India is fighting inequality and is heading in the right direction, but there is a long way to go. Design and symbols can help rally people more powerfully to make an exponential impact.

So we challenged the well-established 'equal to' symbol and created ‘the equity bars' as a symbol for Darsa’s mission for 'equity'. It leverages familiarity while seeding a visual disruption. This small change to the equal sign, will go a long way in spurring a movement for equity which is essential for true social progress.

'Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future'

This is not a product. Its a brand identity for Dasra's (one of India's leading social sector change-makers) mission for equity - a commitment to serve equity through research, funding, consultancy, networking, capacity building and impact through the NGO's they support. So this symbol is a brand identity for the equity focused services that they offer as a new-age social sector systems orchestrator. While it is Dasra's symbol, they have invited the larger social sector to adopt it and make it their own.

Over the past 25 years, Dasra has been working as an orchestrator for the social sector in India. Their vision is 'Towards a transformed India, where a billion thrive with dignity and equity.' Equity is at the centre of all they do because they are deeply concerned about it.

What is particularly worrying in India’s case is that economic inequity further handicaps a society that is already fractured along the lines of caste, religion, region, and gender.These widening gaps affect women and children the most.

As per Jan 2023 data, the top 5 per cent own nearly 62 per cent of the total wealth. Ironically, India has the world’s highest number of poor at 228.9 million.

On the Gender Inequality Index 2022, India stands at rank 108 out of 193 countries

As per April 2023 data, more than 55 million people are pushed back into poverty every year because of "catastrophic" health expenses.

So clearly, the pursuit towards equity needs to be galvanised.

The use of symbols has been intrinsic to the Indian heritage, across religion, politics and social change. They create a common language and association to a fuel a movement. This presented an opportunity to create symbol that unites and energises everyone in the fight for equity. And the time is now, when a young India, if made more equitable, can contribute to herself and the world - more meaningfully.

Even as India actively fights inequality, the economic, gender, geographical, caste and class disparities persist stubbornly. A lot is being done but more has to be done at a more strategic and transformational level.

Dasra, is concerned about the wide divide that still exists in a country that is needs to do lot more to meet SDG goals. They wanted the agency to come up with a rallying cry to help spur further urgency in addressing this.

Objectives: Bring various stake holders to though a common equity mission

1. Challenging embedded power imbalances in policy and funding .

2. ⁠Ensuring gender equity at an opportunity and representation at all levels

3. Representation of minorities and targeted action for disadvantaged groups.

4. Empowering community leadership (proximate) and social protection.

5. Redistribution and downstream changes to create sustainable equity.

Launched at Dasra Philanthropy Week, India's largest philanthropy event. Reached over 1500 stakeholders.

Dasra's mission going forward is focused on equity. Through all the different social sector areas they work in, equity is the overarching goal. We had to give equity a disruptive appeal rather than letting it remain a word that is casually interchanged with equality. So we decided to reference the universally accepted 'equal to' sign and evolve it to represent 'equity'.

We extended the lower bar of the 'equal to' sign to represent that equity goes further.

Giving a concept as rich as equity a symbol gives everyone a compelling and unifying north star; embedding clear call to actions within this symbol makes it's further impactul.

The target audience for this idea, is the funding community which needs to give more strategically to equity aligned initiative, and also social sector organisation that have to embrace the deep and diverse challenges on ground and address them differently.

Historically, symbols that have had a transformational impact have been simple yet rich with meaning. So, when we had to design a symbol to champion equity, we built on the universally known ‘equal to’ sign to pull people in with its familiarity and create an impact with its disruption. We extended the lower bar proportional to its height and created a symbol for Equity - concept that is more powerful than equality.

To make the symbol more human, we added soft corners and organic edges. The symbol in its purest form as an outline, is open to being adapted and adopted by the sector.

For Dasra, we added a gradient and grain inspired by the dynamic and nuanced nature of equity.

This simple yet powerful symbol was adapted across Dasra's programs and brought alive through touchpoints like website, social media, sector reports, t-shirts, badges, and even art.

'Towards a transformed India, where a billion thrive with dignity and equity'. Dasra has been committed to this vision but is concerned that not enough is changing fast enough. This symbol is helping them focus on equity as their singular cause and has also energised the social and funding network to apply itself more efficiently and effectively. It's a visual anchor and appeal for 'equity'.

With this renewed focus on equity and calls to action, the marginalised across SDG's will benefit from greater and faster impact. For example, a NGO working towards childhood education is taking into consideration the internet penetration across different regions before making it's online training plan, so that different content formats can be deployed. This avoids loss of substantial money (if a uniform outreach had been deployed) and enables better impact. The launch of the symbol has also attracted new partners to support the mission.