest Development Agencies, Micro Finance Institutions, People’s Protected Area, Livelihood Projects etc. Raktima is deeply interested in understanding the cross cutting issues of gender equality and gender sensitization process across all the projects and is currently engaged in developing modules for women empowerment, especially for the tribal and other marginalized rural women to improve their autonomy, decision making ability, mobility and well-being both at the family and community level.