This article has been written by Bharati Challa, a 4th year law student and a participant of the Madhya Pradesh Data Sprint1. The sprint was organised by Veditum India Foundation2 on 17th May 2025 as part of its India Sand Watch3 project, and in partnership with Awaaz Leadership Labs & The Habitats Trust.
The India Sand Watch team has only provided additional editorial support to this original reflective piece written by Bharati. It is part of our theory of change to inspire citizens to draw from their vast reserves of empathy, and take action in solidarity. We are glad to have received this piece from Bharati.
Amnesia
The Academy4 has taught me to mistrust tenderness.
Law school and the broader institutionalization of society has rewired something fundamental in me: I find myself reaching for citations when I should be reaching for feeling.
The Academy trains us in a kind of professional amnesia, teaching us to forget that before there were water rights, there were waters; before environmental law, there were environments that held us. This forgetting is not accidental. What is understood as biopower, with data in specific, as a technique of power, operates through exactly this kind of substitution.
I have watched this alchemy work its way through every domain of human experience – the pipelines of healing to ‘healthcare’, learning to ‘schooling’, community to ‘social services’. Each transformation promises efficiency and delivers alienation.
Your moral response is sterilized before it even has a chance to come alive: you’re handed indices where you hunger for intimacy and given metrics where you ask for meaning. It is fatiguing and no way to live; surrounded by this disciplinary technology. Only a true ‘deschooling’ of society can change this.
I was thus initially skeptical about this ‘data sprint’. How do you confront technocratic thought in a society where an increasingly technical vocabulary resembling pragmatism, but with unstated goals, keeps showing up? We’re always in pursuit of the most rational way to go somewhere that is never specified. We’ve optimized the path before questioning the journey. Or whether it’s ours to make at all.
Remembrance
But something different happened in that Zoom call where all these people gathered to talk about sand. People spoke of rivers the way you might speak of a dying relative, with the tenderness reserved for what is slipping away.
Veditum’s India Sand Watch hosts a data platform, yes – an archive of the slow violence being done to the subcontinent’s river, but more deeply, it is about translation, in seeing through the noise, to realise that the footnotes are the story!
In asking, “but what if data could accuse instead of anonymize and control?”, it is quietly radical [and audacious].
Released CC0 by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in collaboration with the GLAM-E Lab
We were born knowing that the land teaches those who listen; that wisdom emerges from relationship rather than detachment; and that the most important knowledge is often held by those whom The Academy has been trained not to hear. And yet, modernity’s motifs are flavours of profoundly alienated lives.
Our amnesia is symptomatic of this alienation – of the ways of this world that we were born knowing but have grown up forgetting, knowledge of the plants in one’s backyard, an intuition that lets us know that everything is everything, that the sum is always greater than its parts – repackaged and sold back to us as ‘systems thinking’ [and we lap it up!].
A total and utter severance.
Severance
This severance is a wound that I’ve been trying to keep open without letting it fester – because to notice it is to be aware of it, and in awareness, at least one is alive. Safety, in all its clinical sterilization, is a kind of death. And so, for me, there was something profoundly healing about India Sand Watch, because at its core, it is a space that refuses this severing.
Here were people using the master’s tools not to rebuild the master’s house, but to tell different stories entirely. Stories of knowledge emergent from relationship and connection to the planet, rather than detachment and the need to control, subject, objectify.
Ivan Illich wrote, in his very compelling book ‘Deschooling Society’, that “the most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each person the same opportunity to share their current concern with others motivated by the same concern.”
This is what organizations like Veditum have been doing, and for so many of us looking for respite from institutional alienation, these kinds of spaces are sustenance. They represent what learning looks like when it starts not with “What should someone learn?” but with “What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?”
Released CC0 by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in collaboration with the GLAM-E Lab
Witness
Participating in the Madhya Pradesh Data Sprint by India Sand Watch felt like remembering something I had been trained to forget, like coming back to a conversation I had been having before The Academy taught me that conversations were inefficient.
I realized I had been depriving myself and had been complicit in a kind of professional self-betrayal, convincing myself that alienated and alienating work was somehow more ‘serious’ or substantial than work that emerged from genuine care.
In Sanskrit, ‘Veditum’ means ‘to understand.’ The kind of understanding I found with this sprint was the understanding that emerges from being in sustained relationship with what you’re trying to know. It is the understanding that the most important insights often come from the patient work of bearing witness and not detached analysis.
This is what I had been searching for without knowing it: pockets of un-alienatedness where the technical and the tender need not be enemies. Data can serve love instead of power, and the work itself becomes a form of moral practice. Not hope, exactly, but something more foundational – a remembering of what it means to be human in relationship with both knowledge and the world.
Bharati Challa is a fourth-year student at NALSAR University of Law. She is currently interning with Agami, shadowing Atreyo Banerjee on environmental justice initiatives and collaborating with Rohit Sharma and Ishita Dutta of Awaaz Leadership Labs.
Borrowing Siddharth’s borrowed phrase, she’s grateful to them for demonstrating how to be “who we have been waiting for” – and especially to Atreyo, for noticing a spark after the Data Sprint and nudging her to name it.
Bharati is trying to make sense of the dissonance that comes from inhabiting a life where law firms lay out six types of artisanal coffee while undertrials don’t get court dates for decades.
You can read more by her here: Breaching The Antechamber.
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Footnotes
- Data Sprints are part of our efforts at our project India Sand Watch to expand the open database of information on sand mining in India’s rivers. These sprints focus on specific geographies and are day-long intense data digitisation efforts. ↩︎
- Veditum India Foundation is an environmental non-profit, working to transform the environmental governance landscape of India by creating evidence at scale, empowering communities to take action, and creating empathetic environmental leaders for the future. ↩︎
- India Sand Watch is an environmental accountability project, protecting India’s rivers from unsustainable and destructive sand mining. ↩︎
- Short for the vast institutional machinery that produces and polices “legitimate” knowledge. These are systems like formal education, science, policy, and research that prioritize reason, detachment, and hierarchy over lived experience or relational ways of knowing. ↩︎