Who We Are

Roop is a researcher, facilitator and a coach. He is a trained process worker, an accredited OD consultant and coach. He is a EUM practitioner and a Fellow of Sumedhas where he has been facilitating personal growth labs with youth and adults and also for process work interns.

Roop has had a 20 year working experience in the development sector focussing on issues of migration, youth and violence. After having worked in the grassroots with communities affected by human trafficking, he worked in an international non-profit organisation called Groupe Developpement as the Regional Director for South Asia, managing bilateral projects between India, Bangladesh and Nepal that addressed human trafficking, protection of children and sexual exploitation of children and youth.

In 2012, he co-founded a non-profit called Sanjogwhich works on policy, legislation and practice of access to justice programmes for survivors of human trafficking for forced labour and sexual exploitation. He has led qualitative researches, impact assessments and social audits and mentors start-ups in the sector to promote leadership amongst human rights activists and collectives of survivors of sexual violence.

He is the co-author of Power, Sexuality and Gender Dynamics at Work.

Email: roop.sen@changemantras.in, roop@sanjogindia.org,

Uma is a psychologist, researcher and trainer and has been working passionately with young girls and women helping them deal with their trauma resulting from experiences of violence, abuse, exploitation, discrimination and neglect.

Uma is a trained psychologist and is an expert in developing psychosocial programmes for survivors of violence and exploitation. She has worked with several national and international organisations as well grassroot organisations building resources for psychological healing of survivors, helping build resilience. She has been instrumental in developing training modules and aids and capacitating frontline social workers and caregivers building empathy towards children and young women that they work with, understanding their roles, the limitations thereof and skills of effective communication and managing stress.

As researcher, Uma has been part of several psychological and psychosocial researches with survivors of trafficking, sexual exploitation, of violence and with street children.

Currently, she is a partner of the firm and also Executive Director of Sanjog, a technical resource organisation that works with survivors of trafficking to set up micro-businesses, training programmes on building resilience and a legal programme for seeking justice.

She's the co-author of Power, Sexuality and Gender Dynamics at Work.

Email: uma.chatterjee@changemantras.in,

Vandana Menon is a Literature Graduate and a Post Graduate in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations from the Madras School of Social Work, Chennai. Starting her career in 1993, her career involved roles in the area of Human Resource Management in diverse settings both in manufacturing and service organizations. Her managerial experience spans Factory personnel management, Industrial Relations, Management Development, Corporate HR and Organization Development.

As a practicing manager, she worked with Tube Products of India (Chennai), where she began her career, and later with RPG Paging Services (Chennai), Since 1999, she has been in organization consulting.

Since 1999, she has been associated with TAO Knoware (now called FLAME TAO KnowarePvt. Ltd.) as Principal Consultant. She is currently a Director on the Board of the company.

Her particular areas of interest are in the realm of organization development: diagnosis, alignment, culture building, leadership development, dialogue and processes of individual and organizational change.

Some of the organizations she has consulted with in the last two decades are Malladi Drugs & Pharmaceuticals (Organisation culture building, Alignment & Transformation), TCS (Leadership development), Ingersoll Rand (Development centers), AAT Academy India Ltd (Organisation culture building, Alignment & Transformation) , Interdominion (Organisation diagnostics, Organisation culture building, Alignment & Transformation) and Akshaya Homes (Organisation diagnostics, Organisation culture building, Alignment & Transformation).

A significant part of her consulting has been partnering SMEs through thresholds of growth and working with entrepreneurs to help build the organisation of their dreams. She helps create spaces for dialogue and learning.

She also does coaching for various levels of the management team.

She has done an Internship in Process Work through Sumedhas: an intensive programme of self – exploration and working with groups – a valuable preparatory ground for meaningful organization development consulting through process facilitation.

She uses theatre extensively both in her work with individuals/groups as well as organisations to enable self-reflexivity and learning that leads to deeper awareness of the self and transformation.

She is a Fellow and current Executive Director of Sumedhas Academy for Human Context, an institution committed to enhancing self-awareness, reflection and personal unfolding, facilitation of dialogue on the emerging human context, and promoting commitment driven action.

She was engaged in a 3 year project with the European Union that involves research into the working of Virtual teams. She was a Director on the Board of a client organization for a period of time and has also been a Trustee on the board of Koothu-p-pattarai, a theatre group in Chennai.

Vandana is based in Chennai and can be contacted at

Email: vandana@totallyalignedorganization.com,

Barnali Ghosh is a mental health specialist with more than 20 years of experience in providing preventive and curative counselling, mentoring and psychotherapy. She is also one of the few trainers and practitioners of Play Therapy in India by using the Sceno Box. Barnali's expertise lies in working across all age groups – children, adolescents as well as adults.

Barnali has conducted training workshops in West Bengal, Chennai and with the Bangladesh government as well. She has worked on skills and capacity development, group therapy, play therapy, dance movement therapy, stress management, gender issues, life skills, parenting and positive discipline, systemic development and as a trainer and supervisor in a multi-sectorial programmefor prevention of violence against women.

She was invited as an expert by GAIL (India) ltd. one of the few Maharatna conferredPSEs in the country, for the selection of National Law students and cost accountants. In the long span of her career, she has worked as a Faculty member at Jadavpur University, as a psychotherapist with Samikshani, mental health consultant with Groupe Development, Kolkata Sanved. At present she is working as a consultant psychologist in Columbia Asia Hospitals.

Barnali has a Master's in Clinical Psychology from University of Calcutta. She has also completed an advanced training course in Counselling and Psychotherapy from Samikshani Kolkata.
 

Vinti Mehta is an Organisation Consultant and Coach with over 20 years of experience in the fields of Organisation Development and Human Resources. She has worked with organisations of varying sizes and complexity - ranging from small, young start-ups to large, mature and global corporates. Her stints in corporate organisations have included roles in generalist HR as well as specialist Learning and Organisation Development. As a consultant, she has also worked with organisations in the development sector.

Among corporate organisations, Vinti has worked with HR Business Partner roles, at various levels, with Standard Chartered Bank, Thermax, and headed HR for Total Environment. Through these, she brings deep and wide experience in setting up and running HR systems and processes, particularly Organisation Development, Leadership Development, Learning and Development, Talent Management, and Performance Management. She has also led the Learning and Organisation Development function at CEAT, where she designed and implemented various large-scale culture change initiatives using Appreciative Inquiry.

As an Organisation Consultant and Coach, Vinti has brought her passion for facilitating growth and transformation to individuals and systems. This shows in the work she has done in areas of teaming, leadership development, and change using human and group process methodologies. She has also coached leaders and teams towards greater self-awareness and alignment, and helped individuals and teams discover strengths and potential waiting to be tapped. Some of her consulting engagements have included working with organisations on Visioning, Alignment of Vision to Values to Strategy to Objectives and Goals to Actions. Additionally, she has helped leadership teams with alignment, designed and facilitated interventions around Leadership Development for senior and mid-level leaders, including individual Coaching and larger Capability Building.

Vinti is a certified practitioner of the MBTI®, EUM®, and TAM® instruments. She holds an MSc in Organisational& Social Psychology from the London School of Economics, and an MBA in HR from NMIMS. She is a Fellow of Sumedhas, the Academy for Human Context, an institution dedicated to the studying and fostering of human processes.

Vinti runs Co-Alchemy Consulting, a practice offering consulting in the areas of Organisation Development, Leadership Development, and HR Advisory. She lives in Bangalore with her family, loves learning about human dynamics from her daughter every day, and enjoys reading, singing, dancing, and cooking during her spare time.
 

Atul Sapre has a graduate degree in Mathematics and a post graduate diploma in Management. In addition, he has completed an Advanced Praxis Conference at the Tavistock Group Relations Conference.

He has an experience of about 25 years in academics and consulting. He has used qualitative analysis in OD assignments like building competency inventories, organisational diagnosis, and interventions. Atul is also well-versed in quantitative data analysis and has directed and conducted over 30 documentation projects. He is also a visiting faculty in a couple of renowned institutes in India. His last assignment was Director, Institute of Management, Development and Research, Pune.

He has designed and delivered over 50 Assessment & Development Centres in India and abroad for senior and mid-level managers. Atul specialises in using the Action Science (Chris Argyris et al) approach to organisation consulting. His work in consulting is based on the socio-technical systems approach. He has also been trained in the socio-economic approach to management at ISEOR, Lyon, France. ISEOR is a research organisation affiliated to the University of Lyon.

Ronita Chattopadhyay is a development professional working primarily at the intersection of process documentation and qualitative research. She has 15 years of experience, mainly in child protection, adolescent reproductive and sexual health and nutrition and education. She is particularly interested in understanding children/adolescents’ perspectives and experiences, vulnerabilities and resilience and the intersection of these with development interventions.  She is committed to promoting multistakeholder perspectives in development narratives.

She has been involved in process documentation initiatives that span brief project periods (1-3 years) to the evolution of flagship programmes and organisations (10-25 year time periods). This latter set includes tracing the growth of initiatives for children living in and around Sealdah Railway station in Kolkata, West Bengal (client: Child in Need Institute; time period covered: 20 years), for migrant children at brick kilns across two districts in West Bengal (client: Save the Children; time period covered: 10 years) and the journey of community-owned schools (Bodhshalas) in deprived urban and rural locations in Rajasthan (client: Bodh Shiksha Samiti; time period covered: 10-20 years).

Ronita has also been a part of several research assignments. This includes three concurrent studies in the disaster management domain for the humanitarian agency RedR (client: UNICEF India Country Office).  The studies looked at (1) adolescent participation in decision making in their lives and in disaster management (2) understanding multistakeholder capacities on child-centred disaster risk reduction (3) provisioning of services for children and mothers within disaster management plans. The studies were conducted in Odisha, Jammu and Kashmir and Assam. She has also participated in a research study on using technology to disrupt commercial sexual exploitation of children in India for Changemantras. This study was commissioned by the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery.

She has developed guidebooks and training manuals on child protection (for Child Welfare Committees and Child Protection Committees) and adolescent development (for counsellors at Adolescent Friendly Health Clinics) in West Bengal, India. These guidebooks and manuals were commissioned by state agencies and developed in collaboration with partner organisations/entities such as UNICEF state office for West Bengal; Terre des Hommes, Lausanne and Department of Applied Psychology, University of Calcutta. She has also developed a bilingual toolkit for supporting parents of deaf children to organise themselves as groups across varied contexts in India (client: Deaf Child Worldwide). She has provided training to organisations, ranging from those at grassroots to international NGOs, on process documentation across multiple states in India.

She has worked full time at NGO Child in Need Institute undertaking programme management, process documentation and knowledge sharing roles. She also worked briefly in an editorial capacity with the NGO Sristi.

Ronita completed M.A. in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai, India) in 2004. Prior to this, she completed a post-graduate diploma in print journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (New Delhi, India). She also worked for two years on The Weekend and The Strategist supplements of the financial daily Business Standard.

Joyatri Ray is currently the Director of Equitable Tourism Options (EQUATIONS), a research, campaign, and advocacy organisation working on tourism and development issues in India. EQUATIONS collaborates closely with other organisations and peoples movements to encourage people-centered forms of tourism & policies that ensure significant local benefits and take into account the negative impacts of an unbridled growth of tourism. She has worked for almost two and half decades on the issue of Gender based violence, primarily anti-human trafficking in various capacities. She has worked extensively to incorporate child safe practices in the private sector in general and particularly in the tourism sector. She has designed and facilitated processes to engage the tourism industry - organised and unorganised tourism service providers to integrate child protection mechanisms within their business operations and facilitated formation of a network of civil society organisations on the issue of child protection in travel and tourism. She has worked extensively in India while working with child protection organisations and Government bodies across the globe.

Veena has been working as a freelance consultant since January 2009 after a career spanning 30 years with the British Council in India and 5 years with its office in Ukraine. From the late 1980s and early 1990s, she led their programmes in Health and Social Development while in Kolkata and then was their HIV and Human Rights Adviser in Ukraine where she was invited to develop the organisation’s profile in these themes.

She initiated programmes for the British Council and the British Government on prevention of HIV and AIDS amongst Sex Workers in West Bengal, Disabilities, Violence Against Women, Child Protection and particularly child sexual abuse, Trafficking of women and children, Adolescent Reproductive and Sexual Health, amongst other social issues. During the implementation of the HIV and AIDS programme, she established herself as an international consultant as well, undertaking assignments for UN agencies (WHO, UNAIDS, UNICEF, UNDP)  in Eastern Europe first to undertake KABP studies and then as a trainer for both government agencies and NGOs who intended to work with vulnerable populations on HIV prevention.

Her recent assignments include evaluation of three programmes funded by the AzimPremji Philanthropic Initiatives, one each on Adolescent Reproductive and Sexual Health, Trafficking and more recently Prevention of Domestic Violence.

Experience showed her that most of the issues cut across all socio-economic sections of society.  Silence, denial, shame and stigma are common factors too and therefore most cases are not reported, thus denying survivors emotional and legal justice.

Krithika Balu is a practicing human rights lawyer and legal researcher, currently based in Bengaluru, India. She is a graduate of the MA Human Rights programme of University College London (UCL) and has an LL.B. degree from the Jindal Global Law School, Sonepat. Krithika has previously worked for organisations like the Human Rights Law Network in Kolkata, where she undertook pro-bono litigation for Rohingya refugees and other marginalised communities in West Bengal, as well as the Centre for Law and Policy Research in Bangalore, where she did anti-discrimination litigation, research and advocacy, as an Equality Fellow. She has also worked as a consultant and research associate for ChangeMantras, Kolkata, where she focused on initiatives relating to tackling the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEoC) across India. Krithika is currently an independent legal practitioner, who divides her time between providing pro-bono legal assistance for marginalised persons and carrying out research in the fields of anti-human trafficking, transgender rights and reproductive rights.

Dr. Chandrani Dasgupta is a social scientist with special interest in issues of mental health, development and migration. She has a Ph.D. in social sciences from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her doctoral research was on resilience of adolescents living with armed conflict in Kashmir. Her forte is designing multi-dimensional research and tools for data collection as well as analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data.

Her research topics pivot around people in distress such as victims of natural disasters, armed conflict, human trafficking and forced labour. Over the past 6 years she has studied rehabilitation needs and interventions for survivors of trafficking in India besides working on policy development. She has conducted quasi experimental studies to evaluate efficacy of Dance Movement Therapy on survivors of trafficking and sexual violence living in institutional set up. She was also part of the team drafting the Anti-trafficking Bill and Protocols for Ministry of Women and Child Development India. She has been part of several studies aimed at understanding issues such as stigma, systemic barriers and contextual realities of survivors, social workers, duty bearers and funders with respect to human trafficking.

Currently she is based out of Singapore where she is deeply involved in understanding manifestations of forced labour among migrant workers in domestic and non domestic sectors. She continues to work with non governmental organizations in India as a freelance researcher. She has also taught few classes on mental health, rights perspective, social theories and qualitative methodology in a certificate program.

Chandrani is excited about working on complex issues with the aim of translating knowledge into action. She is adept in using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS).

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