E-Paper
A canal, a school, 200 toilets: Actor Rajshri Deshpande’s new double role
Deshpande has been spending part of her time in drought-prone rural Maharashtra, helping rebuild in a village called Pandhari. “My father was a cotton farmer and I can never forget his struggle,” she says.
Actor Rajshri Deshpande, 39, is leading a bit of a double life. She’s best known for playing Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s wife in Sacred Games, Urdu novelist Ismat Chughtai in Manto and Lakshmi the fierce maid in Angry Indian Goddesses. But for the last five years, she’s been spending part of her time in Pandhari village in Maharashtra’s coastal Ratnagiri district.
In 2018, she started a non-profit organisation, Nabhangan Foundation and has been working with the villagers to restore water supply from a nearby river, rebuilt the village school, and secured government funds for 200 toilets, all of which are now in use.
Deshpande grew up in Marathwada, the cane- and cotton-growing region of Maharashtra that is home to some of India’s wealthiest farmers and some of its poorest, some of its richest lands and some of its most arid. Her father was a cotton farmer. After their drought-prone plot was acquired for industrial development, she says she saw him struggle to support his wife and three daughters.
That left a lasting impression. Even before the non-profit, she volunteered steadily — in Srinagar after the floods of 2014, in Nepal after the earthquake of 2015, at a shelter home for trafficked girls in Mumbai.
Five years ago, she travelled in the drought-affected villages of Marathwada for three months. She says she realised that tweets and donations weren’t a real answer. Change would only come if she stayed and worked on the ground.
So she decided to focus on Pandhari, a village where an old woman said to her, on her first visit, “I thought you were from the government. You’re just here to talk. I thought you were here to so something for us.” “That hit me hard,” Deshpande says.
Her first project was clearing out a dried-up canal. That needed ₹1.5 lakh, which she raised through donations from friends. For 15 days, 50 farmers worked in shifts, cleaning and dredging. They continue to do clean-ups every year.
Deshpande then spent hours in government offices, with the village sarpanch, petitioning and finally being allotted funds for toilets. Over a year, 200 toilets were built in the village of about 250 families.
The project she’s proudest of, she says, is the restoring of the zilla parishad school. “I studied in a very small school. We used to sit on the floor. There was one toilet, whose door was always open. I thought all classrooms smelt like pee. I never thought of it as a dirty smell. Here, I wanted to help create a school with hygiene, books, sports equipment,” Deshpande says.
She needed a lot more money than for the canal, so in 2018 she decided to register her non-profit. “I then raised money from crowd-funding campaigns, from friends, from villagers who could donate. Someone gave me ₹11. A clerk who earns ₹11,000 per month gave me ₹1,001. I felt overwhelmed by the way people came forward to help,” Deshpande says.
The restoration of the school was finished during the lockdown. “Our school was breaking down. Rajshri Ma’am came to us as an angel,” says sarpanch Deepak More. “She got the permission, raised the money, employed villagers in the work and finished the school. She also got water to our village, set up 200 toilets and transformed our lives.”
Deshpande is now working with a neighbouring village called Pokhari, where she has opened a community centre for women to learn to sew. “I plan to keep Nabhangan small and do a sustainable work to improve villages and empower them to carry on the work. I’m also an actor. I want to continue doing memorable things in both worlds,” she says.
Deshpande will next be seen in a thriller with Jimmy Shergill, a Netflix show with Madhuri Dixit-Nene, and at the women’s sewing centre in Pokhari.
