Hema Rairkar, born in Maharashtra in 1939, graduated in Economics. She is actively associated with action-groups of peasant women in villages of Pune district. She follows and facilitates their attempts of self-learning in study-groups concerned with current gender issues. She organises, in particular on the grindmill songs, seminars which bring together social animators, school teachers, professors of Marathi and social sciences, and those peasant women themselves who reappropriate their tradition.