The room is full. As Chandini Gagana steps forward, the low hum of conversation fades.
Students, doctors, activists, and policymakers turn their attention to her as she begins to speak about sex, gender, sexuality, and health. There are no slides, no notes — only lived experience, shared with a quiet confidence shaped over years of learning, unlearning, and teaching within communities.
For the 52-year-old trans woman and activist, joining KHPT (Karnataka Health Promotion Trust) marked what she calls her second step — a turning point that reshaped how she saw herself and what she believed was possible. Until then, survival had defined her days. Activism was something she felt deeply, but confidence, platforms, and language felt distant.
“As a sex worker, as someone who had begged to survive, I never imagined a life like this,” Chandini tells The Better India.
“KHPT gave me a second chance, not just to work, but to become who I am today. Through activism, I found my confidence. I found my voice. And I grew; not just as a transgender person, but as a leader for my community.”
From survival to advocacy, Chandini Gagana now speaks for her community — locally and globally.
Today, Chandini is a recognised sexual health educator, theatre artist, writer, and go-to community leader. She has addressed conferences in Kenya, South Africa, and the United States. Universities teach her poetry. The Karnataka Government has honoured her with the Natak Akademi Award. But her journey to this podium was neither linear nor easy.
Born and raised in Karnataka’s Mysore division, Chandini began her activism more than two decades ago, in 2000 — at a time when transgender lives were pushed to the margins, spoken about only in whispers or stereotypes.
Building trust from within
Chandini’s life began to shift in 2004, when she joined Karnataka Health Promotion Trust (KHPT), an organisation working at the intersection of public health, community leadership, and social justice. KHPT’s role in her journey wasn’t about charity or representation — it was about something far more radical: trust.
“The only way you build trust in the community is by making them part of your team. By making them drive change from the forefront,” says Mallika Biddappa Thakaran (Strategic Initiative Group Facilitator) toThe Better India.
Founded in 2003 with a focus on HIV prevention, KHPT made an early decision that would shape everything it did next — the people most affected by a problem should be the ones leading the solution.
So instead of arriving with ready-made answers, teams spent time in communities first. They listened. They built relationships. Over time, local leaders began to emerge — transgender persons, adolescent girls, women, and men who understood their realities better than anyone else. KHPT’s role then became one of support: offering training, building confidence, and helping these leaders organise and act together.
The shift was simple but powerful. People were not treated as beneficiaries waiting for help, but as decision-makers shaping change in their own neighbourhoods. Community members learnt how to engage with local systems — from panchayats and schools to public health centres — so solutions could take root within the systems people already relied on.
Step by step, education, health, and gender norms are being reshaped across homes and communities.
Success, too, was viewed differently. It was not just about how many individuals attended a session, but whether entire communities saw change — whether more girls stayed in school, whether healthcare became easier to access, whether harmful norms slowly began to shift.
To make change last, KHPT worked through existing local institutions rather than creating parallel structures. By partnering with panchayats, schools, and community bodies, and gradually transferring leadership back to local groups, initiatives continued even after projects formally ended.
From knowledge to confidence
KHPT invested in Chandini as a community resource person, not merely a beneficiary of its programmes. Through training in advocacy, sexual health, gender, and leadership, she began travelling across districts in Karnataka, engaging with community members, government stakeholders, and institutions. For the first time, she was being trusted to speak for herself and her community.
“With knowledge came confidence; earlier, I only spoke Kannada. I was scared of language, of platforms. But slowly, I learnt how to speak, how to travel, and how to face the world,” says Chandini.
That confidence soon crossed borders. With KHPT’s support, Chandini represented community voices at international HIV and public health conferences in Kenya, South Africa, and the United States. These experiences affirmed a powerful truth: people from the community belong not just in conversations about policy and health, but at the centre of them.
As her leadership grew, Chandini turned to storytelling as advocacy, using theatre, poetry, and film to open conversations on identity, sexuality, and dignity. Today, she is a published poet, with her work taught in several educational institutions in Bengaluru.
Building Payana: A community-led vision
In 2010, Chandini co-founded Payana, a Bengaluru-based, community-owned and managed organisation working for the rights, safety, and empowerment of sexual minorities in Karnataka.
Conceived as a dignified professional platform for transgender people — especially those who are non-English speaking — Payana was rooted in the same belief that shaped Chandini’s own journey: communities must lead their own change.
Under her leadership, Payana has since incubated over 23 community-based organisations across 28 districts in Karnataka, strengthening grassroots leadership and local responses to issues of health, livelihood, and discrimination.
One of its most distinctive initiatives, Truth Dream, documents the dreams and desires of elderly transgender persons — centring lives often rendered invisible even within activist spaces.
KHPT’s transgender programme began in 2003 and was transitioned to the Government by 2013–14 as part of the state HIV response. Today, KHPT continues to offer need-based technical guidance and mentorship to transgender community-based organisations, ensuring leadership remains firmly with the community.
“My dream is that my community lives with dignity; with access to education, respect in society, and the freedom to dream,” says Chandini. “We are normal human beings, and we deserve a dignified future.”
Growing leaders, not just programmes
The same philosophy underpins KHPT’s work with adolescent girls.
Initiated in 2011 — beginning with daughters of Devadasi women — KHPT’s adolescent empowerment programme expanded to reach girls from marginalised communities across Karnataka.
From safe spaces to leadership, KHPT empowers adolescent girls to shape their own future.
By focusing on safe spaces, critical thinking, and leadership rather than one-time interventions, the model was later adopted and expanded by the Government of Karnataka to additional districts.
“Every project defines its own community,” Mallika explains. “But if you only look at people through a project lens, you miss the ecosystem that shapes their lives — families, schools, and social norms.”
Even when funding paused during the pandemic, the work continued. “The girls carried it forward,” Mallika recalls. “The leadership was already on the ground.”
One of those stories is Megha’s.
Finding her voice, claiming her future
Megha (18) comes from Shivpur village in Karnataka’s Koppal district. When she first encountered KHPT in 2018, she was a quiet schoolgirl who rarely spoke in public spaces.
“I was very introverted and never shared my opinions because I was scared to speak up,” she tells The Better India.
She joined KHPT through sessions on girls’ empowerment held at her school. What followed were weekly meetings, leadership discussions, games, debates, and street plays — spaces where Megha learnt to speak up, question norms, and support others in her village.
That learning soon moved beyond the meeting room. Megha helped bring children back to school and intervened to stop child marriages in her community.
Megha found her voice, claimed her future, and now empowers girls in her village to dream freely.
When her own family began pressuring her into an early marriage, she used the communication and negotiation skills she had learnt — along with support from her community organiser, Padmavati — to convince her parents to let her continue her studies.
“I used what I learnt in KHPT to talk to my parents. Today, they support my education.”
For Megha, leadership is no longer about confidence alone — it is about choice.
Today, she is continuing her studies while supporting other girls in her village, encouraging them to stay in school and intervening when she sees early marriages being planned.
“My dream is to empower all the girls in my village,” she says. “I want them to study, decide for themselves, and dream freely.”
From enabling dignified livelihoods for sex workers to strengthening education and health outcomes for adolescent girls, KHPT has consistently worked to dismantle deep-rooted stigma. Another barrier it continues to challenge — within homes — is gender stereotyping and the rigid roles assigned to men and women.
Redefining fatherhood, together
KHPT’s gender work extends beyond women and girls, recognising that lasting change requires men to question long-held norms as well.
For Madhusudan, a 33-year-old father from Tumakuru district, caregiving was once seen as women’s work — handled by mothers or grandparents, never fathers. This belief was widely accepted in his village and rarely questioned.
That began to change when he joined KHPT’s Early Childhood Care and Development sessions. Through discussions and game-based activities, he learnt how a father’s involvement — from pregnancy through early childhood — shapes a child’s emotional security and brain development.
He also began to see how sharing care and household responsibilities could ease his wife’s burden and strengthen their relationship.
One activity — a partner-bonding exercise inspired by the phrase ‘Jothe Jotheyali’, meaning together, side by side — left a lasting impression on him, emphasising that parenting and household responsibilities work best when partners are truly equal collaborators.
Sharing care at home, Madhusudan shows that fatherhood strengthens children, families, and equality.
“If only the mother cares for the child, the child misses the love of the father,” Madhusudan reflects. “When we do it together, the child grows better — and so does the bond between husband and wife.”
Today, Madhusudan is an active carer, sharing responsibilities at home and raising his children alongside his wife — challenging long-held norms not through protest, but through everyday practice.
Breaking silos, building lives
Since 2003, KHPT’s work has touched millions of lives across 15 states — from transgender persons and sex workers to adolescent girls, migrant families, tribal communities, and urban informal workers. Over the years, its programmes have reached more than 25,000 transgender persons, 4.5 lakh adolescent girls, and over 3.2 lakh families — numbers that reflect not just scale, but years of patient, on-the-ground engagement.
Every story of courage, every life touched, shows that steady, collective effort transforms communities.
The journey, however, has never been without challenges.
Conversations around sexuality, gender roles, and violence are often met with hesitation — sometimes from families, sometimes from community gatekeepers, and sometimes within the very systems meant to provide support. At times, delays in accessing services or shifting funding priorities have slowed progress.
But these experiences have shaped an important lesson: lasting change is rarely the work of one organisation alone. It takes cooperation from government systems, local partners, and communities themselves. It takes time to build trust. It takes persistence to keep dialogue going, even when the first response is resistance.
And slowly, those efforts begin to show. Families become more open. Girls stay in school. Fathers step into caregiving roles. Transgender leaders take the mic at public forums.
The stories of Chandini, Megha, and Madhusudan are not exceptions — they are glimpses of what becomes possible when people who were once pushed to the margins are trusted to lead change from within.
Progress here is not dramatic or overnight. It is steady, deeply human, and transformative — carried forward by communities building a different future, step by step.
Just like Chandini, who once struggled to be heard and now stands before rooms full of people, speaking not just for herself — but for many.
All images courtesy Mallika Biddappa Thakaran
