Portrait of a youth champion

In UP's patriarchal villages it's heresy if a girl walks into police station, says the author

Pictures sometimes speak louder than words. I thought of this while watching the video of a young woman I met the other day at Plan India Impact Awards in the Delhi’s India Habitat Centre. In those rarified environs, 19-year-old Shalini Chauhan’s description of her campaign against child labour and child marriage in her village was impressive. But when I watched the video, which placed her firmly in her own milieu — a backward, patriarchal village in Ambedkar Nagar, Uttar Pradesh — the true import of her work had me gobsmacked. 

At the age of 11, Chauhan joined an NGO, Bal Jagriti