7:Working with communities and UNICEF in Latur : Chapter 7

Chapter 7 : The lady who spoke and Budgeting
20/12
I was woke up by Avdhut with odd question , do you know singing ? , It did not take me any time to guess the context , It was an easy guess that probably the toilets in our new room do not have locking latches from inside. I thought we can live with that. We had our breakfast in near by restaurant and started for hotel for the second day of workshop.

As scheduled today there were 3 presentation , first was livelihood which got over in 5 minutes , next came cleanliness and maternal care which was delivered by a nurse from health department , This lady just loved talking , she did not look at chart even once and discussed only first point for 7 minutes. She had all different facilities given by government on her finger tips and for each of them she was able to provide detailed information.

After the third presentation , the agenda for the day was told by Sameer , It was to do budgeting and resource allocation for the activities which these groups have written down on charts so far. Different groups were given one hour to complete this activity.
This was much better then any MBA class , the best part was these groups come prepared for such activities , When I was estimating how many students are there in the Block , my team member who was superintendent in Education department took out a data sheet which had detailed information about number of students , mal and female student ratio and different expenses in these government. After hving such kind of data the task of budgeting was no difficult.
In my group one volunteer was also present from Shirur , I talked to him on different issues and he had some very intelligent questions for me and the first one was “ What can he learn from me “ , It took much effort for me to explain what he can learn from interns like me , I told that we would be able to help them with various activities , also gave some observation and recommendation on the rally and workshop , we discussed couple of recommendation and what are bottlenecks and benefits in them.

After the workshop we had discussion with Mr Jayant Patil from Yashda who was also able to clarify some of our doubts regarding the process for data collection and how it is being utilized . He also mentioned how the focus of government is now shifting to provide maximum support , He quoted an example where one of the district CEO collected 4 crore Rs from different development funds to provide gas connection to child development centers so that people out there can spend more quality time educating kids rather than being in kitchen cooking.

After being at home for some time in night we came out with a commitment to find out where is PVR in Latur , We walked for half hour to discover the magnificent PVR building which is at one end of Latur , I was amazed to see the kind of investment PVR has put for city like Latur .