In the 1990s, in a village of about 300 people in Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh, there was exactly one place where news from the outside world arrived: a tea shop. Electricity had reached the village only in 1995. There was no school beyond Class 5, no library, no community space. But every day, a newspaper came to that tea shop.
Vimal Jat, the co-founder and CEO of Synergy Sansthan, then a young boy from a labourer’s family, would stand there and wait.
“We would stand there for hours,” he recalls. “Some people would read it and some would leave it. After that, we would get the opportunity to read it.”
It is a small detail, but it says something about the shape of Vimal’s childhood: curiosity without access, ambition without a clear path, and the habit of finding knowledge in whatever cracks were available. He was the first person in his family to go to school. His two elder sisters had been married off young, never having sat in a classroom. Till Class 5, he walked 3 kilometres to the next school. Till Class 12, it was 10 kilometres. His father and mother both did daily labour on a small farm, and once Vimal finished school, the expectation was clear: the eldest son earns.
Indore, Rs. 900, and the Long Road to Graduation
Vimal arrived in Indore with, as he puts it, “a lot of fear, a lot of expectations.” His father had arranged for him to go through a contact, since Indore was the nearest city where people from the region went looking for work. The deal was that he could study, but he had to support himself.
His first job was at a screen painting shop, for Rs. 900 a month. He worked in several such places over the next two to three years, sometimes running back to the village, wondering what he was doing, then returning again. It took him that long just to adjust to city life. By the final year of his graduation, he had set his sights on an MBA. It was 2001, people were talking about it as a guaranteed route to a job, and he had started saving.
Then, during a break back in the village, a friend told him about an opening with CARE India, which was looking for a community organiser who could work locally across a few villages. Vimal joined for the money, and to keep the option of studying open.
He did not expect what came next.
“I got a chance to see the village from a different perspective,” he says. “I got a chance to talk to people and understand their problems. And when I used to leave the village every day, it was a different kind of happiness. It was a different kind of fun. I had never seen a village like this before.”
He started asking people whether there was a formal field of education for this kind of work. Someone mentioned social work. He dropped the MBA plan entirely, enrolled in the social work master’s programme at Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya in Indore in 2004, and never looked back.
Eighteen Students, No Faculty, and a Question About Purpose
The social work course Vimal joined was new, running for the first time, with no permanent faculty and no proper classroom. Eighteen students enrolled, they did not know each other. What they discovered, once they started talking, was that their stories were strikingly similar: most had come from small villages, had scraped through school against the odds, and had arrived at university carrying years of struggle that no curriculum was designed to address.
Since the course was not giving them what they needed, they decided to build it themselves. They went beyond their assigned field placements, visiting each other’s sites, planning activities together, running sessions on issues the course was not covering.
“Very organically, out of the group of 18 people, we decided to do something beyond the course,” Vimal tells The Logical Indian. “Every week we had field placement for two days. But we went beyond each other’s fields to do some activities, to plan some new things.”
As graduation neared, 8 of the 18 decided they wanted to continue working together. They spent months debating the purpose, the name, the approach. They came up with around 150 names before settling on Synergy, a word suggested because they were people coming from different places, meeting together, and trying to create something larger than any one of them could alone.
In 2006, Synergy Sansthan was formally registered; it operates today with a team of 141 members. The founders were young men who had themselves grown up in rural families, each of them having struggled through the same narrow corridors of access and expectation that they now wanted to widen for others.
An 8×8 Room and a Lot of Pushback
In 2007, Vimal and co-founder Ajay Pandit volunteered to do the first on-ground work, later joined by Vishnu Jaiswal in 2010. They chose Harda, a small district of Madhya Pradesh with around five lakh people, roughly half of them from ST and SC communities, and a significant portion living in forest villages in the Satpura Valley. From the outside, Harda looked like fertile, manageable terrain. From the inside, it was layered with caste and gender discrimination and almost entirely overlooked by civil society organisations.
Their office was an 8×8 room where they also slept. They set up a small library, started meeting young people, and began to understand the ground.
The challenges came immediately and from multiple directions. Vimal’s family could not understand what he was building or how it would sustain itself. Friends who had taken regular jobs told him he was being foolish. Even within civil society circles, the assumption was that young people starting out did not really know what they were doing. “We didn’t know what to do, but we set up an organisation.”
It was, Vimal now reflects, a harder ecosystem to operate in than today. There was little institutional support for grassroots organisations led by young founders, and almost no public conversation about the specific needs and aspirations of rural youth.
Child Labour, Police Cases, and a Change of Approach
Synergy’s early ground work brought them face to face with something they had not fully anticipated: children working in bonded conditions across the district. Young people who should have been in school were labouring for farmers, with their wages often going directly to adults who controlled their families.
“When you call it child labour, people don’t have that much sensitivity,” Vimal explains. “But if you look at it according to one definition, all of them are in bondage because they don’t want to go to work on their own.”
The team worked to bring more than 100 children out of bonded labour and helped them access education. But it came at a serious cost. Farmers were antagonised. Police cases were filed. Entire communities started shutting out the families whose children had been helped. Synergy’s team faced hostility in the very villages they were trying to reach.
The experience forced a harder question: what did it mean to pull one child out of a field without touching the poverty, exclusion, and lack of opportunity that had put them there? After five to six years of this work, Synergy shifted. Rather than crisis-response, they moved toward something more structural: building leadership in young people from the ground up, so that change was not imposed from outside but grown from within communities.
Yuvalaya: A Space That Actually Belongs to Young People
The programme Synergy built around this thinking is called Yuvalaya, meaning “house for youth.” The idea came directly from an observation that runs through everything Vimal says about his own upbringing: young people in rural India have almost no spaces that belong to them. Families, schools, and community institutions are all structured around adult decision-making. Young people are expected to follow.
What started as a single Yuvalaya centre in Harda has since grown to 13 Youth Resource Centres running across 9 districts of Madhya Pradesh, each covering 10 to 15 villages and staffed by a team of four.
Young people enrol and move through a structured one-year journey built around four expanding circles: self, family, society, and system.
“It is a non-judgmental and young people-led ownership space,” Vimal says. “No one judges them.”
The process starts with questions that most institutions never ask: who am I, what do I fear, what do I want, how do I learn? From there it moves outward, to how young people navigate family relationships and negotiate with parents rather than either surrendering or running away. Then to the community and its problems. Then to understand how systems work and how they can be changed.
People go on group exposures to other organisations, carry out community action projects, and eventually take on individual internships of 21 days. The design is not about delivering knowledge to passive recipients. It is about building people who can think, negotiate, and act.
UDAAN: When Girls Needed Their Own Room
While working through Yuvalaya, Synergy kept noticing something: the barriers facing girls were not just larger in scale, they were different in kind. Families were more resistant. Mobility was more restricted. The decisions made about their lives, marriage, education, work, were made earlier and with less room for their own voice.
UDAAN started as a specific fellowship for girls aged 16 to 21. Each cohort of 30 fellows goes through a rigorous selection process, including interviews and home visits. Once selected, each fellow designs and leads her own social action project in her village, working with younger girls between 10 and 19 years old. Fellows receive a stipend of Rs. 20,000 per year, less as an incentive and more as an acknowledgement that their time and work have value.
Now in its 10th cohort, UDAAN has produced stories across Harda and beyond that show what happens when young women from marginalised rural backgrounds are given time, support, and the latitude to decide what they want to work on.
Leather Ball, a Reluctant Coach, and 184 Teams
Around 2017-18, two UDAAN fellows came in with a project idea that nobody in Harda had tried before. They wanted to form a women’s leather ball cricket team.
The barriers were immediate. Finding even 8 or 9 girls willing to join was difficult. When they approached the Harda Cricket Association for coaching, the coach refused outright. The atmosphere in the district was already charged: there had recently been two incidents of sexual harassment by sports coaches, one in cricket and one in karate. Coaches had become wary of working with girls at all.
After repeated visits from the fellows, the coach relented to a single condition: bring a female family member along for every session, and he would teach. The girls brought their mothers and aunts. They came every day.
The mockery came along with the coaching. People watching would comment that the leather ball was too heavy for girls, that the pitch was too long, that they would get hurt and quit. They kept playing.
By the end of the first year, they had a team. By the end of the second, they were the first registered women’s leather ball cricket team in Harda district, having organised the first ever women’s cricket tournament in the district, drawing teams from three districts.
Synergy extended the experiment over three years, training girls across 15 villages for cricket tournaments. Then came the next idea, one that Vimal says even his own team doubted: mixed-gender cricket.
“Our team also thought that this is not possible. How will this happen?” he says. “But the team was formed.”
The rules were designed to give girls genuine participation rather than token inclusion: seven girls and four boys per team, girls-only captainship, girls to bat for the first four wickets, girls to bowl four of the six overs. In the first edition of what has since grown into the Samaveshi Cup, 64 teams participated and the community contributed Rs. 3 to 4 lakh to run the event. The following year, 102 teams. The year after that, 184 teams from 8 districts, still with girls leading.
What Society Keeps Getting Wrong About Young People
When we ask Vimal to describe what drew him to this work, the conversation turns to something that bothers him deeply: the narrowness of how institutions, whether government, corporations, or civil society organisations, tend to think about young people.
He identifies three dominant frames, and finds all three inadequate.
The first is the economic frame: young people as a demographic dividend, as a pool of cheap, trainable labour. “Two months of training, four months of training, and then you come to the companies on a certain salary,” he says. “But to look at young people overall, to bring out their potential, that kind of work has not always happened.”
The second is the problem frame: young people as a source of social risk, as potential drug users or criminals who need to be rehabilitated. Programmes built on this view are designed to fix a problem, not support a person.
The third, and perhaps the most insidious, is the instrumentalisation frame. Politicians and leaders regularly celebrate youth as the future in their speeches, while using young people as volunteers for rallies, as footsoldiers for campaigns, as vehicles for someone else’s agenda.
“There is never this view,” Vimal tells The Logical Indian, “that what is the problem of young people, what are their needs, what are their challenges, what are their aspirations.”
What is missing, in his reading, is the simplest starting point: take young people seriously as people, not as a resource to be deployed.
Hamrahi: Supporting the Next Generation of Organisations
By 2023, Synergy had spent roughly 15 years in Harda testing and refining its approach. Young people who had come through its programmes had gone to universities, started organisations, entered panchayats, become village heads, joined national fellowships. The model had held up through external evaluations. Vimal and his colleagues felt it was time to take it elsewhere, not by expanding Synergy itself, but by building an ecosystem.
This thinking produced Hamrahi, a two-year incubation programme for early-stage youth-led organisations elsewhere in Madhya Pradesh. It draws directly on what Synergy’s own founders wish they had access to in 2006 and 2007: support on organisational vision and culture, leadership development for co-founders, help designing contextual programmes, and guidance on finding resources and visibility.
Participating organisations receive Rs. 1.5 lakh in funding, 24 days of in-person workshops over two years, and ongoing online support. After a pilot with five organisations, the current cohort runs with 15.
Synergy has also started annual youth conferences bringing together over 300 stakeholders across civil society, government, media, and young people themselves.
The Numbers Behind the Work
Across 19 years of work spanning 21 districts, the scale of Synergy’s ground-level impact is visible in a few key figures. Over one lakh youth have been directly impacted, with five lakh people reached directly and indirectly. More than 1,200 youth-led social action projects have been initiated, and over 400 youth leader fellows have come through the programmes. Thirty youth-led campaigns have been run across communities, with local change ranging from securing streetlights to advocating for menstrual health access in anganwadis. Twenty youth-led early-stage partner organisations are now active across Madhya Pradesh, across 9 districts of direct intervention.
In 2021, Synergy received the National Youth Award from the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, Government of India, followed by the Social Impact Award from SPJIMR in the Sustainability category in 2024.
The Road Ahead: 2026 to 2030
After nearly two decades anchored in Harda, Synergy is now in a deliberate phase of scaling its tested models across Madhya Pradesh and, selectively, into neighbouring states like Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, where the challenges facing rural and tribal youth are similar.
The plan moves on three tracks. The first is continuing to deepen and expand Youth Resource Centres (YRCs) and UDAAN fellowship models across more districts, including aspirational districts and the state capital. The second is partnerships and knowledge sharing: supporting early-stage youth-led organisations through Hamrahi, codifying training modules and leadership curricula from Synergy’s own experience, and building communities of practice across the sector. The third is ecosystem building: engaging with government institutions to influence youth-related policies, and positioning Synergy as a knowledge and technical resource for the broader youth development field.
By 2030, Synergy aspires to directly reach 1 lakh adolescents and youth in Madhya Pradesh, anchor a collective of 50-plus organisations driving the youth agenda across the state, and indirectly influence the lives of 1 million young people.
“The aspiration is that in the near future, there should be an organisation in every district of Madhya Pradesh where young people who are working there can get support,” Vimal says. “How can we keep young people at the center? How can we build these lanes in the institutions and government bodies working with young people?”
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
Vimal Jat grew up in a village where a shared newspaper at a tea shop was the window to the world. He is now spending his working life making sure that young people in similar villages have something better than a leftover newspaper: a space, a process, and people who take their aspirations seriously.
“The population of rural, tribal, and semi-urban young people is very large and their challenges are very different,” he says. “Before 14 years of age, there will be a discussion about marriage, employment, and jobs. Before that, they don’t know what their dream and aspiration is. They don’t know how to strive for it.”
He is not sentimental about what he does. He is precise about why the investment matters. “Our experience tells us that this investment multiplies. The work that we have done is influencing hundreds of young people positively. It doesn’t stop and it is sustainable.”
