Chapter 9 : A village named Ekurka
22/12
On 22nd morning 7 AM we started from Latur for meeting in a village called Ekurka , This village has undergone process of Micro planning recently and has done very well in many of the key indicators. After travelling for 1 hr we stopped in outskirts of Chakur for tea , The Tea stall owner had a large garden where he had grown various fruits , there were Many papaya trees with ripe papayas , so we had breakfast of papaya’s with tea, The owner was generous enough to charge only for tea.
After next one hour we were in Ekurka ,A board out side the village informed that this village is a model village for sanitation , here every home has toilets. The arrangements for meeting was done in gram panchayat . A small room near by panchayat was converted into Village information post (VIP) , Mr Gopinath Menon inspected the VIP with great interest , this place was equipped with many many informations related to village , this is the vision Unicef is pursuing as of now where community can be leverage the power of information .UNICEF wants communities to be responsible for keeping track of what is happening in their village and using this information to set further milestones and goals.
Gradually people gathered outside the panchayat hall and all of us made ourselves comfortable on the ground. Shankar who was volunteer coordinator introduces other 3 volunteers , SHG group heads and sarpanch of the village , he also gave a brief introduction of our team. Sarpanch gave small history as what has happened after microplanning , he told that count of toilets in village has increased from 3 to 121 now , 2 of SHGs have funds in lacs , they have \also started their own dairy business. Aganwadi center has been doing very well and count of mal nourished children is now in decreasing trend. After sarpanch Anu ma;am requested Volunteers and SHG coordinator to speak.
There was a heated discussion over the issue of water n the village , the village had only one water source , Villagers have been failed to create another water source , agriculture depends on rain hence they are able to grow crops only in one season , in rest of the years they have to go to near by places like hyderabaad , pune , Mumbai and find work for their survival. Suresh who is a founder member of Sath and was travelling with us suggested that they should try water harvesting but villagers had never heard of this so they requested a training and demonstration of this technique. Anu suggested that there is a new government scheme which they can discuss with CEO and other irrigation officers .
As we were given the task to check the feasibility of an operational village information center , we enquired from sarpanch about computer literacy , he informed that total 20 boys in village are computer literate , there is one computer in village of population 950 but as of now there is no internet connection.After some more discussion on future action plans the meeting concluded , Avdhut was busy talking with AWC coordinator , I joined them and we tried to understand what all information aganwadi center is collecting . We gave a visit to see the registers being maintained by AWC , one by one we inspected some 6 registers which had information from kids health to all the families in villages , we were overwhelmed to know that such a small center maintains total 17 registers which have many minute details related to village , the only use of this information is in reporting to government , that is also a very small subset of information goes in reporting , now I could understand why UNICEF is trying to generate interest in villagers related to this information.
No comments:
Post a Comment