The Society (SOCHARA) was set up in 1991 after a study – reflection – action experiment from 1984-90 by a core group of Johnites – Thelma Narayan, Ravi Narayan, K. Gopinathan, Shirdi Prasad Tekur, Mani Kalliath who moved beyond the campus and got together over these early years to experiment with promoting Health For All with the community as partner. This initiative was called a study reflection action experiment and there were based in a small centre called Community Health Cell (CHC) which was facilitated by the Centre for Non-Formal and Continuing Education (CNFCE) linked to Ashirvad, Bangalore. Of these Thelma, Ravi, Gopi and Krishna Chakravarthy started working as the initial CHC team in February 1984 and are often referred to as the co-initiators.
This team of five Johnites, initially based in CHC, CNFCE were supported by a few other team members including Krishna, Nagaraja Rao V N, C James, S J Chander, M Kumar, V and M S Nagarajan with John Clarence as a Library Volunteer.
In 1990-91, a group of 6 professionals joined these 5 pioneers to register SOCHARA. Since then the Society has grown gradually with new members being invited to add value to the work and ethos of the society and bring in multi-sectoral, multi-disciplinary expertise and their own rich community or social sector experience.
A list of these members by itself does not do justice to this unique clustering – being a very significant, dimension of the SOCHARA story (which has evolved over three decades). As background to the story that is being evolved, this note describes briefly about the members and clusters them into groups relating to the ‘why’ and ‘how’ they got invited to become society members. As of today we have had 50 members of the society of which 36 are current members.
Cluster 1 – The original Johnite Pioneers
There were five pioneers – including Thelma Narayan, Ravi Narayan, K. Gopinathan, Shirdi Prasad Tekur, Mani Kalliath, from the CHC team who became original signatories to the formation of SOCHARA as a Society. The first three were team members of the Department of Community Medicine of St.
John’s Medical College, Bangalore. 1983 and the other two were graduates of the early batches interested and involved in community work. All five in their own way have helped the foundational stability of SOCHARA bringing specific interest and expertise to the Society. Thelma brought in the training, research and policy action dimension; Shirdi strengthened community health training including in the vernacular, medical and health pluralism; Mani strengthened community mental health; Gopi strengthened management particularly personnel management; Ravi contributed primarily to networking and movement building.
Cluster 2 – Professional Solidarity to form SOCHARA
Six professionals joined the pioneer in 1990 to register SOCHARA in early 1991 and brought in their own expertise making the SOCHARA, a multi-disciplinary and multi sectoral Society from the very beginning. They included C M Francis (Retired Dean, St. John’s Medical College and expert on Health and Hospital Management and Bio-ethics), Fr. Claude D’Souza (Sociologist and Social Development, in-charge of CNFCE), Valli Seshan (Community Development and one of the founder of the SEARCH Experiment), A. Arumugam (Accountancy, Financial Management and Law), Mohan Isaac (Psychiatry and Community Mental Health and the links with NIMHANS), and M J Thomas, also a Johnite (Family and Mental Health) Cluster (1) and (2) together constituted the eleven founding members of the Society in 1991.
Cluster 3 – ‘Wise Women and Wise Men’
Around eleven wise women and wise men were invited into the Society over the years, because of their commitment even when working in mainstream institution with community health and social concerns. These included George Joseph (Retd., Prof. of Community Medicine, AIIMS, New Delhi and CSI, Healing Ministry), V Benjamin (Retd., Prof. of Community Health and Development – CHAD, CMC, Vellore), D K Srinivasa (Retd., Prof. of Community Medicine and Director, Teachers Training Centre, JIPMER,
Pondicherry and RGUHS, Medical Education, Consultant), Padmasini Asuri (Regional Home Economist and Nutritionist, Govt. of India), M K Vasundhra (Retd., Prof. of Community Medicine of Mysore Medical College, Bangalore Medical College and Ambedkar Medical College), Fr. John Vattamattom (Director, Catholic Health Association of India, Secunderabad and Community Development), Vatsala Nagarajan (Retd., Prof. of Financial Management, Indian Institute of Management – Bangalore), Ravi Kapur (Prof. of Community Mental Health, NIMHANS & Deputy Director, National Institute of Advanced Studies, IISc., Bangalore), Pankaj Mehta (Prof. of Community Medicine at MSRMC and KMC, Manipal); H Sudarshan (Community Physician and Primary Health Care Innovator of VGKK in BR Hills and Karuna Trust) and Sam Joseph, (Social work and ActionAid, and Development Consultant).
Cluster 4 – Colleagues from the Community Medicine Department of St. John’s
Since the core group of the SOCHARA had their roots in the community Medicine Department of St. John’s, four others from the department joined SOCHARA as members of the Society and some of them also as a team members for a short period of time. These included S V Rama Rao (Retd. Prof. & Head of Department of Community Medicine, St. John’s and BMC); Paresh Kumar (A sociologist from St. John’s and Mysore University and later IRMA); As Mohammad (Retd. Demographer and Statistician from St.
John’s); S.B. Pruthvish (Associate Prof. of Community Medicine, St. John’s, later Prof. of Community Medicine, MSRMC, Bangalore). All of them were deeply involved with the outreach experience of St. John’s Medical College Department of Community Medicine which gradually metamorphoses into the Department of Community Health. CHC/SOCHARA in some ways was an extension of the Community Health oriented outreach work that was already ongoing in St. John’s during the second decade (1973- 82) and as these four retired from the department, they joined SOCHARA to support its evolving initiatives. Prof. Rama Rao initiated the School Health programme which the Deena Seva Sangha and Paresh and Mohammad supported the field research and the community health learning programme particularly. Pruthvish who remained connected with SOCHARA even as he moved from St. John’s to Action Aid, then Ramaiah Medical College, UNICEF and now ICMR became a society member more recently and in September 2019 has just become the President of Society, leading into the next decade.
Cluster 5 – The young brigade
From 1998 when Thelma took over as coordinator after the 1998 review she felt it was necessary to inject young, enthusiastic health professionals to the Society apart from experienced seniors and peers. These included Ravi D’Souza (Community Medicine); Ramani D’Souza (Community Medicine); Narayan Devadasan (ACCORD & Public Health); Roopa Devadasan (ACCORD & Public Health); Denis Xavier (Pharmacology Department, St. John’s); Madhukar Pai (Epidemiologist, Sundaram Medical Foundation and later McGill, Canada); Sunil Kaul (Initiator of ANT, Assam & Public Health); Neela Patel (Community Medicine & Elder Care) and Edward Premdas (Medico Social Work & Jagrutha Mahila Sanghatane – JMS, Raichur). Many of these younger professionals also became linked to SOCHARA as team members during different phases supporting various new initiatives and new directions. Today Ravi is the consultant, coordinator of the Bhopal CPHE Unit; Roopa supported the women’s and health training programme; Denis was linked for six months in between his post-graduation in Pharmacology and joining the Department of Pharmacology as faculty and therefore consider himself one of the few or only community oriented pharmacologist in the country who very recently even as Vice-Dean of St. John’s has become the new Vice-President of SOCHARA; Sunil Kaul along with the ANT team has been our strongest link, resource person and field mentor of CHLP in the North-East ; Premdas who joined SOCHARA for a year as a senior fellow also became Secretary/Coordinator from 2006 to 2011. Ramani, Deva and Madhukar have been community medicine expert involved in many ways over the year. More recently Premdas has been deeply involved with COPASAH – The Community of Practitioners on Accountability and Social Action in Health and has been involving many team members and fellows in this initiatives.
Cluster 6 – The Tamilnadu Advisors
When the Tsunami response of SOCHARA led to the gradual evolution of the Community Health Cell Extension Unit in Tamilnadu (CEU) it was felt necessary to add a local solidarity group of professionals to support the local team. These included P Chandra (Retd. Senior Paediatrician, Chennai and Health Activist); V. Shanmugavelayudhan (Retd. Prof. of Social Work, Loyola College, Chennai); V R Muraleedharan (Prof. of Humanities and Health Economist, IIT, Chennai) and Anand Zachariah (Prof. of Medicine, CMC, Vellore). All four have been active resource persons and advisors to the Chennai team and Dr. Chandra also played a very important role in the development of the Health Movement and supported the governance of SOCHARA as a Vice – President of the Society and the CHLP programme as a field mentor in Tamilnadu. Both Dr. Chandra and Prof. Shanmugavelayudhan also been strong supporters of PHM Tamilnadu (Makkal Nalavazhu Iyakkam).
Cluster 7 – Representatives of Government Health Sector and Research Institutions
We felt all along that we should not exclude resource persons with government and health department or research backgrounds if they were willing to join the society either when in service or when they retire. Over the years three of them have been invited as members including Ravi Kumar (Regional Director, Health and Family Welfare, Kendriya Sadan) who has been a great supporter of all our community action and policy engagement with government all these years; Abhijit Sengupta (Retd.
Health Secretary, Govt. of Karnataka), who played especially a key role during SOCHARA extensive engagement with the Karnataka Task Force in Health and Family Welfare and its follow-up; and S K Ghosh (Malaria Research Centre, now National Institute of Malaria Research, ICMR, Bangalore) who built partnership with SOCHARA in many initiatives in the state in Vector Borne Diseases especially in Tumkur and Mangalore. All three are also very good resources for SOCHARA to understand the workings of governmental institutions and programmes since we strongly believe in engaging with them in our efforts at policy action.
Cluster 8 – The continuing St. Johns link
All along, while SOCHARA was not formally linked to St Johns, the campus, the ethos and the overall mission of the institutions kept up the community health and primary health care vision over the years resulted in many more Johnites linking to the society as members and adding their experience and enthusiasm to the work of the Society. These have included Sr. Aquinas Edessary (Physician and initiator of CRHP, Kamagere and more recently the Swasthya Swaraj initiatives, Kalahandi, Odisha); Kishore Murthy (Health Management Consultant); Arvind Kasturi (Prof. of Community Medicine, St. John’s and Maya Mascarenhas (Community Medicine and Development Consultant, MYRADA). All of them have also actively supported governance in SOCHARA in more recent years with Sr. Aquinas being Vice- President of the Society for a few years and member of the EC; Kishore as a member of the EC; Arvind as member of the SOCHARA Institutional Scientific and Ethics Committee; and Maya as a member of EC and the Chair of Finance and Management Committee. In addition, all of them bring very rich community health experience with specific focus on certain newer sectors and dimensions and should be seen as resource persons as well. Sr. Aquinas has rich experience in community oriented primary health care; Maya in community health with a development perspective and the importance of inter- sectorality; Aravind with community health with a focus especially on elder care and Kishore on management challenges for medical and health systems.
Cluster 9 – New members post transition
Since the transition started in 2016, only three new members have been invited, more recently in 2019. These are Ganthimathi Jayaraman (in Chennai); Anjali Norohna educationist and resource person (Eklavya) in Bhopal and Gurumoorthy M (AID, Bangalore) who has also recently been appointed on 14th August, 2019 as new coordinator /Secretary of SOCHARA. Ganthimathi brings rich experience from her work in Tamilnadu for years and will add to Dr. Chandra’s long standing and continuing contribution SOCHARA; Anjali’s rich experience in education, policy action and inter-sectoral thinking through Eklavya
will help us understand the changing context of our work in today’s realities; and Guru while adding great value as the face of the new leadership will add great value to our learning programme and management strategies at SOCHARA and field level using his rich experience as information technology engineer deeply connected to the social sector, with the additional understanding of the movement dimension through the links with the AID India initiative.
Some additional significant features about the membership (This may be particularly useful for the newer membership of SOCHARA!)
- Three elder members – Fr. Claude D’Souza, C M Francis and George Joseph were also called the ‘three wise men’ since they were our informal advisors during the CHC phase – the study reflection action experiment from 1984 to 1990, before we registered as SOCHARA.
- An interesting feature of this unique clusters of SOCHARA members is the catalyst core, that has arisen out of the outreach oriented, community health inspired, St. Johns campus – where the concept of an ACHARA (Agency for Community Health Assistance to Rural Areas) emerged in the late 70s and the community health orientation of the Medical College and Department of Preventive and Social Medicine started from 1973. Those members with a St. John’s linkage include Ravi Narayan, Thelma Narayan, K Gopinathan, Shirdi Prasad Tekur, Mani Kalliath, M J Thomas, S V Rama Rao, C M Francis, Paresh Kumar, As Mohammad, S B Pruthvish – all of whom knew each other in the pre-SOCHARA – St. John’s phase. Later, Johnites from other batches got associated over the years and include Sr. Aquinas Edassery, Denis Xavier, Arvind Kasturi, Kishore Murthy and Maya Mascarenhas. At the team and fellows level including flexi fellows we have had Adithya Pradyumna, Sylvia Karpagam and Lalit Narayan. More recently there is larger number of young johnites visiting and associating with the SOCHARA sarai including Randall, Praveen, Rodney, Carl and others.
- Interestingly, the only other campus from where many others have joined SOCHARA is the community oriented, CMC Vellore campus. These include V Benjamin, Ravi D’Souza, Ramani D’Souza, Roopa Devadasan, Narayan Devadasan, Madhukar Pai, Anand Zachariah. Among the team members, we have had Chander, Rakhal, Sukanya and Rajan and many team members of the CHAD department of CMC, Vellore have been reviewers and evaluators of SOCHARA programmes helping us in learning actively from these initiatives. These have included Sara, Abraham Joseph, Shantidani Minj, P Zachariah and Kurian Thomas.
- Some of the Society members apart from the original five Johnite who were the pioneers were also team member and advisors of SOCHARA for varying periods and phases during the last few decades. These included C M Francis, V Benjamin, Paresh Kumar, Roopa Devadasan, Edward Premdas, Ravi D’Souza, Ravi Kapur, As Mohammad and Sam Joseph. Two others spent six months each with the centre before they started their teaching careers at St. John’s and they were Arvind Kasturi and Denis Xavier.
- All the society members have actually contributed to the professional work of the society and have not been only involved with the governance and management of the society. Many of them were involved with major initiatives with SOCHARA before they joined as members and many played that technical resource role even as members. Particularly in the initiative of training, research and policy engagement this contribution by members has been highly significant and should continue to be tapped as a major resource. Just as illustration the current membership includes:
- Over the years some members have passed on but continue to inspire us through the legacy of their involvement and sometimes also from the documents and publications they have given to our library (CLIC). These include the late C M Francis, V Benjamin, George Joseph, Pankaj Mehta, Paresh Kumar, Ravi Kapur, Fr. Claude D’Souza, Padmasini Asuri and more recently Vatsala Nagarajan.
- Incidentally over the years, some members did not continue their membership and a few opted to become honorary members as well. This is shown in the details table which is also attached. Even though some did not continue as members, they kept in touch.
- One of the most significant and unique features of the, nearly fifty members of SOCHARA over the last three decades, has been the interaction, working together and solidarity of six generations of mainstream and alternative enthusiasts of Health For All and Social Justice goals from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, the millennials and the current emerging generation. So apart of being multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral SOCHARA has also experienced a multi-generational interaction, shared learning and solidarity.
- Finally, as of 31st August 2019 at the 28th AGBM of SOCHARA an important transition took place with all the original founding members stepping off from team and governance responsibility and handing over to new members and younger generation team. Mohan Isaac and Thelma Narayan who had long innings in multiple phases of governance and coordinatorship roles respectively step down and handed over to new a team both at governance and coordination levels. Mani continued for a short time to bridge that gap between the old and the new. The current list of members and the EC of SOCHARA are listed out in Appendix I.
- The new core team consists of Pruthvish as President; Denis as Vice-president; Gurumoorthy M as Secretary/Coordinator; Ameer Khan and Prahlad as Co-coordinator and Nagaraj as Admin Officer supported by the EC consisting of Mohamad, Maya, Ghosh and Mani and our team members in Bengaluru, Bhopal and Chennai. With the transition now being over and several new enthusiastic members, SOCHARA moves into a new phase of energy and action.
(see also Appendix II in which the 50 members of SOCHARA have been listed out and their phases of membership and their participation in role of Executive Committee members including president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer has been shown)
(Compiled by RN/HRM, SJMAP, 31102019)
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APPENDIX: I – Current list of members as of 30th September 2019 APPENDIX: II – Membership review since 1991 till 2018
APPENDIX: I – Current list of members as of 30th September 2019
| Sl. No. | Name | Background / discipline | Current role |
| 1 | Arumugham (1991) | Chartered Accountant | Honorary Member (F) |
| 2 | Mohan Isaac (1991) | Mental Health | Member (F) |
| 3 | Ravi Narayan (1991) | Community Health | Member (F) |
| 4 | K Gopinathan (1991) | Personnel Management | Member (F) |
| 5 | Mani Kalliath (1991) | Public Health / Mental Health | EC MEMBER (F) |
| 6 | Thelma Narayan (1991) | Epidemiology / Public Health Policy | Member (F) |
| 7 | Shirdi Prasad Tekur (1991) | Child Health / Alternative Systems of Medicine | Member (F) |
| 8 | Valli Sesan (1991) | Community Development / Training | Member (F) |
| 9 | D K Srinivasa (1994) | PSM / Community Medicine / Pedagogy | Member |
| 10 | M K Vasundhra (1994) | PSM / Community Medicine | Member |
| 11 | H Sudarshan (1994) | Primary Health Care | Member |
| 12 | Fr. John Vattamattom (1997) | Social Work | Honorary Member |
| 13 | Ravi D’Souza (1999) | Community Medicine | Member |
| 14 | Madhukar Pai (1999) | Community Medicine / Epidemiology | Member |
| 15 | N Devadasan (1999) | Public Health | Member |
| 16 | Denis Xavier (1999) | Pharmacology | VICE – PRESIDENT |
| 17 | Sr. Aquinas (1999) | Medicine | Member |
| 18 | Sunil Kaul (2000) | Public Health | Member |
| 19 | As Mohammad (2000) | Bio-statistics and Demography | TREASURER |
| 20 | E. Premdas (2000) | Social Work / Law | Member |
| 21 | Ravi Kumar (2002) | Public Health | Member |
| 22 | Neela Patel (2004) | Community Medicine | Member |
| 23 | Abhijit Sengupta (2012) | IAS / Administration | Member |
| 24 | Sam Joseph (2012) | Social Development | Member |
| 25 | S K Ghosh (2012) | Entomology / Research | EC MEMBER |
| 26 | S B Pruthvish (2013) | Community Medicine | PRESIDENT |
| 27 | V R Muraleedharan (2012) | Health Economics | Member |
| 28 | P Chandra (2013) | Child Health | Member |
| 29 | Kishore Murthy (2013) | Health Management | Member |
| 30 | V. Shanmughavelayudham (2013) | Social Work | Member |
| 31 | Anand Zachariah (2013) | Medicine | Member |
| 32 | Maya Mascarenhas (2016) | Community Medicine | EC MEMBER |
| 33 | Arvind Kasturi (2016) | Community Medicine | Member (Chair – SISEC) |
| 34 | Gurumoorthy M (2019) | Engineer / Social Work | SECRETARY / COORDINATOR |
| 35 | Ganthimathi Jayaraman (2019) | Child Health | Member |
| 36 | Anjali Noronha (2019) | Alternative Education | Member |
| 37 | Priyadarsh | Community Medicine | Member |
| 38 | Prasanna Saligrama | Member | |
| 39 | Ramani D’Souza | Member | |
| 40 | Lalit Narayan | Community Medicine | Member |
| 41 | Adithya Pradyumna | Environmental Health | Member |
| 42 | Ameer Khan | Health Rights | Member |
| 43 | Prahlad I M | Sanitation | Member |
| 44 | Rahul ASGR | Member |