I thought I knew how to listen.
I packed my bags for Nandurbar, thinking I was prepared. I knew the challenges of tribal communities, forest rights, and child marriage. I’d read about them and discussed them. I even knew Marathi. What I didn’t know was how much I didn’t know.
The moment I stepped into a tribal village(Thanepada, Nandurbar) and tried to hold a conversation, the language fractured into dialects I barely recognized. I caught fragments, guessed at the rest, and smiled through the silences. That gap between the Marathi I knew and the one they spoke felt like a metaphor for everything that followed. I had arrived with a translator in my head for a language nobody there was speaking.
When the Stakes Become Real
My first day at the Collector’s office was surreal. I’d never been inside a government building in any official capacity. And then Collector Mittali Sethi walked in. We were invited to a meeting where officials presented problems: infrastructure, livelihoods, land rights, and the future of Toranmal. I noticed something happening inside me that I had experienced before. In college, when a problem is introduced, you dig deep to ask whether the problem given is the real problem or something else. But here, I wasn’t asking. I was listening. And not just to what was being said, but to what was underneath it. Mittali ma’am speculated on futures, on possibilities. She wasn’t solving; she was imagining. I recognized that move. We’d practiced it in Design Methods, Designing the Now, and Designing the Future Studio. Here, the stakes were real.
Feeling the Floor Shift
Child marriage was, until Nandurbar, something I knew as a statistic, an abstract injustice from somewhere else. I grew up in Mumbai, and it genuinely felt like a different country’s problem. Sitting across from the officer who helped the women who had lived it, who told their stories, because for them it was simply what had happened, I felt the floor shift. I wasn’t prepared. And the not-being-prepared was important. Because the officials I met at the Khushibaby office weren’t waiting for a first-year design student from Mumbai to arrive and maybe solve for them. They mentioned that the tribal women had built entire systems of resilience. They had also built walls, learned to fear the police, and shaped their sense of possibility around what had been possible for their mothers. Their mental models had been formed by necessity. And I sat there with all my design tools and realized, quietly, that no workshop can redesign a mental model that took decades to build.
What I could do — what anyone can do — is listen. Not perform listening. Actually listen. It means noticing how much comfort you extend before someone will share something real with you. The way you receive what they say either opens or closes the door.
The Gap Between Policy and Reality
Choosing a final project after those conversations felt almost beside the point. But the “Community Forest Rights” (CFR) work gave us somewhere useful to put the energy.
Our final project grew out of conversations with CFR officials. CFR is a policy that, on paper, grants tribal communities legal ownership over their forests. In practice, most people in those villages had never heard the word, let alone understood what rights it afforded them. The gap between what exists and what is known felt like the kind of design problem worth working on. We decided to make a documentary: what people think CFR is, what it actually is, and how it could change the socio-economic structure of a village if people knew they could use it.
Get Siddhi Vaity’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
But the conversations taught me something harder. People talked about how green the jungles looked before CFR arrived. Nobody dared go out during the day, so the forests were preserved by fear. As soon as CFR gave people ownership, everything changed. Fields appeared everywhere. The mountains lost their greenery. People cut down trees and started farming. It was no longer about preserving the jungle; it was about filling stomachs and claiming ownership. CFR was meant for a good cause. It didn’t necessarily do the job it intended. Sometimes the most well-designed policy lands in a context it was never designed for.
Make Them Feel You Are Nobody New
Filming was a lesson in itself. You cannot shove a camera into a space and expect truth to come out. We learnt early that the key was never the interview itself; it was the hour before it. Sitting with people. Asking about their fields, their children, and what they ate that morning. Making yourself a slightly less strange presence. A CFR researcher named Ganesh told us something I keep returning to: “Make them feel you are nobody new.” Don’t be a guest. Be someone who has always been there. Give people their importance back.
And the small things mattered enormously. Accepting water when it was offered. Eating mangoes straight off the tree when someone held one out. Dancing at a tribal wedding when the circle opened for you. These weren’t gestures of goodwill; they were the price of admission into trust. Every time I said yes to something offered, a small formality dissolved.
Building a Career Around a Gap
I met Dr Urvashi Walvi at a PHC centre, a woman who had completed her MBBS and had come back to Nandurbar. She didn’t return because she had no other options. She returned by choice, because people here would trust her. Because there are things women in these villages simply cannot bring themselves to say to a male doctor. I’ve thought about her often since. The simplicity and weight of that reason. She built a career around a gap, not an opportunity, a gap that she understood better than any outsider could. She is doing design, in a sense, just isn’t calling it that.
We decided to create a separate interview series alongside the documentary on women’s empowerment, on the act of dreaming bigger than your circumstances suggest is allowed. Not as inspirational content, but as proof. As something young girls in those villages might see and recognise as being about them.
Empathy Cannot Be Mapped
Design school had given me methods. Nandurbar gave me the context in which those methods either hold or collapse. Empathy mapping makes sense in a classroom. In a village, empathy is slower, more physical, and far less tidy. You cannot map your way into trust. You can only earn it incrementally, by showing up and not making the conversation about yourself.
India is vast, complex, and full of people whose lives are shaped by systems that predate them. Bringing change here is genuinely hard, not because people don’t want it, but because the conditions that resist change are old and structural and often invisible to those of us arriving from cities with clipboards and good intentions.
What I will leave with is not certainty. It’s a set of better questions. And the quiet understanding that the most important design skill I can develop, more than systems thinking, more than prototyping, more than any framework, is the ability to truly listen to someone until they feel that they have been heard.
I came to Nandurbar as a design student. I’m leaving as someone who finally understands what design is in service of.
#BITSDesignSchool
#BITSCommunityProject
#DesignForImpact
#DesignForChange
#StudentVoice
#DesignWithCommunities
