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ACHRC

Our work

Defined pieces of work, with a start, a method, and an end

A programme is a standing commitment. A project is a specific thing we said we would do, in a place, over a period, to a method we can describe. These are ours.

See the programme streams

Running now

Currently in the field

Each of these is active, staffed, and accountable to a named stream of the society's registered objects.

Ongoing

Know Your Rights — Mandal Circuit

Period
2023 — present
Location
Ranga Reddy and Hyderabad districts
  • Rights literacy
  • Community outreach
  • Multilingual facilitation

A repeating circuit of neighbourhood rights sessions held in the language of the locality, sized so that participants set the agenda rather than sit through one.

Each sitting is capped at roughly thirty people. We open with what the law actually guarantees at a police station, a ration shop, a government hospital, and a municipal office, then spend the larger half of the session on whatever the room raises. Facilitators carry printed rights cards in Telugu, Urdu, Hindi, and English, and leave them behind.

How it runs

  • Sessions run in four languages with locally recruited facilitators
  • Printed rights cards distributed at every sitting
  • Follow-up desk hours offered in the same locality within the fortnight
Ongoing

The RTI Clinic

Period
2022 — present
Location
Hyderabad, with correspondence support statewide
  • Right to Information
  • Drafting assistance
  • Appeals guidance

A drafting desk that helps citizens frame Right to Information requests precisely enough that they cannot be brushed aside on a technicality.

Most RTI applications fail on form, not on merit — the wrong authority, an overbroad question, a request for opinion rather than record. We sit with the applicant, identify the correct Public Information Officer, narrow the question to documents that must exist, and explain the first-appeal timeline before the application is ever filed.

How it runs

  • Applicants leave with a filed-ready draft and a diarised appeal date
  • Standard templates published free on the Resources page
  • Refusals reviewed to decide whether a first appeal is worth filing
Ongoing

Documentation Desk

Period
2021 — present
Location
Telangana
  • Documentation
  • Research
  • Confidentiality

A standing record of what people report to us, kept to an evidentiary standard so that patterns can be described without exposing any individual.

Every account is recorded with consent, dated, and stored against a reference number. Identifying details stay in the confidential register and never enter a publication. What we publish are patterns — the recurrence of a demand, the office it attaches to, the month it clusters in — and only where the underlying records would survive a hostile reading.

How it runs

  • Consent recorded before any account enters the register
  • Complainant identity separated from published analysis
  • Corrections issued on the record when we get something wrong
Ongoing

Transparency Fellows

Period
2024 — present
Location
Hyderabad
  • Youth leadership
  • Civic education
  • Public finance literacy

A short, unpaid fellowship that teaches college students to read a public document properly before they form an opinion about it.

Fellows spend a cycle learning to read budget lines, tender notices, and audit observations, and to trace a scheme from sanction to delivery. The exercise is deliberately unglamorous. Those who complete it are usually the first to notice that most public failure is administrative rather than dramatic.

How it runs

  • Structured curriculum on reading public records
  • Each fellow completes one supervised documentation exercise
  • Cohort review published without naming individual fellows
Ongoing

Welfare Access Guidance

Period
2021 — present
Location
Hyderabad and surrounding mandals
  • Welfare entitlements
  • Documentation support
  • Grievance routing

Help with the paperwork that stands between an eligible household and a benefit it is already entitled to.

Pensions, scholarships, ration entitlements, and disability certification fail more often on documentation than on eligibility. We explain which document is actually required, what the sanctioned timeline is, and where the grievance route sits if the timeline passes. We do not promise an outcome and we do not act as an intermediary with any office.

How it runs

  • Eligibility and document checklists explained in plain language
  • Statutory timelines diarised with the applicant
  • Referral to the correct grievance authority where a timeline lapses

Concluded

Work that has finished

We keep completed projects listed rather than quietly removing them. What we did is part of the record whether or not it is still running.

Completed

Election Literacy Drive

2023 — 2024 · Telangana

Process-only voter education: how to register, how to verify a roll entry, what a polling officer may and may not ask, and how to report an irregularity.

Take part

Most of this runs on people who turn up reliably

Projects need facilitators, translators, and people willing to read a document slowly. None of it requires a legal background.

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