About - Belongg: Innovation For Inclusion

Billions of people across the world face prejudice and sub-optimal access to products and services on account of their identity: gender, disability, race, caste, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, or other markers.

Belongg focuses on research and innovation to drive intersectional inclusion in a) Technology products and b) Global development programs to better serve the needs of these users.

We believe in inclusive research and design processes and engage extensively with partner organisations and individual experts who have both topical expertise and the lived experience of identity-linked marginalisation.

We are a team of talented and passionate innovators and changemakers and would love to engage with similar organisations and individuals.

“Diversity and inclusion, which are the real grounds for creativity, must remain at the center of what we do.”

TEAM

Aishaanyaa Tewari - SENIOR ASSOCIATE, RESEARCH

Aishaanyaa completed her B.A. (Hons.) in Psychology from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University and her M.A. in Social Work (Mental Health) from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She is an Ideosync UNICEF Information Fellow, a student of restorative justice having learnt closely from Fulbright Nehru fellow Prof. Martin E. Price and dabbles in storytelling and theatre. Having worked with women who come from marginalised backgrounds and traumatic histories involving psychiatric institutionalisation, she cares deeply about inclusive and safe healthcare systems that are rights based, recovery oriented and facilitate healing from systemic harms. In order to stay in touch with the pulse of the mental health care sector, she practises on the side as a queer-informed, poly-aware, trauma informed counsellor and wants to learn more about healthcare behaviours and intersectionally diverse meanings of distress and care.

Muda Tariq - RESEARCH ASSOCIATE

Muda graduated with a Bachelor's in Political Science, followed by a postgraduate diploma in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding from Lady Shri Ram College for Women. She is passionate about working on the intersections of gender, human rights, and conflict. She is also a fellow at the LedBy Foundation and the EU-funded ALLY Project.

Nirat Bhatnagar - FOUNDER

Nirat is the founder of Belongg and has deep experience in social innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategy. In addition to Belongg, he is also a Partner at Dalberg Advisors where he focuses on strategic questions in water, sanitation, and agriculture. He is also the founder of The Slow School a venture that focuses on self-reflection and “inner work”. He studied at IIT Kharagpur & IIM Bangalore and spent several years in management consulting and technology entrepreneurship before following his heart into the world of social innovation.

Shranya Gambhir - BOOK CLUB INTERN

Shranya is the Book Club & Library Intern at Belongg. She has a BA in English and Journalism from Ashoka University. Most recently she was a fellow with Teach for India, where she taught children on issues of gender and prejudice. She is deeply invested in understanding and furthering goals of social justice and inclusive development. In her free time, you can find her reading or spending time in the kitchen, experimenting with sourdough recipes.

Rukmini Chawla Kumar - consulting advisor, belongg book club

Rukmini is a consulting advisor to the Belongg Book Club and brings her long experience in publishing to the Book Club. She is, also, currently the Consulting Editor at Penguin India and has significant experience in themes of diversity and inclusion including being involved in publishing books related to sexuality rights in India. She has also spent many years specialising in mind-body-spirit publishing and is the founder of The Healing Room, a space where mental health practitioners, doctors, alternative medicine practitioners, meditation teachers and other experts come in to talk about mental, physical and spiritual healing and wholeness.

Yoshita Srivastava - LITERATURE COLLECTIVE ASSOCIATE

Yoshita has a BA from Flame University, with a major in Literary and Culture Studies, a minor in journalism. Her experience spans working in media, publishing, and social justice, with organizations such as The Quint, Orient BlackSwan, and Aasra NGO. She believes inclusivity and diversity in representation is essential for a better future — empathy being key in dismantling hatred. She hopes to research, write, and teach a diverse literary canon. When not buried behind a book, you can find her outraging against patriarchy, drinking unhealthy amounts of coffee, and learning random trivia.

Anugraha Raman - ASSOCIATE

Anugraha is a psychology graduate from TISS who is passionate about contributing to psychological knowledge about marginalized groups, improving their mental health, sensitizing health systems, informing policy design and achieving mental health equity. She has worked with the indigenous communities of the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, assisted research on deinstitutionalized women with psychosis, and wrote her master's dissertation on the phenomenological experience of community violence in a resettlement area. She has also worked with students with autism spectrum disorder and with adolescent and young adult individuals in therapy.

Vaibhav Dutt - PROGRAM MANAGER

A lawyer by training, Vaibhav designs and implements tools for research and innovation in complex systems thinking in areas such as mental health, inclusive technology, and climate sustainability. Using participatory planning and anti-discrimination approaches, he is working to make India’s most used products and services more inclusive.

For over 5 years, he has used innovative methods of engagement such as games, simulations, and oral data collection on policy projects with state governments and nonprofits in the areas of equitable access, social protection, and resource insecurity.

ADVISORS

Gaurav Gupta

Gaurav is the Global Managing Partner for Dalberg Advisors, a global advisory firm focused on impact. Gaurav works on a wide-ranging set of issues that include energy access, financial inclusion, access to education, and inclusive business strategies. Outside of Dalberg, Gaurav has been a founding partner in a number of social ventures including two eco-resorts, a sustainable tourism online platform, an organic tea plantation, and an eco-friendly fair trade fashion label. Prior to Dalberg, Gaurav was a Project Leader with the Boston Consulting Group in Sydney and London. He holds degrees from Oxford University and Yale University.

Henrik Skovby

Henrik Skovby is the former Global Managing Partner and founder of Dalberg. In his current capacity as Executive Chairman of Dalberg Group, most of Henrik’s time is dedicated to industry innovation and establishing new business lines under the Dalberg brand. Prior to Dalberg, Henrik worked at McKinsey & Company, where his focus was financial and public institutions. He began his professional career at the United Nations Development Program, where he worked on project management, budget matters, and strategic positioning of the organization. Henrik holds degrees from Harvard, Copenhagen Business School, and the University of Aarhus.

Vedika Bhandarkar

Vedika is Water.Org’s Global Chief Operating Officer and is responsible for the operating efficiency and effectiveness of Water.org, and for the attainment of strategic objectives and annual organizational goals. She has more than 25 years of experience building teams and businesses with Indian and international financial institutions. Prior to joining Water.org in January 2016, she served as Vice Chairman and Managing Director at Credit Suisse Securities (India) Private Limited from 2010-2015. Previously, she served as the Managing Director & Head of Investment Banking at J.P. Morgan. Vedika serves as an Independent Director on the boards of several companies. She has been appointed as a part time member of the Banks Board Bureau, and she also serves as a board member of the Jai Vakeel Foundation, an institution focused on children and adults with intellectual disabilities.

Danish Husain

Danish Husain is an actor, poet, Dastango, and a theatre director. Currently stranded in America, lives and runs his theatre company The Hoshruba Repertory in Mumbai. Instrumental in reviving the lost art form of Urdu storytelling Dastangoi & inventing the multilingual storytelling platform Qissebaazi, he is currently in news for his forays in the OTT platforms especially, his performances in Netflix Original series Bard of Blood & Taj Mahal 1989.

Ishaan Sethi

Ishaan leads Brand Solutions at CRED, an exclusive member's only community of India's most credit & trustworthy individuals, and brings deep experience in impact-focused innovation & entrepreneurship. He co-founded, Delta, India’s first homegrown LGBTQ+ community focused app that became a platform for people to explore shared interests, access peer support, and also enabled brands to engage through the Delta Network. He had previously co-founded a startup in the analytics space in India and had also been in the Global Communication team at the Nike World HQ in Oregon engaging with programs such as The Girl Effect. He is passionate about Diversity & Inclusion topics as well as technology, fashion, and animal rights. He has been on the Forbes Asia 30 under 30 list and studied economics at Brown University.

Priya Ajmera

Priya is the CEO of AIC NCore, an incubator focused on technology based innovations for the social sector. At the incubator, Priya works with early stage nonprofits across diverse thematic areas and helps them define their strategy and build on their ideas. Her role is to act as a catalyst to expand the innovation ecosystem for Bharat focused ideas through her work at AIC NCore and as a co-hosts for the Bharat Innovation track at Nasscom. Prior to her move to the social sector, Priya spent many years in the corporate sector working in strategy & product management roles with large enterprises (like Yahoo, eBay, HP) & technology startups. Priya holds an MBA from IIM Bangalore.

Kaustubh Chakraborty

Kaustubh is a retired partner from McKinsey & Company where he used to lead the consumer & retail practice in India in addition to serving clients in healthcare & pharma. He now spends his time reading a lot, teaching, writing, & quizzing. He has taught at the Ashoka University and The Vedica Scholars Programme for Women as well as being part of McKinsey’s Alumni Faculty. He also occasionally trains people working in mission driven institutions across Asia and Africa in sectors such as agriculture, education, energy, ocean waste, and water. Kaustubh studied economics at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi and management at IIM Bangalore.

ALUMNI

Amiya Chaudhuri - RESEARCH ASSOCIATE

Amiya Amiya holds a B.A. (Research) degree from Shiv Nadar University, with a major in Sociology and a minor in Economics. Passionate about researching on sustainable and equitable cities, and advocating against patriarchy and caste discrimination, she strongly believes in passing the mic to communities to tell their own stories. She has previously served as an AIF Clinton Fellow with Prajwala Sangham, worked with Timbaktu Collective and the Young Leader’s Initiative, and has conducted ethnographic research projects on caste in the city.

Sai Bourothu - independent consultant

Sai Bourothu is an independent consultant (external) to Belongg and brings her expertise on LGBTQ+ issues as well as a deep understanding of forging communities focused on such themes. She is a criminologist presently working as a Project Officer at Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative in the Police Reforms Team. She has been actively involved in the campaigns against the Transgender persons bill as part of TISS queer collective of which she was a founding member.

Saransh Bisht - Associate (Mental Health Collective, Belongg)

Saransh has completed his post graduation in Clinical Psychology from Ambedkar University. In the past he has worked with diverse communities on themes of disability, gender and mental health. In 2019 he co-founded queer listening circle to enable healing spaces among community spaces. He is a mental health advocate and aspires to involve himself in trauma informed work with marginalised communities in the future.