HISTORY

Uttara Bharath founded Nalamdana with a seed grant from the Echoing
Green Foundation in New York, with the idea of designing innovative
communication methods to deliver social messages to illiterate audiences.

Uttara was looking to use entertaining methods of creating awareness
of health issues and of reaching out to audiences. R. Jeevanandam,
a double graduate from Madurai, and his group of friends were already
using street plays to create health awareness in and around Madurai.
Since their college days they had done plays on health issues: tuberculosis,
general health, HIV AIDS: had worked in truck stops through the nights,
creating awareness of safe sex. A serendipitous encounter between
Uttara and Jeeva while waiting to meet the officials of another NGO led
to the first street show on 'Health and Hygiene" in a Chennai slum in 1994.
The response to that first play was so overwhelming that Jeeva and his
friends moved permanently from Madurai to Chennai.

Nalamdana was registered as a Charitable Trust in 1993 and an office was
set up in a small rented flat by April 1994. Uttara became executive trustee
and Nithya Balaji, one of the original trustees, took over from her later in 1996.
Jeeva and his core group also joined the Board.

Since 1993, this creative collaboration has created street plays on a variety
of health issues, and Nalamdana has reached more than half a million people
through street theatre, and many more through other media like tele-dramas,
interactive media and print. Nalamdana's performances are targeted at a
semi literate and illiterate audience in rural and urban Tamil Nadu. In ten
years, we have covered more than 50 villages in Tamil Nadu and about 500
inner city slums in Chennai.

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