Gagan Sethi of Janvikas in conversation with Deepak Nanda of Project Tech4Dev — on decades of grassroots work, the promise and peril of technology and why the most radical act today might simply be listening.
Some people are drawn to social change by circumstance. Gagan Sethi was drawn by fire — a moment of outrage that refused to stay quiet, and which set in motion decades of work at the intersection of law, community and human dignity.
Who Is Gagan Sethi?
Gagan Sethi is the founder of Janvikas, a development support and training organisation, and the Centre for Social Justice, a human rights and access-to-justice initiative working across South Asia. He brings more than 30 years of experience in organisational development, capacity building and advocacy at local, national and international levels. He is a recognised leader in policy formulation, facilitating development projects and advocating for minority rights — and is a member of the drafting committee of the Nyaya Panchayat Act.
Beyond Janvikas, Sethi has helped set up several strategic organisations including Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan, Sahjeevan, Drishti, and the HID Forum. He has served on the board of Oxfam India, and was appointed as a member of the monitoring group by the National Human Rights Commission to monitor human rights violations during the Gujarat earthquake and communal violence. He also led the largest civil society initiative for rehabilitation and justice following the 2001–02 Gujarat earthquake and carnage, and the team that worked on the landmark Bilkis Bano case was anchored by him.
He has been a board member and CEO mentor for more than 15 advocacy campaigns, development organisations and international agencies, and has authored books on legal aid, gender, nonprofit governance, and communal violence in Gujarat. His key areas of work span legal justice, women’s empowerment, conflict management, and minority and Dalit rights — as well as youth employment and education.
A Journey Rooted in Justice
Gagan Sethi’s work with Janvikas did not begin with a polished strategy document. It began with a fire — and a tragedy that would define the course of his life. In the early years of his work, Sethi and a group of friends were on the ground with a Dalit community, helping them assert their rights, access land, and create ripples of change in a deeply entrenched system. The work was gaining traction. They were touching nerves.
On 26 January 1986, those nerves snapped back. Upper caste men came on horseback and killed four of his friends. The violence was not random — it was a message, aimed at silencing a movement that had begun to threaten the existing order.
Sethi did not retreat. He fought the legal battle — and won. That first case taught him something he has carried ever since: there is no development without justice. Economic progress, land rights, dignity — none of it holds without a justice system capable of protecting it. From that conviction came a strategy: not to fight every battle himself, but to build champions — people with the fire and the grounding to champion causes of their own.
Building an Ecosystem for Young People
Out of that reckoning came a more deliberate strategy — one centered on young people. Sethi and his team created spaces for youth to examine their passions, confront their fears, and develop not just skills but a genuine sense of ownership over their own futures. Some found their voice in communications. Others in policy. Some stepped into uncomfortable territory and discovered themselves there.
The through-line was always justice. Social change remained the north star, but the path was widened to include economic empowerment, creative expression, and self-determination. The goal was never to produce followers, but independent thinkers capable of planting seeds of their own.
“We help them look at their passion. My passion still remains in setting up a justice system — and young people take me forward.” — Gagan Sethi, Janvikas
As Deepak Nanda put it: Gagan is ‘cooking a lot of justice under the fire of his passion, in this melting pot of youth and everyone coming together.’ It is an image that rings true — not a pipeline, not a programme, but something alive, layered, and always in motion.
Sethi speaks about this with the quiet warmth of someone who has watched the model bear fruit. Lawyers he mentored 25 years ago are now senior practitioners. His daughter works in the high court. He is training his son for school-level legal advocacy. Not a dynasty — an ecosystem. Rooted, distributed, and alive.
Technology: Enabler or Eraser?
Deepak Nanda of Project Tech4Dev steered the conversation toward one of the most pressing questions facing the sector today: as AI and automation accelerate, are we inadvertently building a world where human thought, connection, and judgment become optional? Sethi didn’t hesitate. The erosion, he argued, is already underway — and it is not only economic.
The most visible symptom, he observed, is the disappearance of idle time. Earlier generations took a break and let their minds wander. Today, the moment someone pauses, they reach for a screen. AI agents now hold conversations that were once between humans. Chatbots answer questions that once required a relationship. Each of these substitutions seems efficient in isolation — but together, they quietly train people out of thinking, feeling, and connecting for themselves.
“If it enables creativity, it’s fine. But human connection — on the other hand, technology is making people less engaged. And I have a problem with that.” — Gagan Sethi, Janvikas
Sethi is particularly wary of what he calls the ‘solution handover’ problem — where technology platforms, including well-meaning social sector tools, arrive with pre-packaged answers rather than building the capacity of communities to arrive at their own. The difference matters enormously. One creates dependency. The other creates agency. He sees Tech4Dev’s approach as an example of the latter, and believes the sector needs more of it.
On the question of AI specifically, Sethi’s position is nuanced. He does not dismiss it. He sees genuine use cases — in scaling outreach, in processing information, in connecting people across distance. But he draws a sharp line when AI begins to replace the quality of human reasoning itself. When organisations stop asking hard questions because an algorithm has already provided an answer, they lose something irreplaceable: the friction that produces real insight.
There is also a branding dimension he raises — one that gets little attention. As more civil society communications are generated by AI, the distinct voice of a movement, the texture of lived experience, the imperfect authenticity of a community speaking for itself — all of that gets smoothed away. The result may be more polished, but it is less true.
It is worth noting that alongside his legal and justice work, Sethi has done significant work in the field of behaviour change — understanding how people, communities, and institutions shift their thinking and actions over time. That lens shapes everything: persuading a corporation to be accountable, helping a young person rewrite their self-narrative, nudging a funder to trust rather than monitor — all of it, at its core, is about changing behaviour. Technology, viewed this way, is just one more lever. Powerful when it shifts behaviour toward greater agency and dignity. Dangerous when it entrenches passivity or replaces the human relationships through which real change actually moves.
He recently co-launched a podcast called Unmute with a colleague — and the provocation at its heart cuts to the core of this debate: can technology unmute us, amplifying voices that have been suppressed, or does it ultimately mute us further by replacing human noise with algorithmic calm?
Sethi’s answer is not fatalistic. Technology, he insists, is not the enemy. The question is always: who holds the design choices? Who decides what gets automated and what stays human? As long as those questions are asked — and answered with honesty — there is room for technology to serve justice rather than undermine it.
Youth, Narrative, and the Will to Take Up Space
Perhaps the most resonant part of the conversation was Sethi’s reflection on the stories young people carry about themselves. Many have absorbed narratives of inadequacy — that they don’t belong in certain rooms, that change is made by someone else, somewhere else. The tragedy is that these same young people are often already doing the work. Already in the spaces. Already taking ownership. They just haven’t believed — or been told — that it counts.
The response, Sethi insists, is not more programming or intervention. It is presence. Adults who show up not to fix or instruct, but to witness and affirm. It begins with something deceptively simple.
“You don’t have to physically do anything. Just love yourself. And then bring what’s in you — from wherever you are fortunate to be. That’s what is needed.” — Gagan Sethi, Janvikas
The NGO Squeeze — and the Case for Rooted Trust
Sethi closed with a frank appraisal of the civil society landscape. NGOs doing vital work are increasingly squeezed — by funding shortfalls, lack of technological support, and paradoxically, by the very institutions meant to enable them. The tension between market logic, state power, and grassroots civil society is real and growing.
CSR funding arrives with conditions. Monitoring frameworks designed for corporate compliance get imposed on community organizations whose value cannot be measured in quarterly outputs. Sethi’s response is direct: trust the people who are rooted in community. They are listening. Let them do their work.
“I’m rooted in community. I’m listening to people. Either trust me — check me out — but don’t monitor me like I don’t know my own job.” — Gagan Sethi, Janvikas
There is a creative tension between market, state and civil society that — when well-managed — can be generative, Sethi believes. But when market efficiency colonizes civil society’s logic, or when the state grows threatened by organised civic voices, the result is a narrowing of the very space that democracy depends on. The antidote, he suggests, is a return to education, to noise, to human beings unmuting themselves — and to each other.
“Let’s hope the human comes back to the chat — and unmutes themselves.” — Deepak Nanda, Project Tech4Dev
About this conversation
This interview was conducted by Deepak Nanda of Project Tech4Dev, an tech enablement nonprofit that empowers NGOs to leverage technology and data for measurable, scalable social change. Gagan Sethi is the founder of Janvikas and the Centre for Social Justice, civil society organisations working at the intersection of law, community empowerment and access to justice for India’s most marginalised communities.
