SMDT works in 5 areas for development of equitable communities.

• Education
• Health and Nutrition
• Environmental sustainability
• Livelihood empowerment
• Sports development.

At SMDT, we started with a simple thought of educating the rural children back in 1960. Needless to say, the idea of educating children stems from the want for a better and sustainable future, one that sustains the communities and the environment that they inhabit. Over the past few decades, while we continued to address education singularly, we also realized that there was a growing need to address other sections of the society.

When we observed that attendance in our school was lowering due to ill health, we went to the villages and realized that ill health stemmed from malnutrition. When we assessed reasons for malnutrition, we realized that lack of consistent income and a denigrate attitude towards women resulted in ill health of the mother resulting in weak children. While we addressed maternal health, we realized that financial and ideological dependence on the earning member of the family deprived them from taking decisions that suited their and the child’s health. When we started addressing financial independence for women, we also realized that overall family income from the breadwinners had depleted, due to the inequalities that modern agriculture was facing.

Until family income wouldn’t improve, spend on education, preventive healthcare for the children and family will not improve. The wife won’t be able to plan a healthy pregnancy, and healthy children won’t be born, leading to low attendance in schools and lesser IQ. This would impair employability once these children graduated and further lead to unemployment. Once the dots were all placed on the board, all we had to do was connect. SMDT devised community participation based developmental model wherein most sections of the society are involved in development without singularizing any single section or issue.

Our conviction for a more equitable and just society keeps pushing us ahead towards achieving this goal. “Come and join us to help create a better society.”