PiI was born when some of us from the MTIS Team visited Melbourne in October 2018 and shared with the Australian and Aotearoa Board of Psychodrama (AABP), our desire to grow psychodrama within India. This desire had been ignited through attending a few workshops conducted by Sue Daniel (Founder of AABP) in India. Through these experiences we not only fell in love with psychodrama, but saw its endless possibilities for healing and the development of mutual positive relationships that have benefit across our society. Meetings and discussions happened over 2 days and many hours with the Board members hearing out the vision we had for Psychodrama, and then inviting us to set it out in action.  They generously agreed to support this social enterprise and provide all kinds of training, guidance, and the necessary supervision for developing this great approach within India in a systematic manner. Through these discussions two bodies emerged. The first one was the Moreno Psychodrama Society India (MPSI) which would be under the umbrella organisation MPS. MPS was like the corresponding association like the other registration body in different nations (eg. AANZPA, BPA, ASGPP). It also ensured that the Psychodramatists getting accredited from PiI would maintain their membership and to keep developing themselves both personally and professionally.

The second inception was PiI. This training organisation was formally announced on 22nd January, 2019 under the supervision of PIM and Sue Daniel and auspiced by the AABP until June of 2024.  Sue Daniel was the primary consultant and trainer involved in building the training capabilities, ethics and standards of PiI following Morenian principals. PIM also guided PiI in formulating its curriculum, and was closely involved with its design and delivery. Roohdaar aka Meenakshi Kirtane, the Director of PiI was supervised, groomed and mentored by Sue Daniel to eventually take over as the main/primary trainer role at PiI. Sue Daniel recognised the well-developed trainer role cluster in Roohdaar due to her 15 years of prior experience as a psychotherapy trainer and therefore encouraged her to co-train right from the first group of trainees.

Through this system, PiI became the first Indian psychodrama training institute to be accredited by a psychodrama board, thereby developing and following a system of training, evaluation, accreditation and registration that was at par with what was prevalent in the world. The first group of trainees co-trained by Sue Daniel and Roohdaar were the then working team of Maanas The Inside Story. The first training group therefore consisted of 10 group members. While Sue Daniel visited India twice for in person training and workshops with the first group, Roohdaar would conduct the monthly training sessions with this team under the supervision of Sue Daniel. Organically, this system of two trainer training was developed at PiI.

In the end of 2019, after a year of training her own team, Roohdaar felt confident of taking psychodrama outside of MTIS and announcing new training groups both in Bangalore and Ahmedabad. With a lot of excitement, the PiI webpages were written, finalised and added to the MTIS website and the PiI got its first online presence in the beginning of March of 2020. The announcement poster was designed by Roma Tayyibji who was also heading MPSI. PiI entered the social media space for the first time in 2020 with the posters and social media ads for the course announcements. As interest kept increasing suddenly COVID hit the world.

The challenge for PiI during covid times was that there was already a group in training and another about to form. At this time, the world was full of health anxiety, deaths, loss, grieving, claustrophobia and fear of survival. The PiI team felt the need to do something about it. With this push that the pandemic created, the need of the hour gave birth to online psychodrama training. The entire psychodrama training went online at PiI and remained like that for 2 years till mid of June 2022. The online group that started that year had 10 trainees. This group could meet each other face to face only after two years of them being a part of their training when India became safe enough for in-person meetings. 

With the training groups and systems falling in place, PiI felt the need to spread psychodrama and its benefits to everyone who was interested in this form of workshops. From March 2023, the PiI workshops began in Bangalore and Ahmedabad and continue to run once in every quarter. It was decided by the PiI team to run the workshops as a series so that if people needed continuity or post workshop support, they could reach out to us. All workshops have a post workshop follow up support group that is conducted after 6 weeks of the workshop. The first series of workshops that was launched last year was a 3 part series called On a Journey with Myself and helped people look at their relationship with their self, their relationship with other people and their relationship with their work. In 2024, the series of workshops that was launched was I Matter. This 5 part series looks at the Indian philosophy of human beings and entire nature being made up of the 5 natural elements (Space, Air, Fire, Water and Earth) and their interplay. The series is facilitating participants to explore their relationship with each of these elements as they operate within and around them.

The year 2023 saw the beginning of monthly reading groups. Begum Saiyed, one of the senior trainees from the first training group, started leading the reading group from September 2023. The idea was to have a forum where trainees could be encouraged to read psychodrama literature and discuss it so that there is meaning making and concept integration with their experience of psychodrama sessions.

A welcome development to the open workshops was the interest in psychodrama training they created in participants. Soon some of the participants in both Bangalore and Ahmedabad reached out to PiI as they wanted a further exposure to and learning of psychodrama. This gave birth to the latest in-person training groups that have started and are slowly moving towards increasing the number of trainees with Bangalore having 3 trainees and Ahmedabad having 5 trainees at present.