Sebastian Devaraj is the executive trustee of Fedina (Foundation for Educational Innovations in Asia), an umbrella organisation created in 1983 to coordinate the work of several NGOs in Southern India with the broad objective of empowering the marginalised. Sebastian Devaraj was for many years a civil servant employed by the Karnataka Legislative Assembly and the president of the Karnataka Legislature Secretariat Employees Association. In 2007, he joined Fedina and in 2017 became the organisation’s executive trustee.Éric Sautedé : What is Fedina’s broad mission?Sebastian Devaraj : The Foundation for Educational Innovations in Asia, or Fedina, focuses on building formal organisations among the highly unorganised and unprotected workers who constitute nearly 95 % of the labour force of India. Conscious working people who “participate fully”, not just in the workplace, but in all aspects of decision making in society, will deepen democracy. This is especially necessary in a society which is dominated by patriarchal values and caste-based hierarchies, which denies even basic human rights to a vast majority of the working people.
Our main focus is to organise working people, train them to function democratically with due respect for each other, enable them to collectivise and gain formal recognition, and “build” representative leaders who recognise the importance of dialogue, negotiation and bargaining with employers for improved wages and working conditions.
These formal organisations also enable their members to understand social dynamics and participate in movements for better governance, effective health, education, housing and other public amenities…