 Somu Kumar is 'Your Voice and Action Counts' EB member. Somu joined AID in 2004 with Maryland Chapter and have been an active volunteer since then. He served as a fund-raising coordinator for a year. He was deeply attracted by the Sangarsh arm of AID and started involving in many campaigns - especially in Bhopal, Agriculture and Anti-Corruption works. He worked as campaign coordinator for AID Maryland for an year and joined EB on the same position. Somu is passionate about Social Justice issues in India and is working on building consensus on AID campaigns, supporting various grassroots movements and showing collective solidarity with AID's partners on ground.
He is an active member of AID Anti-Corruption Team (ACT). Corruption is one of the plagues affecting the country and poor communities are worst affected by it. Feeling a need to root it out, he along with few more AIDers started the AID Anti-Corruption Team. ACT is supporting campaigns targetted at making government accountable for its expenditure on public works. ACT works directly with many leading organizations doing good works in this field. Somu is coordinating campaign with project partners like APVUU, Janpath, Parivartan. He closely follows National Rural Employment Guarentee Act, which has good potential to reduce poverty in rural households. The issue of corruption and food security to be central to the realization of the right of the most marginalized communities to live a life of dignity and the challenge is to make sure these two powerful acts are implemented in their right forms and spirit.
His main focus is to support these programs, through AID, where Right to Information (RTI) is used at grassroots level to ensure that NREGA and other Social welfare schemes meant for welfare of the poor indeed reach the poor.
Somu was born in Madurai, studied in Coimbatore and Hartford, CT. He works as Tech analyst now in Virginia.
Email: somukumar_at_gmail_dot_com
|
