Asian Bridge India was founded in 2009 in Varanasi and registered as a public charitable trust (Registration No. IV-142/09, dated 1 July 2009). What began as a grassroots effort to stand with the city’s most excluded communities has grown, over more than 15 years, into a multi-thematic organization working across 59 rural villages and 10 urban slums of Varanasi district.

ABI’s Story: Rooted in Lived Experience

Asian Bridge India (ABI) was not born in a conference room or from a project proposal. It was born from a life — from decades of walking alongside the most marginalized, often as one of them.

ABI’s founder Mohammad Moosa Azmi, grew up in a low-income Muslim family in Varanasi. Bullied through school, pushed out of his home at 18 after failing his Class 12 exams, he spent months sleeping at Banaras railway station, washing tea glasses, pulling a cycle rickshaw, and later driving an auto — learning English not in a classroom but in conversation with foreign tourists on the ghats of Banaras.

Yet even in those years of hardship, he was giving back. With whatever little he earned beyond his own needs, he supported people poorer than himself. That instinct — to serve before being served — never left him.

His scouting work as a teenager had already earned him the UP Governor’s Award in 1989 and the President of India’s Award in 1990, presented by Late President R. Venkataraman. But these recognitions came alongside deep personal pain — a father who celebrated his son’s national honour and two years later threw him out of the house for a third division result. Joy and wound, always together.

The turning point that changed everything

In the early 2000s, while working as a sales representative for Eureka Forbes, Moosa witnessed the gang rape of an 8-year-old Dalit girl in Bharlai, an urban slum near Shivpur, Varanasi. He carried her bleeding body to the hospital. He fought for justice. And he watched the system fail her — because her family was Dalit and her attackers were from a dominant caste. Her father, terrified, fled with her before the case could proceed.

That moment broke something in Moosa — and rebuilt him differently. It ignited in him a deep rage against gender violence, and an urgent need to understand caste oppression. He joined the Dalit Swadhikar Rally in December 2003 — walking from Delhi through Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra, ending at the World Social Forum in Mumbai in January 2004, organized by NCDHR. He spent years fighting Dalit rights on the ground.

In 2005, the system struck back. He was arrested on false charges, jailed for 33 days, and subjected to third degree police torture. But his case drew international attention — UN Special Rapporteur Hina Jilani documented it in her Human Rights Defenders Report 2006, and the government was compelled to punish the police personnel responsible. He was acquitted with full honour.

From 2006 to 2008, he served as UP State Coordinator for the National Project on Preventing Torture in India, working with Peoples Watch, Madurai — turning his own experience of torture into a shield for others.

From the ground to the global — and back

In 2008, Moosa received a scholarship to study at Sungkonghoe University in South Korea, where he completed his Masters, deepening his understanding of development, social movements, and grassroots accountability across Asia.

He returned to Varanasi — not to leave it behind, but to invest everything he had learned back into it. And he founded Asian Bridge India.

What ABI is, at its core

ABI is not an organization built on theory. Every programme it runs — child protection, gender equity, digital literacy, community empowerment in urban low-income neighbourhoods — is rooted in what its founder has lived: poverty, displacement, caste violence, gender injustice, state repression, and the stubborn belief that ordinary people deserve dignity and rights.

The communities ABI works in are not “target populations” to Moosa. They are his people. He has been one of them.

That is what makes ABI different. And that is why it exists.