Empowering Women for Social Change: The Gulabi Gang’s SBCC Approach

In the villages of Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh – one of India’s most impoverished regions – women once had little recourse against domestic violence, child marriage, and caste-based oppression. Police stations turned them away. Village councils sided with abusers. Institutions failed them at every turn. Then a group of women in bright pink sarees started showing up – and refusing to leave. The Gulabi Gang didn’t just fight for women’s rights; they communicated their way to change. Their story is one of the most powerful real-world examples of Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) in action.

The world the Gulabi Gang was born into 🔗

To understand what the Gulabi Gang achieved, you first need to understand what they were up against. Banda District in Uttar Pradesh, where the group was founded, ranked 154th out of 447 districts on the Planning Commission’s backwardness index. Over 20% of its 1.6 million people across 600 villages belong to lower castes, and domestic and sexual violence were commonplace. Female illiteracy stood at over 57%, and girl children were widely treated as financial burdens because of dowry demands.

The violence wasn’t just physical – it was systemic. According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, Uttar Pradesh consistently registers the highest number of crimes against women in India, contributing nearly 15% of all such cases nationally, with 65,743 cases filed in 2022 alone. In a state where domestic violence prevalence can reach as high as 45%, reporting abuse was itself dangerous. Women who went to the police were often sent home and told to “make peace.” In this context, gender-based violence wasn’t just a crime – it was an accepted norm. And that is precisely what SBCC is designed to challenge.

What is SBCC – and why does it matter here? 🔗

Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) is a strategic communication approach used to shift behaviours, challenge harmful social norms, and create conditions where positive change can take root. As defined by the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change Communication, it employs a systematic process that includes understanding target audience needs, planning tailored messages, and evaluating outcomes across individual, community, and policy levels. It goes beyond broadcasting information – it creates dialogue, builds social pressure, and normalises new behaviours.

Crucially, SBCC recognises that behaviour doesn’t change in isolation. It requires shifts at multiple levels: individual attitudes, community norms, and institutional accountability. The SBCC Implementation Kits framework highlights community mobilisation – where community members identify and address their own needs – as one of the most powerful strategic approaches. It also emphasises community-based media, including folk dramas, public meetings, and local rallies, as channels that reach communities most authentically. The Gulabi Gang, whether or not they used the term SBCC, executed all of this with remarkable precision.

Sampat Pal Devi: the communicator at the centre 🔗

Sampat Pal Devi was born in 1958 in Banda district to a poor shepherd’s family. Married off at twelve, a mother by fifteen, she taught herself to read and write from her brothers’ schoolbooks. She later worked as a government health worker before resigning to become a full-time social activist. Her early act of standing up to a neighbour who was openly beating his wife – using a bamboo stick – became the spark for a larger movement. In 2006, she formally founded the Gulabi Gang with women from her own village.

Her biography is itself a communication act. Sampat Pal was not an outsider or an NGO worker arriving with clipboards and curricula. She was a woman who had lived the same deprivation, faced the same humiliations, and survived. Her credibility was rooted in that shared experience, making her voice – and her message – far harder to dismiss.

The pink saree as a communication symbol 🔗

The most immediately visible element of the Gulabi Gang’s communication strategy is their uniform: a vivid pink saree. This was not an accident of aesthetics. The choice of pink was deliberate – it reclaimed femininity as a site of strength rather than weakness, and made members instantly recognisable across the dull landscape of rural UP’s villages. The uniform builds identity and unity; it says, without words, that this woman belongs to a collective, and that collective has power.

The bamboo stick – the lathi – added a second layer of meaning. Lathis had long been tools used by police and upper-caste men to enforce dominance. When marginalised women picked them up, they turned a symbol of oppression into one of justice. The visual contrast was immediate and arresting: the softness of pink against the strength of the lathi. Together, these two elements formed a powerful, non-verbal communication message – one that even illiterate communities could read and remember. The gang’s signature pink sarees were later featured in an exhibition at the London Design Museum, signalling how far their visual symbol had travelled as an emblem of resistance.

Folk songs: education disguised as culture 🔗

In a region where female illiteracy exceeded 57% and most women had no access to print media, the Gulabi Gang turned to a medium that needed no literacy at all: song. They adapted traditional Bundeli folk songs – locally known as lok geet – but replaced conventional lyrics about harvests and devotion with revolutionary messages. Their songs addressed the importance of girls’ education, condemned the dowry system, questioned why women should stay silent under abuse, and called out corrupt officials.

This is textbook SBCC in its most culturally intelligent form. As the IntechOpen framework on SBCC notes, using local culture – traditional art, folklore, and local performance – to transmit behaviour-change messages is among the most effective ways to shift social standards, precisely because it works through trusted and familiar channels. Folk music in rural India is not just entertainment; it is how communities process meaning, pass on values, and define what is normal. By inserting a new narrative into that medium, the Gulabi Gang made women’s rights feel like something that belonged to Bundelkhand’s own cultural fabric – not something imposed from outside.

Public speeches and community gatherings 🔗

Beyond songs, the Gulabi Gang organised community assemblies – public meetings where women could speak openly about their experiences of violence and injustice. These gatherings served a specific and strategic SBCC function: they turned private suffering into shared public grievance. A woman who believed she alone was being beaten by her husband, or that her situation was shameful and exceptional, discovered in these meetings that dozens of others had the same story. That shift – from private shame to collective outrage – is the emotional and social foundation of any behaviour change campaign.

Sampat Pal’s own speeches were direct, bold, and deliberately public. She did not speak in euphemisms. She named abusers, named corrupt policemen, named politicians who looked away. As Al Jazeera reported, journalist and author Amana Fontanella Khan observed that Devi’s success came precisely from her “bold and creative way of protests,” which “stepped into the vacuum left by the state” to offer an alternative means of justice. The speeches were not polished or academic – they were visceral, credible, and deeply rooted in the lived experience of the audience.

Direct action as a communication strategy 🔗

SBCC does not only operate through words and symbols – sometimes the most powerful message is an action. The Gulabi Gang understood this. When a woman in Banda was raped and then arrested by police who sided with the politically connected perpetrators, the gang organised two mass demonstrations outside the police station and the legislator’s home. Their mobilisation eventually brought 20,000 angry women across Bundelkhand to demand justice – and it worked. The case of Sheelu Nishad became a watershed moment that put the gang on the national map.

Similarly, when police refused to act on a domestic violence complaint, the gang staged a sit-in outside the station until media coverage and public pressure forced action. Each of these interventions sent a clear message to institutions: impunity has a cost, and that cost is public accountability. This is precisely what SBCC calls “creating an enabling environment” – changing the institutional behaviour that allows harmful individual behaviour to continue unchallenged.

Challenging norms, not just perpetrators 🔗

One of the most sophisticated aspects of the Gulabi Gang’s SBCC approach is that they didn’t just target abusive individuals. They targeted the norms that made abuse possible. Child marriage, dowry demands, and the idea that domestic violence was a “private family matter” – these were the real targets. Gang members visited households to advise parents on educating girls, distributed information about the Panchayati Raj Act and women’s political rights, and helped illiterate women fill out government aid applications. They also supported the rise of women-led small businesses and self-help groups: Dalit woman Prema Rambahori, supported by Sampat Pal, built a leaf-plate making enterprise that eventually employed 500 women from her community.

This layered approach – addressing individual behaviour, community norms, and structural inequalities simultaneously – mirrors what the SBCC framework describes as working across “social, environmental, and political levels.” The gang understood that you cannot change behaviour in a vacuum. If women remain economically dependent, socially isolated, and institutionally ignored, no amount of messaging will hold. Empowerment had to be material, not just rhetorical.

Scale, recognition, and enduring impact 🔗

By 2014, the Gulabi Gang had grown to an estimated 270,000 members spanning 11 districts across Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Men were not permitted as official members, but many male supporters participated in solidarity, helping with administrative tasks and accompanying the gang to demonstrations for safety. The movement earned the Godfrey Phillips Bravery Award for social bravery and has been the subject of multiple documentaries, academic papers published in journals like Communication, Culture and Critique (Oxford Academic), and a 2013 book, Pink Sari Revolution. Their signature sarees were displayed at the London Design Museum.

What makes their model significant for SBCC scholarship is how it proves that effective behaviour change communication does not require high budgets, mass media access, or formal institutional support. It requires authenticity, cultural intelligence, and the courage to link communication directly to action. The Gulabi Gang did not ask for permission to be heard. They used every tool available to them – a colour, a stick, a song, a crowd – and built one of the most recognisable grassroots movements in contemporary India.

Lessons for SBCC practitioners 🔗

The Gulabi Gang offers several clear lessons for anyone designing an SBCC strategy. First, know your audience’s communication channels: in a region with high illiteracy, folk music reached more people than any pamphlet could. Second, visual identity matters: the pink saree created instant recognition and solidarity at zero cost. Third, public testimony transforms shame into collective power: the community meeting format allowed women to move from isolation to agency. Fourth, direct action is communication: a sit-in outside a police station speaks a language that a politely worded complaint does not. And fifth, economic empowerment and behaviour change are inseparable – the gang’s support for cottage industries was not a side activity but a core part of the strategy, because financial dependence keeps women trapped in situations that communication alone cannot change.

Gender-based violence in India remains a pressing crisis – NCRB data from 2022 shows 445,256 reported incidents of crimes against women, with cruelty by husbands or relatives accounting for nearly a third of all cases. Against that backdrop, the Gulabi Gang’s sustained campaign over nearly two decades reminds us that change is possible – and that the right message, delivered through the right channel, by the right messenger, can shift even the most entrenched social norms.

What do you think? The Gulabi Gang used folk songs and visual symbols to communicate messages that formal institutions failed to deliver – what does this tell us about which communication channels are truly powerful in contexts of low literacy and high distrust of authority? And in the age of social media, can grassroots movements still achieve the same depth of norm change without the face-to-face, community-rooted methods the Gulabi Gang relied on?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulabi_Gang
2. https://gulabigang.in/about-us.php
3. https://cjp.org.in/mapping-gender-based-violence-in-india-trends-determinants-and-institutional-frameworks/
4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4216486/
5. https://www.centreforsbcc.org/what-is-sbcc/
6. https://sbccimplementationkits.org/lessons/step-4-strategic-approaches/
7. https://gulabigang.in/team-gulabi.php
8. https://polsci.institute/gandhi-contemporary-world/gulabi-gang-women-vigilantes-uttar-pradesh/
9. https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/88122
10. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2014/3/4/gulabi-gang-indias-women-warriors
11. https://feminisminindia.com/2019/03/20/gulabi-gang-breaking-ceiling/
12. https://www.shethriveshere.com/blog/gulabi-gang-womens-vigilante-group-story
13. https://academic.oup.com/ccc/article-abstract/9/4/558/3979343
14. https://sabrangindia.in/indias-gender-based-violence-crisis-2025-facts-must-drive-change/