The Trigger Team

West zone (Jaipur, Rajashthan) - Prof Vileen Shah, Khyati Shah

Blind since age 3 yrs, Prof Vileen has not allowed visual impairment be a hurdle. He has taught at the Mumbai university and is presently teaching American History to students in several universities in Chicago. He is passionate about the use of technology (braille printers) for productive citizenship. Khyati, daughter of Vileen and moderator of Asha Special focus group, is an Asha Stanford volunteer who has recently visited some Mumbai schools to extend the reach of Project Trigger.

North zone (Delhi) - Jagdish Chander, Sirish Agarwal

Jags is a graduate student in disability studies at Syracuse university. He was a visiting professor at Delhi University. Blind since young age, and overcoming several personal hurdles, he is an inspiration to many today as he goes about helping tribal and blind children. Sirish is an active volunteer of Asha DC and is a driving force of Asha Special team. His work includes researching the best practices among disability organizations in India and around the world, and making asha-special a center of competence.

East zone - Joy Telngoh Haokhosei

Joy is an extraordinary Asha volunteer and a young tribal from Manipur. He displays a strong sense of duty and dedication to Asha's mission. Joy has managed to rise against harsh and impossibly challenging adversities - being rejected by his father at a young age, grappling with starvation during childhood, watching his mother's losing battle with poverty, witnessing his tribal women going into prostitution driven by economics, managing to get through school with dignity despite being misunderstood and beaten, being the only person from his school to pass out of 80 students, getting through a highly competitive national exam and landing a govt job, and through it all maintain commitment to help his tribal people in the Manipur villages. Joy and Jags are close friends. Read more about Joy in "A Friendship Between a Tribal Boy and a Visually Disabled Person".

South zone (Chennai, Tamilnadu) - Lakshmi Venkatesh, Jambu Nathan, D P Prakash

Lakshmi is a graduate student in speech therapy at University of Seattle at Washington. She has worked with several NGOs in assisting the disabled. Jambu Nathan is a retired official from Indian Railways who is on the board of several disability focused NGOs in Chennai. Dr. D P Prakash has been volunteering with Asha for over a decade and is deeply involved in several Asha projects. As active members of Asha Chennai chapter, these volunteers are working to bring together 75 NGOs in the Chennai vicinity to develop a common action agenda and cooperate on common action items.

Center zone (Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh) - Satinath Sarangi, Raj Chauhan, Jayashree Janardhan

Satinath Sarangi is a very experienced activist who has been working with the Bhopal movement after the Union Carbide gas leak disaster. Since then he's been working with victims and runs a clinic which provides medical treatment and support for survivors. He says 150,000 survivors are still chronically ill and children are still being born with defects as a result of the accident. Raj recently went on a 6 month tour of India visiting several Asha projects. Jayashree, one of the most experienced volunteers in Asha, is supporting numerous projects across India.