July 2003

From the Editor's Desk

Hello readers!
Meeting all of you after a very long time. In the past two months I was busy with an interesting assignment for which I had to go out of station. In this issue of the newsletter I would like to share with you my experience gathered there. Please keep me posted about your feedback!
- Basundhara (Editor)

It made a difference!

One day a Maltese lady named Marcette came to our office and asked us to document one of the programmes of their organisation which happens to be in Jharkhand. The manner in which she narrated the issues, the conviction and commitment that showed on her face, inspired us no end and we took up the assignment.

I reached Pakur along with my two colleagues Atanu and Anupama at the crack of dawn and was received by the smiling faces of the organisers of TRDP (Theodori Rural Development Project). They have been working in the North-Eastern part of Jharkhand since 1956 for empowerment of tribals. Marcette herself has spent more than 20 years in this country working with Santals and Paharia tribes of Jharkhand. A trained nurse by profession, she came to India as a health worker and gradually got deeply involved in rehabilitating children with different kind of handicap. The Santals and the Paharias live a marginal existence and mobility is a great issue for them, hence the calipers, crutches and mobility training provided by CRPC (Community Rehabilitation Programme for Children, the programme we had gone to document) are of paramount importance to them. Right now CRPC is involved with the task of rehabilitating children with different kinds of handicap and integrating them into schools.

It was a great experience for us to see orthopaedically handicapped children experience the 'joy of walking' after years of crawling and living a subhuman existence. But we can never forget the pain we experienced when we heard the CRPC staff talk about the helplessness they felt when confronted with an orthopaedically handicapped child, with severe vision impairment, suffering from tuberculosis of spine. As we moved around the area in the midst of heat and dust, we marvelled at the commitment of the entire team, specially Marcette who has made this work a part of her existence.

The insights we developed are far beyond what words can express and we really enjoyed working on the document. It was heartening and encouraging for us. It made us believe further that there are many such organisations, which we sometimes fortunately meet and sometimes we don’t who are giving shape to dreams for a better future.

Vikramshila's Diary

During this interim period we had a few important visitors. The Principal Secretary of Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, Mr. Tripathi, visited two of our Nabadisha centres in Kolkata. He interacted with the children and their mothers. He was impressed by the teaching-learning methodology followed in our centres and enjoyed the juggling show put up by the children at the Watgunj Centre. Around the same time, Mr. B.K. Joshi, former Vice Chancellor of Kumaon University and Mr. Lalit Pandey of Uttarakhand Seva Nidhi, Uttaranchal, visited our lab school at Bigha in Barddhamaan district of West Bengal as evaluators from MHRD. They appreciated the community education programme that runs centring around the school. In particular, they praised the environment education programme and the way the environmental aspects are delivered in the curriculum.

In partnership with CRY (Child Relief & You), we have been instrumental in forming an Education Resource Group or ERG in Uttar Pradesh and recently in Rajasthan. In Uttar Pradesh this local resource group has been actively working, since 2001, at grassroots level to spread our movement for equitable quality of education for all children. In the past few months, we were involved in several ERG meetings, sometimes jointly with CRY and ERG project partners, to discuss the problems faced by the ERG members in the field. Besides developing plan of action, one of the major objectives of the meetings was to give them an idea on intervention in Government schools. Last week, the Uttar Pradesh ERG came to Barddhamaan for an exposure visit and saw our model centre.

Our director attended a very interesting workshop on 13th and 14th June, organised by Comet Media Foundation along with the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. This eastern regional workshop was attended by NGOs, Government organisations, scientists, media planners, social scientists, etc. The objective of this meeting was to brainstorm on the content and structure of a proposed Science Channel to be launched in India in 2005 with the idea of demystifying science and providing scientifically authentic knowledge in an exciting manner.