Seva Mandir operates in the southern part of Rajasthan. Seva Mandir's work area encompasses 626 villages and 56 Urban Settlements. Majority of these villages are located in Udaipur District. In total the organisation reaches out to around 70,000 households, influencing the lives of approximately 360,000 persons. The region is characterized by rocky and hilly terrain of the Aravalli hill ranges, moderate to low rainfall (400-600mm/year), and large temperature variations (4-48 degree C).

The rural population in this area consists primarily of tribal (68%) and other disadvantaged communities, whose resource base is severely depleted. People are dependent upon subsistence agriculture, animal husbandry, and wage labour for their livelihoods. The absence of genuinely empowering institutions through which citizens can come together on an equal basis—particularly women, youths, children, and lower-caste groups—presents a major impediment to the development process. Without appropriate structures in place at the village level, norms relating to the management of common resources are abandoned, resulting in the degradation of the natural resource base on which the people depend, and communities remain too unorganized to work together for their common development. Coupled with inadequate service delivery from the government and the private sector, which almost systematically fails to respond to local realities, this results in widespread deprivation in terms of various factors critical to human well-being, particularly in the areas of health and education.

Udaipur’s literacy rate, as of the 2001 National Census, was 59.26%. However, for the rural areas, the rate is much lower. The health parameters for the women and children of Rajasthan rank amongst the worst in the country, with extremely high levels of malnutrition, infant mortality rate (IMR), and maternal mortality rate (MMR). The IMR for South Rajasthan stands at 86.3 per 1000 live births. MMR for Rajasthan stands at 670 cases per 100,000 live births. The region is plagued by high incidence of tuberculosis (TB) and malaria, at 420 cases per 100,000 of rural population and 4,458 cases per 100,000 of rural population respectively. Complete immunization rates for children in our area stands at a dismally low figure of 5%. 90% of children under 3 years are malnourished.