Swapnil

Work area : Gwalior and Shivpuri districts, Madhya Pradesh

Swapnil Shukla is a graduate of National Law University, Odisha. His work involves identifying existing socio-legal issues in the region as well as in the state, which highlight violations of basic human rights, and social welfare legislations, and finding remedies to these issues using administrative and legal channels.

He has been working in Shivpuri and Gwalior on various issues related to education, environment conservation, forest rights, and manual scavenging. Through Zenith Society for Socio-Legal Empowerment, run at Shivpuri with the help of volunteers and law students, he provides legal services to communities and other organizations.

He has organised campaigns to clean water bodies, engaged the administration to recognise the needs of marginalised communities like the Sahariya adivasis, secure support and better treatment for workers who are suffering from silicosis, alongside try to improve the education opportunities available to them.

He believe that the law is an efficient tool to bring social change and this can only be done by putting the knowledge of law in the hands of people and also making them self-sufficient to be able to effectively use it. A strong community action as the means to tackle various social inequalities is a way forward and therefore, he is involved in conducting various awareness-building training and other educational programs in villages for effective social change. Moved by the prevailing inequalities and discriminations that exist, he started the Access to Justice Program in Madhya Pradesh in April 2018.

He is currently working with two functional youth collectives – Shivpuri Jalashay Sanrakshan Abhiyan (a youth-led environment movement for ecological restoration in Shivpuri) and Shivpuri Youth Forum (Library and Resource Center for youth of Shivpuri). At a young age, he has made commendable efforts to bring local youth and young lawyers together – facilitating a fresh churning of ideas, efforts and camaraderie among their peers.