Wednesday, December 26, 2007

6: Working with communities and UNICEF in Latur : Chapter 6

Chapter 6 : Getting clarity , facing pessimism of social work.

After workshop we moved for our scheduled meeting with Mr. Raveendra Patil and Mr. Sameer ghosh. First of all Sameer wanted to know from us as what is our background and what is being taught in our course . They also asked what kind of orientation was given to us by UNICEF Maharastra head Mr Gopinath and his colleague Anu .When I talked about different overlapping data being collected by several organization , Sameer immediately jumped into discussion with quoting facts and figures which were not only new to me but also amazed us , He mentioned that govt gets data reports from its departments almost every month and these reports are huge for example only health department has some 73 different forms to fill for each family.
Later Sameer asked if we are already about to narrow down on any of the project , we mentioned our interest in the Bhavisya Aliance where HUL is supposed to facilitate some outlets to SHG groups where HUL would provide its product .This time it was Mr Patil who enlightened us on this collaboration , he being involved in this project since the talks have started had many information. He told us very firmly that YAshda and NGO would not let any organization use SHGs as a promotion and profit making vehicle , the aim is crystal clear to empower SHG without spreading capitalism in rural areas. There were clear ideological differences as Zia had already mentioned to us in the previous morning.

After this much discussion when Raveendra and Sameer noticed that we had picked up a direction for our project , they became apprehensive in discussing what they had in mind for us but we insisted that it should not be seen as what we want , it will be more relevant if we can do what is of immediate help to them ., then Ravendra mentioned that they want us to work on a study and scope documents for the database which is associated with their software . There are many issues associated with it and they want us to address some of them as permitted by the time constraint.
1) Content generation
2) Data security
3) Managing generated data
4) Capacity building
5) Data entry
6) Offline Vs Online data handling
7) Who should be using this data
8) Further Analysis of data
9) DR and Maintenance
10) Handling large quantum of data
11) Data updation

I was happy to see that this time Mr. Patil was fully prepared and had much more clarity . Myself and Avdhut were pretty much OK to go ahead with this study , We had to just discuss this with Nakeeran.
After meeting we returned back to home , Zia Didi had already called us to find where are we so we decided that first we would meet her as she is about to leave for some meet in Osmanabaad . Didi was in office there she enquired about workshop , how did we find it and about different people present there. She briefed us about the convention in Deoni .
We dwelt into discussion about volunteers who have come forward from villages to help UNICEF in this microplanning . These volunteers as of now work without any benefit , Sath is trying to arrange some kind of monthly stipend for them so that they stay back in the process , this was the major concern for Zia and many of her colleague in UNICEF and Zia discusses it with lots of apprehension not sure whther they would be able to get this kind of support from government. Today Zia’s complete discussion was focused on how difficult it is for them to sustain whatever they have built after so much hardwork. Now when results are showing on surface , other agencies still come forward only to take credit and not to help sustain the process , what can be done to make sure that participation from government , people and NGOs can be formed with minimum friction and maximum commitment . We tried to assure Zia that if they can come to this point then there is no way backwards , its going to forward only .

Zia told that next few days activity will not be so intense as Bakreed and Christmas is near by. While leaving We took assurance from Zia that we will treated with delicacies in both of them .

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