Kosi Lok Manch

Kosi Lok Manch is a registered national level voluntary organisation working across the belt of Bihar, West Bengal and Assam. It works to protect children from all forms of exploitation and abuse, and to ensure that every child has access to the right to education and development. It describes itself as a grassroots people's initiative, meaning its work is built around community level responses rather than service delivery from outside. Its stated values are justice, freedom, courage and integrity, which it frames as founded in compassion. Alongside direct protection work, it engages law enforcement agencies and statutory child protection authorities to strengthen how cases involving children are handled.

Major Areas of Work

• Child protection: Preventing and responding to child labour, child trafficking, physical and sexual exploitation, and child marriage.

• Education: Ensuring children have access to meaningful, compulsory and quality education as part of their overall development.

• Policy and institutional strengthening: Working towards a robust policy and institutional environment for child protection.

• Law enforcement engagement: Training and capacity building with police and child protection authorities so that crimes against children are handled better.

• Girls' safety and agency: Strengthening the responses of young girls to risks including child marriage.

Major Initiatives and Programmes

• Aprajita Clubs: Clubs being set up across West Bengal that strengthen the responses of young girls through self defence training, run as part of the Child Marriage Free India campaign.

• Training and capacity building with law enforcement agencies and child protection authorities: Work in partnership with law enforcement in Bihar, West Bengal and Assam to strengthen intervention in cases concerning crimes against children.

The Aprajita Clubs are the organisation's most visible current push. Rather than treating child marriage purely as a matter for adults and authorities to settle, the clubs place self defence and response capability with the girls themselves, and are being built out across West Bengal as a network rather than as one off trainings.

Kosi Lok Manch operates in three states across an eastern belt where child labour, trafficking and child marriage are live, not historical, problems. The work spans direct community engagement, casework alongside police and child protection authorities, and policy level effort, so it suits someone who wants field exposure and statutory system exposure in the same role. It would fit a person comfortable in a grassroots organisation, willing to work in district and block level settings, and interested in child rights, protection law and community mobilisation rather than in a purely desk based role.