Ensaaf is an international human rights organization dedicated to ending impunityand achieving justice for gross human rights abuses in Punjab, India, bydocumenting and exposing human rights violations, bringing perpetrators to justice,and organizing survivors to advocate for their rights to truth, justice, and reparations.

Punjab Documentation Project

In the Punjab Documentation Project, Ensaaf is collaborating with Benetech Initiative's Human Rights program to analyze "disappearances" in Punjab, India. Ensaaf has collected multiple sources of documentation, such as interviews, newspaper accounts from a ten-year period, and cremation ground records, comprising over 20,000 accounts of political violence. The two organizations will jointly engage in complex statistical analyses of this documentation, and devise a scientifically defensible survey todocument disappearances throughout Punjab. These quantitative methods will help definitively establish that these crimes were widespread and systematic.


Progress Report

In the first two and a half months of 2009, Ensaaf made great strides in its Punjab Documentation Project. Highlights include the publication of a joint report, photo essay, and podcast with Benetech's Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) after a two-year collaboration, consultations with survey experts, the announcement of a job opening for datamanagement, and further data collection from newspapers and Right to Information Act requests.

Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances during the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India

GyanSewa Trust seeks to provide equal access to educational resources to those who have been deprived and to remove the disparity among rural and urban areas and also among rich and poor. The Trust specifically aims to identify talented students in rural Punjab and provide them with the best available educational resources, allowing these students to compete with the urban students of Punjab as well as other major metropolitan areas. To accomplish this mission, GyanSewa Trust has hired the best available faculty from New Delhi to visit and teach these gifted students of rural backgrounds.

Satellite Education Program

In the Satellite Education Program, teachers from New Delhi have been hired to visit and teach students in rural Punjabi areas. This program is run in over 200 government schools, and essentially targets gifted students from the villages of Punjab who would otherwise have no access to higher education. This program prepares these students to be competitive in nationwide exams, and as a result, provides opportunities for rural Punjabis to enter professional and technical schools. Currently, the educational satellite program focuses on 11th and 12th grade students at Baba Gurbaksh Singh Uttam Singh School.

The Khadoor Sahib Centre was inaugurated in April of 2006, and since then, two classes of students have graduated from the program. Among the students, more than 70% have moved on to other professional courses. The students at the Khadoor Sahib Centre meet with faculty from New Delhi every Saturday and Sunday for classroom teaching.