India
Chloé Sharrock
Jagar Pratishthan
In 2025 The PhotoBridge Project worked with Jagar Pratishthan in Maharashtra, India, to highlight the struggles and triumphs of marginalized communities. Through the lens of photographer Chloé Sharrock, this portfolio sheds light on women and men confronting exploitation, inequality, and caste discrimination — and on their determination to claim dignity, rights, and justice.
India – Jagar Pratishthan
In the villages and sugarcane fields of Maharashtra, daily survival often collides with entrenched injustice. Here, bonded labor, caste discrimination, and systemic exploitation weigh heavily on the most vulnerable — especially women. Yet amidst these challenges, grassroots leaders are driving transformation, fighting for land rights, reproductive health, and a more equitable future.
In 2025, The PhotoBridge Project worked with photographer Chloé Sharrock to document this struggle for dignity alongside Manisha Tokle and Ashok Tangade, co-founders of Jagar Pratishthan. Since 1989, the organization has defended the rights of marginalized communities, confronting injustice through legal action, education, and public campaigns.
These images reveal how activism takes root at the local level — from Dalit women demanding land ownership, to sex workers and sugarcane cutters fighting for reproductive health and safe working conditions. They are a testament to resilience, solidarity, and the power of grassroots leadership to ignite change.
About Jagar Pratishthan
Founded in 1989, Jagar Pratishthan is a grassroots organization working in Maharashtra to advance the rights of marginalized communities. Its initiatives span from farmers’ access to seeds and water, to Dalit women’s land ownership, organic farming, sex workers’ rights, and reproductive health. The organization has also been at the forefront of campaigns against bonded labor, caste discrimination, and systemic exploitation.
For its decades of advocacy, Jagar Pratishthan has received the Padmashri Karmaveer Dadasaheb Gaikwad Award for land rights activism, while co-founder Manisha Tokle was honored with the Ahilyadevi Holkar Award for women’s leadership.
About the Photographer
Chloé Sharrock is a French documentary photographer whose work explores the intersection of women’s rights, conflict, and resilience. After studying Art History and Cinema in Lyon and Paris, she turned to photography in 2017 as her medium to bear witness to the world’s turmoil. Her early projects focused on women in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, leading to the creation of Alhawiat, an association promoting the role of women in rebuilding post-conflict societies.
In 2019, her commitment to women’s rights brought her to India, where she produced Sugar Girls, a powerful investigation into coerced hysterectomies among female sugarcane workers. The project was later exhibited at Visa Pour L’Image and awarded grants from the French Ministry of Culture, La Scam, and the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP). Her work has been published internationally in outlets such as The Washington Post, Libération, Le Temps, and Newsweek Japan.
Acknowledgment
This portfolio was made possible thanks to the generous support of our partners and sponsors, whose commitment helps ensure these stories of resilience and resistance reach audiences far beyond Maharashtra.
