Doosra Dashak Blog

Ubuntu Newsletter November-March '11

2011-08-17T02:27:00.001-04:00

The Road Ahead – RTE implementation

2010-09-20T07:22:00.000-04:00

The ‘Free and Compulsory Right to Education” bill was passed by both the houses in the Parliament in the year 2009. This has come into effect since 1 April, 2010.

This Act is being considered as a revolution in the field of education. Provisions under this Act include the following:

1. It contains details of minimum facilities any school should provide. It says that every school must have at least 2 teachers. Teacher pupil ratio must be 1:30 per school.

2. A School Management Committee (SMC) must be appointed for every primary/upper primary school. 75% members in this committee should be the parents/guardians and females should not be less than 50% of committee’s total members.

3. The responsibility of SMC is to ensure regular presence of teachers and RTE implementation.

4. Apart from duties assigned during elections and census survey, no other extra work can be assigned to teachers.

5. Every boy and girl aged 6-14 years should mandatorily be enrolled in the school. The education shall be free of cost. Besides, no student, under any circumstances, be punished, physically or mentally.

6. The curriculum used in the school should be in accordance with the guidelines laid down in the Indian constitution. Therefore, the pedagogy will not make any discrimination based on sex, caste, creed and community.

RTE - The road less travelled?

7. RTE implementation will be the responsibility of local authority. Here the local authority means the local Panchayat and the local level government structure for primary education.

The onus of RTE implementation lies not only with the state government but also with the organizations working for the social causes. DD is no exception. DD plans its role in the following manner:

a) Although there is room for improvement in the Act, still DD will create forums to get the public opinion in favour of RTE implementation.

b) Under the social mapping survey, identify and enlist unschooled boys and girls aged 6-14 years. Our efforts will be to get such children enrolled in schools.

c) Ensure that re-formation of SMC is systematized and as per the desired norms. To the extent possible, the committee members selected should be dedicated people who are willing to spend their time and energy for the betterment of schools.

d) Work towards capacity building (organizing trainings/workshops) of SMC members.

e) Ensure that with the help of Panchayat and education officers that the facilities and arrangements as mentioned in the Act are provided by the schools.

f) With the help of SMC and Education Department officials, DD will also try to improve the system so that teachers regularly come to the school and teach students properly.

We will make our best efforts to effectively implement the Act and resolve the practical problems as quickly as possible.

DD's Lok Adhikar Yatra- a video on youtube

2010-08-17T08:23:00.002-04:00

Doosra Dashak (DD), working to empower adolescents in rural and tribal areas of Rajasthan has succeeded in changing lives of many young people. In this video, some of the young change-makers share their experinces with DD.

Agla Kadam

2010-08-17T06:07:00.007-04:00

Agla Kadam is a bi-monthly hindi newsletter published by Doosra Dashak which is a medium to promote the values and principles of DD. This is an important component of the Continuing Education Centres (CECs) – libraries, Ikhvelos and science centres. In CECs Agla Kadam is being used for sharing information about the recent developments in the field of human rights, education and development. This is an important medium to motivate the youth.

Curriculum Revision in DD

2010-08-16T08:42:00.001-04:00

Here in Doosra Dashak, the 4-month residential programme is the most vital component. And equally crucial and important is the curriculum designed for these 4-month residential camps. The process of curriculum development in DD is time consuming and we take care that no detail (irrespective of how minute it is) should be missed.
Ten years back, with the beginning of residential camps, DD studied the social environment and beliefs of the residents in all the blocks it worked in and thereafter carefully chose the subjects to be covered in the residential camps. The subjects and pedagogy was meticulously designed after a thorough analysis of identified needs and the expected impact of the curriculum in the minds of young people. Subjects covered for the 4-month camps are:

• Language (Hindi)

• Mathematics

• Team Building and Participation

• Gender

• Samaj ki Parakh (An introduction to sociology)

• Health

• Adolescence and Sexuality

Over last ten years, there have been several changes both subtle and manifest, which inspired us to assess the relevance of the original curriculum in the present scenario. With the objective of revising the original curriculum; DD is now working on analyzing the changed conditions and needs as well as on impact assessment of the original curriculum.

The SCU (Steering and Coordination Unit, Jaipur) members have already started working on it. Several meetings were held at Jaipur with the eminent experts. With the initial framework ready, the SCU team will now work with the FESU (Field Extension and Support Unit) in all the nine blocks. Revised curriculum is expected by the end of this year.

We hope this exercise will guide us in making necessary changes in the course content and help us continue to strive for excellence.

Ubuntu Newsletter May-June

2010-07-08T01:27:00.002-04:00

Click Above.

Ubuntu

2010-07-08T01:13:00.000-04:00

Ubuntu, the bi-monthly newsletter released by Doosra Dashak highlights the recent happenings in the organization as well as in other NGOs working for similar cause. Ubuntu is word of Xhosa language (from South Africa) which means “I am because we are”. It is used for referring to a way of life based on values of respect, caring, sharing and solidarity – currently seen as an alternative to values that promote individualistic goals.
We at Doosra Dashak believe in growing together and value our partners as much as ourselves. For us, victory is not a result of an individual’s achievements but is the outcome of several like-minded people working for a common goal. Ubuntu, at Doosra Dashak, is a platform for our partners for sharing their ideas and experiences that help us evolve better and continually inspire us to achieve our goals.

Faces of change: Kayma

2010-05-11T17:28:00.007-04:00

It is impossible to really document the faces of change in the areas where Doosra Dashak works. But some stories just have to be shared. In our "faces of change" series, we will attempt to do just that. Here is Kayma's story.

Kayma comes from a small village in the Thar Desert, fairly close to the India-Pakistan border. She is Muslim. As is the norm in her community, and in many parts of Rajasthan, she was married at the age of 9, but lived with her parents until she was 15. Kayma had received barely two years of schooling before she got married.

The Doosra Dashak field team invited Kayma to attend one of the four month all-girls residential educational programs. Here, she reached the education level of a 4th grade student, and imbibed Doosra Dashak values. Motivated by her time with Doosra Dashak, Kayma was determined to continue her education; yet the nearest school from her village was over 5 miles away. So she recruited several friends, and together the eight girls demanded that Doosra Dashak provide them bicycles to ride to school. Doosra Dashak agreed, but it was left to the girls to convince their families to allow them to continue their education. Kayma managed to persuade not only her own grandmother and entire family, but also her in-laws, as well as her friends’ families. These girls are now attending secondary school, and ride together to school on their bicycles.

Kayma was selected by UNFPA as a case of an empowered adolescent who pursued education against all odds, and she was asked to address the UN General Assembly in October 2006. Unfortunately, she was refused a US visa and was unable to attend. There was, however, a photography exhibition featuring Doosra Dashak at the General Assembly.

The Moral Imperative: Anil Bordia's Convocation Address at IRMA

2010-05-06T15:00:00.003-04:00

29th Convocation Day, April 13, 2010

The Moral Imperative

President of the Board of Governors, Professor Yogendra Alagh, Members of the Board, Director of the Institute, members of the faculty, and above all, graduates who are passing out of this great, well-reputed institution. The first thing I would like to say is that ever since your Director asked me to come for this very important occasion I have been searching around to find the right theme which I might speak on. Everyone who knows higher education knows that this Institute is different – although it is more and more becoming an institute of management, the original ‘ghuttee’ of rural management does not part from its apron strings.

While wracking my brain to select the theme of this Convocation Address, in the morning of the 5th April, about a week ago, I came upon the headline in the Hindustan Times: “Children in UP village eat mud”, the headline said. That story is really worth telling, even though everyday stories of Israel-Palestine conflict, rape in moving motor car and depiction of poverty are subjects most readers simply gloss over. For them, they have no news value. This story is grim reminder of the depth of deprivation which is widespread in our country. The story is about frail, malnourished children eating moist lumps of mud laced with silicon, a raw material used to make glass sheets and soap. This village is about 45 kilometers from Allahabad, a universally centre known for being home to Nehru family and a centre of the activities of national movement. In village after village in the vicinity of Allahabad, skinny, hungry children can be seen on the dusty edges of stone quarries chugging mud. “It tastes like pounded-gram, so we eat it” – this heart-rending statement was made to the newspaper reporter by a 5 year old child. A health volunteer surveyed 149 families, and found that children in all families were severely under-nourished – every second child had swollen eyes, protruding bellies and severe stomach aches. 30% of these families were tribal and an almost equal number belonged to the Scheduled Castes. Only 45 of these 149 families were provided BPL cards. This volunteer doctor said these people should get not just right to food but food as well. This is a basic question of rural management. This reminded me of the experience my colleagues and I had had in Kishanganj block of Baran district in eastern Rajasthan. When we started to implement the Doosra Dashak programme in that block we decided to work among the Saharia primitive tribe who comprised 40 percent of the block’s population. A couple of kilometers in the interior from a national highway in the Saharia colony we found that almost all infants and children below 5 years were suffering from extreme malnutrition. Lack of nourishment had made them listless and the infants were unable to suckle at their mothers’ breast, even if mothers at all had milk in their breasts. For weeks, our efforts at famine relief were of no avail because mothers as well as children had lost their appetite and ability to digest food. Before our eyes we saw children dying while we had come equipped with laddus made of roasted rice, jaggery and oil. It took us months to create a system of family-tracking to ensure that casualties due to starvation were prevented. But here is also a policy issue.

There are said to be more than 300 million poor in the country today and whatever food security is provided is the result of decisions of the Supreme Court which have appointed its own Commissioners for Food Security. Generally speaking, government’s stand is minimalist, ensure that people do not die of starvation, but the state can not take responsibility for nourishment for the poor. Whenever starvation deaths occur the reason given is its immediate medical cause – pneumonia or even heart failure! In the current year’s budget an amount of about Rs.55,000 crores is provided for food subsidy, while the requirement is Rs.72,000 crores. This includes subsidy in procurement, compensation for mismanagement of storage and transportation – indeed compensation for mismanagement which straddles all aspects of food economy. The attitude of the state governments is even more shocking. On the ground that they do not have enough storage capacity some states are providing subsidized food grains to distilleries to produce liquor. The moral imperative of the situation is obvious – the question is would government look at it as an issue of life and death of the people or will the hidebound and insular fiscal approach continue to prevail.

My task to prepare my convocation address was made easy by a friend having sent a copy of Harsh Mander’s book: Fear and Forgiveness: the Aftermath of Massacre, published last year, and its review by Upendra Baxi in the last issue of EPW. I can see on the face if some young people: oh no, not the 2002 carnage again. But this is my first visit to Gujarat since the year 2002. I just could not bring myself to come to this beautiful state known to me for Elaben Bhatt, Ramlal Pareek, Narainbhai Desai and you Sir, Professor Yogendra Alagh, the distinguished son of Gujarat who rightly resented it when referred to as Gujarat’s son in law! Talking of my memories of Gujarat I am reminded of Ravi Mathai who had close attachment with your Institute as well. For the 2-3 years that I worked with Ravi, that was late sixties, I was posted as collector of Ajmer and Ravi had chosen that district to give a taste of what real innovation could be – to give that understanding to officials of Rajasthan government, to confident young men and women from the Institute of Design and of course his students at the Institute of Management. Each of us was assigned a task, the details of which were spelt out and although most of us felt that we would not come up to the expectations of Ravi, we tried all the same. And in that process we changed the design (and marketability) of durries that were made in Beawar and Jawaja, a cooperative of sheep breeders came into existence and management did not seem like part of a complex corporate machine. It was a day-to-day affair when reflected upon the Ravi Mathai. And from these simple episodes emerged a new world of learning and management, referred by Ravi as the Rural University. But those horrific last few days of February and early March of 2002 changed it all. I had not had the stamina to come and serve the ghettoized Muslims in camps and the voice I raised with numerous other public men was shrill and ineffective.

It is possible that the farther away we are from the event, easier it is to demonize it, to quote a famous aphorism of Professor Yogendra Alagh. But, then, how far is really far? Those events, the depth of cruelty and the criminal role of the state - having worked in government for 37 years I was just not able to understand those things. Even now, it is not only the numbers of people killed, displaced, hurt and harmed by various forms of mayhem that bring sorrow and anger, but much more disturbing is to recall the means and methods of planned violence, and in particular the incidence of brutal acts of gang rape, smashing the skulls of infants in front of their mothers, and similar challenges to humanity. Indeed statistics of human and social suffering remain a poor guide to understanding the enormity – the scale and the depth – of human abuse and violation. Mander fully invites our consideration to more than 40 independent citizens’ committee reports that gathered systematic evidence on the enormity of brutality, advance preparations for the carnage, the deliberate subversion of relief, rehabilitation, and the legal process, and the comprehensive denial of the human rights of the persons internally displaced by violence. It was left to the National Human Rights Commission and the Supreme Court of India, energized by human rights and social movement activists, to redeem somewhat “the cumulative outcome of deliberately faulty police complaints and investigation, discriminatory arrests and bail and the intimidation of witnesses and biased prosecution and judges”. Mander recounts the climate of fear in which the Gujarat 2002 survivors had somehow to put together their wounded lives and shattered life-projects, further fully imperiled even till date by the virulent practices achieving extraordinary forms of social and economic boycott against the survivors. Mander also reminds us about the practice of social apartheid which still continue to consign many tens of thousands of survivors to ghettoized forms of existence, struggling to live with a government and neighbours that deny their losses and displacement. It is this denial of basic citizenship – via acts of social cleansing – which makes the aftermath of 2002 even more chilling. This is indeed a dreadful term to invoke! Yet, “neo-Nazi politics” is already a term in the study of politics in Europe, America and several third world states. Many a practice inviting this description remains writ large on the Indian political development. While there is much talk concerning the “criminalization” of Indian politics, its specificity is perhaps best captured by a more accurate naming of it in terms of the growth of neo-Nazi politics. To use another reference, Gujarat 2002 offers a demonstration of what Jean Francois Lyotard (1988:8) described as a “perfect crime”. He is quoted by Baxi as follows: It is in the nature of the victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong. A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means.

The perfect crime does not consist in killing the victim or the witnesses… but rather in obtaining the silence of the witnesses, the deafness of the judges, and the inconsistency of testimony. You neutralize the addressor, the addressee, the sense of testimony, then everything is as if there were no referent (no damages). All this epitomizes Gujarat 2002, and its continuing aftermaths and aftershocks. Mander’s effort is not to plunge in sullen remorse, but to move on to explore the limits of compunction. In this he was guided, of course, by the lofty Gandhian tradition, but more so by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I suppose I would be forgiven if I make another digression. Between 1990 and 1995 I served as a part-time voluntary consultant with Nelson Mandela Foundation and was asked to design school improvement in Qunu Sub-province in Western Cape Province. Almost every day that I was at Johannesburg I used to go and watch the proceedings of Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was like a dream sequence – witness after witness coming to the witness box and recounting the work they did as underground combatants and the white Africans officials they killed. And also hundreds of secret police agents and ruthless detectives who sponsored killing of freedom fighters. I believe Harsh has not had this direct knowledge about Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but as the ancient Greek author Plutarch said: some events of history change the course of others simply by existing. Faced with the enormity of criminal impunity and immunity Harsh does not recommend a juridical solution, but rather a Gandhian one, or let us say something that Nelson Mandela would have commended. Eventually Harsh Mander poses this difficult quest in terms of a process of “acknowledgement, remorse, reparation and justice”. He is not unaware of the futility of such a solution in the present day Gujarat because he observes that: Instead of acknowledgement, there remains active denial and the blame of victim; instead of remorse there is pride for communal enmity; instead of reparation, there is economic boycott and state denial of rehabilitation; and instead of justice, there is active subversion of process of low.

I had requested Professor Vivek Bhandari to encourage students and faculty members to put questions to me, if they so wished. A few very interesting questions were remitted to me. As expected, a couple of them related to the new Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education Act, the bill passed last year by both houses of Parliament and brought into effect from the 1 April, earlier this month. And I am happy to refer to that Act because for me that Act epitomizes the salient underpinnings of quintessential educational principles and also because to me if casts its option in favour of the moral imperative. Having learnt our educational lessons from Tolstoy and Gandhiji many of us have been opposed to compulsory education as traditionally understood. In that understanding, parents are obliged to send their children to school or suffer prosecution in courts of law. As collector of the district of Ajmer, where Ajmer Merwara Compulsory Education Act 1956 was in force, I recall to my utter dismay at the fact that implementation of that law had resulted in many more parents in civil jail than children in schools. It has always seemed atrocious to us that while the state does not run schools properly, parents are required to enroll children and ensure their attendance. I vividly recall a few incidents of in which I felt helpless in the face of that draconian law. I was an official of the state government and the officials implementing the compulsory education law were answerable to the central Ministry of Education. They were ruthless in their mission to punish absolutely every parent who did not ensure that his or her children were in primary schools. Often, the Attendance Offices, this is what the field functionaries were called, threatened gullible parents with prosecution unless they parted with some bribe money. When I made an assessment of the outcomes of this Act in the sub-divisions of Ajmer and Beawar, where the law was in force, I was repeatedly told that the number of children in the cities of Ajmer and Beawar did show our increase, but there was practically no increase in the rural areas. The number of defaulting parents who were sent to the tehsil jails, the saw called civil jails, numbered 300 to 400 on any given day. And since civil jails had no arrangement for providing meals to the interns, they waited for their families to bring them food which had to be handed over to the jail chaprasi who only occasionally had it delivered to the intended recipient.

The Right to Education law of 2009, imposes compulsion on the state to provide education in the neighbourhood of every child and further imposes an obligation on the state to ensure that the school must have an infrastructure, the details of which have been specified in the schedule appended to the Act. It is true that in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Nelson Mandela and his comrades had incorporated a right to education for every citizen, but the numerous education acts of the provinces of that Republic provide for punitive measures if the parents failed to send their children to school. Perhaps for the first time in the history of education, a country has imposed a compulsion on the state to provide free education for all children within walking distance from their homes. Admission of children in school, inter-school transfer and grade to grade promotion, have all been made automatic – to enable all children to learn in an environment free from stress and discrimination. As regards the parents, all that this Act states is that “it shall be the duty of every parent or guardian to admit, or cause to be admitted, his or her child or ward to an elementary education in the neighbourhood school”. It has rightly been said that what is wrong with Indian education is the stance of the teachers and their bearing. There are varying reports about teachers’ performance – their irregularity of attendance, unpunctual school arrival and casualness towards their professional responsibilities. On the other hand, teachers have their own grievances – unsatisfactory school infrastructure, lack of parents’ interest in their wards’ education, harsh and thoughtless school management and load of non-educational responsibilities, to name just a few of them. The Right to Education Act goes to considerable length to improve the working conditions of teachers and also to ensure that only qualified persons are appointed. In this sense the Act rejects denigration of teachers as para-teachers and various other ways. The Act does require teachers to be regular and punctual in attendance and to devote special attention to evaluate the performance of learners, but it does not lay down a punitive framework in case teachers are found delinquent. What is provided is an empowered School Management Committee, consisting mainly of parents, which is to oversee school functioning, including teacher performance. That, of course, is in addition to the existing rule that teacher committing default in performance of duties shall be liable to disciplinary action under the service rules applicable to them. It is the government, at the state as well as the local level, on which compulsion has been imposed in various ways. These include - opening of required number of schools in the neighbourhood; - provision of facilities as laid down in the schedule; - placement of qualified teachers on the prescribed numbers in every school; - provision of appropriate education for children with special needs so that they may also progress along with other children; - ensuring that every child admitted in a school complete 8 years of elementary education; - laying down of curriculum which is child-centred and which is in conformity with the postulates of our country’s Constitution; - ensuring that children from SC, ST and other deprived sections do not face discrimination or in any other way prevented from continuing their education. In these ways the Right to Education Act 2009 invokes the moral compulsion among parents, teachers and the state itself. The Act seems to believe that for too long has the Country taken recourse to ineffective goadings, to attract to schools which are characterized by their unattractiveness, in fact children are known to shun the school – if you want to see joy on their faces all you have do is to declare a holiday.

From this state of affairs to a situation where the law and rules themselves attempt to spell out what attractive and joyful learning is and create a system of parental participation in school management. So I close with congratulating the new graduates and their teachers for successfully completing the rigorous and practical courses of study and I wish all young men and women a very happy working life and many years of service of the people of our country.

Adivasi saathis have shaken up the system

2010-04-12T21:55:00.003-04:00

This has been a defunct blog but we could not resist this post. Meanwhile Doosra Dashak also started a print newsletter (you can go their website and register to get it if you like).

So coming back to why we were shaken into reviving the blog:

Rajasthan held Panchayat elections whose results were announced in February 2010. As you know, Doosra Dashak saathis have been involved in voter education campaigns from the beginning. Doosra Dashak has been particularly concerned by the hijacking of the adivasi agenda by corrupt incumbents. And since the program works mainly in remote adivasi areas, the saathis from these areas have grown into formidable community leaders. This includes not just the youth but also members of the Mahila Samoohas (wormen's groups).

During the last Panchayat elections many Doosra Dashak saathis realized that they were educating voters on the ills of a system which they had the power to change. So some of them contested elections and few became panchs (ward members). That was then. Over the last few years Doosra Dashak's leadership in the areas it works has become a socio-political force. In every area there are specific issues, but overriding all others is the issue of eroding moral fibre and use of large money in elections (to be recovered when the contestant wins).

During the Jan-Feb 2010 elections 22 saathis contested for the position of sarpanch (head of the panchayat) and 12 won!! 160 others contested for the panch positions and 148 - one hundred and 148 - have won! All those who have won are in adivasi areas - Doosra Dashak saathis lost all seats in the non-adivasi areas. The election platform is - clean elections and better implementation of government programs.

Doosra Dashak is part of a consortium of NGOs and NGO led programs whose members and associates have contested the last Panchayat elections. The solidarity amongst these groups is unusual.

What does this mean for a social movement? What can we expect? What do you think?

Revival through Priya's post

2009-08-11T00:31:00.003-04:00

I have always thought there's nothing worse than a blog that comes with a fury and then you don't even hear the whimper. Our blog behaved a bit like that, what with college theses, interminable travels and other pre-occupations. Meanwhile I saw Priya Agarwal's blog while she was an Indicorps fellow based in Shivpuri, MP and it inspired me to revive this one. Priya summarizes her time in Pisangan Block of Doosra Dashak as below.

During the last week of January, I visited Pisangan, Rajasthan as part of my personal workshop. Indicorps asks us to select another NGO-whose focus is related to our respective projects-to visit and to learn their best practices and techniques. So for four days at the end of January, I rode on the back of a motorcycle through the hills of Rajasthan, visiting remote villages and learning about Doosra Dashak’s approach to providing accessible education. Doosra Dashak, literally meaning “second generation,” was founded in 2001 to put children, aged 11-20, who never begun formal education back or dropped out back into the school system. Their approach is, in one word, ingenious. The first step of Doosra Dashak’s engagement in a village is social mapping, a process that engages interested and various people of the community to map out the demographics of the village. I saw the final meeting of an assortment of kisans (farmers), housewives, and high school students, come together to examine the final version of the census they had created. Later that same day, they threw a huge party for the villagers of Rathor, showing, in a well-crafted PowerPoint presentation, the status of education in their village. It was dire. According to the statistics presented, the situation called for immediate attention, which was Doosra Dashak’s second step.When volunteers are social mapping, they come into contact with the various influential people of the village including midwives, Ananwadi (government nursery) workers, teachers, and of course panchayat officials. They use these contacts to set up a woman’s group, a mehla samooh. In turn, the mehla samooh draws local support and sponsorship to send children to a four-month residential camp intended to mainstream them into formal education. I was fortunate enough to visit the campsite twice during my stay at Pisangan. The boys I met, taught to shake hands instead of bowing for the traditional pranam (a sign of respect for elders), wowed me with their eagerness to learn and their solemn commitments to continue the ‘good habits’ they had learned. After the camp, active alumni of these camps then create a Yuva Manch, a youth group, to address social problems and carryout samaj seva in their village. Especially active members of this group are sent to the Youth Sangatan, a youth forum that meets once every two months.Visiting Doosra Dashak was incredible. Not only was it an inspirational lift, the sheer physical beauty of Rajasthan was heart-stopping. See a panorama of craggy hilltops and desert land, the sky, a deeper inky black than you thought imaginable, pierced with a shrapnel of stars, the rising and falling of rocky and crumbling fort walls, a castle on a mountaintop where brides and grooms continue to pay homage on their wedding day, legends and lore you thought mythical, like the city of Bithor in The Far Pavilions, being places on a map. Being there was almost like living in a fairytale. With the cold winter air whistling through my dupatta, I felt as though I was flying through Rajasthan. In four days, I visited more than ten villages. We sailed through villages situated 50 km apart in the day and in the dry heat, visions of women draped in brightly colored saris and lenghas alternated with desert scenes.I met child brides and even more childish brothers-in-law. Parts of Rajasthan that seemingly had not been touched by modernity, a romantic notion I know, and one that could be true if you looked past the overwhelming number of satellite dishes in multistoried homes. India is at once a contradiction and a wonder. In villages where no one has a bathroom, everyone may have a television. Think again about your definition of a village home. A hut? Try a multistoried complex, as dazzling and intricate as anything you could see in Architectural Digest. At once beautiful yet troubling are India’s steps toward the future. The caste system still holds supreme; in every home I sat and drank chai,in someone would ask me what my caste was and nod accordingly. The gunghut, a married woman shielding her face with the palloo of her sari to denote respect for the males in her vicinity, became my deepest grievance against the injustice women face in this country. Yet, Indian hospitality continues to be unparalleled. After visiting a mostly Muslim populated village for an hour with Anita, a DD worker, she invited me to her home and I stayed the night, sleeping beside her and her four-year old son. We woke up at dawn when Auntie, her mother, passed us mugs of cardamom and ginger infused chai and told us to go to the rooftop and watch the sun rise over the castles in the distance. India is beautiful and cruel in too many ways.

UN features Doosra Dashak in advancing the MDGs in India

2008-09-21T16:01:00.002-04:00

Goal 2 : Achieve universal primary education

Education is a fundamental human right and essential for sustainable human development. Since almost two-thirds of the world's 110 million children out of school are girls, ensuring their education is a top development priority. The Dakar Goal of Education for All urges nations to eliminate gender disparities and ensure that girls have full and equal access to basic education.

The Doosra Dashak project, supported by UNESCO, organizes skillsbased education for girls in residential camps. Peer education, through short training programmes, supports efforts to mobilize the community. In a matter of 18 months, Doosra Dashak has reached 91 villages in Rajasthan, and more than 1200 girls have received skillsbased training.Meet Muravvat from Nure ki Burj village, Rajasthan. Her father, Laldin, drives a tractor in Orissa and spends most of the year away from home. Her mother works in a nearby salt mine. Once, after an illness, Muravvat's mother decided to stop sending her to school. But, Doosra Dashak's project officers convinced her to return the girl to the educational camp.

Today, pride is writ large on the faces of her family as Muravvat solves mathematical questions and reads confidently from a book.

Read "Sails of Success" on the UNDP website at
http://www.undp.org.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=73&Itemid=157

Internship with Doosra Dashak: Moeena Das

2008-09-19T14:21:00.009-04:00

I am hoping I can bring in Moeena Das as a regular blogger, but until then, here is a post she shared with me. It is from a blog on Wellesley College's internal network about her summer internship at Doosra Dashak in 2007.

I am currently in the state of Rajasthan in India, finishing up my internship with Doosra Dashak, an education NGO that operates throughout the state. I spent about a month living in Ghanerao, a small village in eastern Rajasthan, where I was primarily involved in working on social mapping in Ghanerao and the surrounding villages. Social mapping is the process by which one gets an overview of a village situation, from the level of education amongst the youth to the conditions of facilities such as the local schools and health clinics. Doosra Dashak targets youth in the 11-20 age group and works to educate them, teaching them everything from Hindi to sexual and reproductive health, as well as how to effect social change in their communities.

My initial impression was quite honestly that of complete disorientation, mainly because the area I was living and working in is home to some of the most disadvantaged groups in India. The large majority of families are far below the poverty line and most women are married off between the ages of 10-15 and have their first child by the time they are 13-19. I was also living the life of an NGO worker at a grassroots level—I worked close to 15 hours a day, 7 days a week for over a month. This was considered the norm, and I had some colleagues who worked 16-18 hours per day!When I wasn’t working in the block office (Doosra Dashak has 9 blocks in Rajasthan, I was working in the Desuri block in the Pali district), I spent time at the 4 month long residential camp for girls, where illiterate girls from the local tribal groups and castes were educated. I started work in Desuri barely a week after the camp had started, so it was a wonderful experience to observe the change in these girls over the course of the 4+ weeks I was there. Some of the best experiences were when parents would come from their villages to visit their children—the fact that they were letting their children, particularly girls, out of the home for an extended period of time to receive an education really was quite amazing, particularly since the value of education for girls in particular is nonexistent.

Looking back, my fondest memories are my conversations and interactions with the girls and when in the villages, especially my interactions with 13-year old Tulsi. She was incredibly vibrant and energetic and loved song and dance—she was at the girls camp with her sister and sister-in-law, while her brother, husband and brothers-in-law (all 14 years old and under) were at the boys camp a few kilometers away. Her mother was constantly ill, leaving her father to do all the housework and cook meals for the first time in his life. This was certainly not the norm in their village, yet he did so and according to one of my colleagues, was also very enthusiastic about his children attending the camp, and visited them regularly. Spending time with these girls, most of who were married, photographing them, hearing their stories, and observing their strength and resilience was inspiring. It is quite a startling experience (and this was more when I was in the field doing social mapping or when I interacted with mothers or family members visiting the camps) to meet women and interact with women my age and younger who are already mothers to more than 2 children and are managing their families and constantly having to figure out some way to put food on the table.

As someone who has had countless opportunities, I was also sad. Sad because, beneath the strength and resilience, beneath the reality they were facing, they were still little girls. I did an activity with the girls, where I asked them “Aap Kaun Hai?” (“Who are you?”) and made them go around and give me verbal responses—most replied with their name or something such as “Sister” or “Daughter”, yet when I asked them to draw everything that represented who they were, they drew pictures of jump ropes, balls, mangoes, flowers and their houses. It was very interesting for me to repeat the process with girls in the 7th and 9th class at the village school in Ghanerao. The verbal responses were incredibly different—they included aspirations such as teachers, doctors, nurses, and the few big ones such as computer engineers or news reporters. Yet these dreams and hopes too, won't be achieved—I say this based on interactions and conversations I had with the villagers during my stay, and from the data I am working with, for most girls drop out by the 9th or 10th class.

In closing, I have to say one thing about cell phones; I have been in India for nearly 10 weeks after an absence of a year, and the technological advances are simply mind blowing, particularly in the rural areas. I brought this up with some of the girls and some of the families I met, and a common response was along the lines of “Well, I get one roti (bread) a day, but my family has a cell phone.” How do they charge it (since most families are without electricity)? With a battery solely used to charge the phone! That's just a snippet from this summer-- I tried to condense it as much as I could and make it as accessible to those who haven't really had exposure to work such as Doosra Dashak's. In case you want to check out Doosra Dashak's website the address is http://www.doosradashak.org/ . It hasn't been updated in some time and can be a bit difficult to navigate but the essence of the organization and it's programs are there. Also take a look at Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti's website http://www.bgvs.m2014.net/ (I worked for them in 2004 with the Midday Meal Programme research and analysis in the slum areas of Jaipur).

Dorabji Tata Trust

2008-09-19T14:21:00.006-04:00

The Dorabji Tata Trust is one of the main supporters of Doosra Dashak. See a profile of Doosra Dashak by the Trust at

http://www.dorabjitatatrust.org/ngo_profiles/dusra_dashak.asp

Starting a blog....a tentative introduction to Doosra Dashak

2008-09-19T14:21:00.004-04:00

I have been writing on other people's blogs for a while now. This is a blog about a movement I have been peripherally associated with called Doosra Dashak. Literally it means "second decade" and works with adolescents in their second decade of life. I say its is a movement, and I'll explain how through this blog, but more formally, its called a project.

So, Doosra Dashak is a "project" of the Jaipur-based Foundation of Education and Development and began in 2001. It works with adolescents from areas of extreme poverty and educational deprivation. It operates in 620 villages in nine blocks (a block is a decentralized administrative unit below the district) whose population is 15 million. Two of the blocks are inhabited by India’s most “backward tribes” – the Sahariyas and the Girasiyas. Other blocks have large concentrations of Dalit and of Muslim populations. One of the blocks is located in the heart of the Thar Desert – an ecologically fragile area with endemic drought.

I am hoping I can rope in Friends of Doosra Dashak to write on this blog.