Our Diary

Offered by the New Delhi, India-based development research, praxis and communication team KRITI, Our Diary is a yearly publication that brings together information on people's movements from India and across the globe.

Produced each year since 2000, Our Diary documents and recounts the voices of various grassroots/people’s movements for the protection of, and against the denial of, social, cultural, economic and political rights from all over India and other parts of the world. These movements include protests, campaigns, and struggles, of tribals, students, women, peasants, workers, dalits and the marginalised, around issues of social- and gender-based inequalities/injustice, ideology, political representation and freedom, the environment, communalism, nuclearisation, skewed development policies, cultural imperialism, and the like. Each edition of the diary reflects the diversity of efforts to mobilise - individually and collectively - for justice, equality, and freedom in India, as well as the challenges those movements pose for the present and the future in terms of claiming the rights of India's citizens. A few of the particular issues explored in the 2006 Our Diary, for example, include:

• Resistance poetry
• The story of an uprising against alcohol
• Activism in the student movement
• Struggles against displacement
• The World Social Forum
• The peace movement

Designed for communication for development practitioners and activists, this bilingual (English and Hindi) resource includes features such as a daily planner; annual updates of experiences and issues raised by different movements covered in the diary; a movement map that marks locations of these struggles; contact addresses of movement support groups and resource centres; and references on movements’ information. Offered in 2 sizes, it is presented in a colourful format, with images and illustrations that are designed to provoke the reader to think and act.

The text in the Diary each year gets transferred into and becomes part of a related KRITI publication called Movement Features; that way it becomes a research document rather than remaining a diary for a year.

KRITI works on development and human rights issues in collaboration with grassroots activists, civil society organisations, students, and the community at large. As part of KRITI's efforts to share development information, the organisation has published the annual Our Diary to document people's movements, to the end of recognising and creating solidarity with people's struggles in enabling social change.