Visit to Swanirvar – January 16th, 1998
I visited Swanirvar’s main site at Aandharmanik village during my trip to Calcutta. I would have most certainly liked to spend a few more days there but unfortunately didn’t have the time to do so on this trip. I was lucky that Dr. Sinha was going to the village from Calcutta that day, so I didn’t have to do any route finding but I’ll put all the details here just in case anyone wants to visit the place. As I was there for a short while I could visit only one village (their operations now extend to about 15 villages) and I confined myself to Aandharmanik, the place where Swanirvar (will use SN henceforth!) has their "main" site.
First, a note on names. You’ll find some inconsistency with name spellings. I don’t know how best to transcribe them, the way they are spelt in the Sanskrit equivalent or the way they sound in Bengali. For starters, take Swanirvar for example: basically if you ask anyone for Swanirvar pronounced the way it is, no one would probably have heard of it. In Bengali it becomes something like "Shaw-nir-bhawr". Similarly Manzoor is "Moan-joor", Sujit is "Shoo-jeet", Razzak is "Rojjak", Kolsur is "Coal-shoor", Vikramshila is "Bikromshila" etc… Get the idea?
Anyway to get to the place one can take a local train towards "Bon-ga" from Sealdah station to a station called "Moch-londo-pur", it’s a little more than 50km, about 1hr 40 min. From there one gets on the road and looks for a bus or "trekker" going towards Bo-shir-haaT. The bus seemed to be a safer option. The trekker is some extended jeep like contraption with about 15 people inside and another 10 on top. The road isn’t the best and the ride takes about 40 min to Aandharmanik village by which time you’re all shaken up and quite happy to be let out of the bus and be able to walk the remaining way. The village is 3km from BaduRia and just about 10km from the Bangladesh border.
I discussed a lot with Dr. Sinha on the train, and also with him and Tirthankar Mukherjee, another of SN’s founder members at the village. I also met some of the people who work there – one of the school teachers, a health worker etc. The school at Aandharmanik was having their annual "Sports Day" that day, so I couldn’t see a class in progress. These notes are put together from some of the things that I had written down there as well as general additions from what I can remember.
Well, getting back to SN. It is not only running 3 primary schools, but is also imparting training to teachers from other NGOs interested in learning the techniques developed by them, not only in non-formal education but also in agriculture, health etc.. (Actually there is am organization Vikramshila which runs 10 schools, one themselves, and 3 sets of 3 schools thru other NGOs, SN is one of these.) Vikramshila is mainly funded by CRY and now imparts training to people associated with CRY projects all over India. Right now SN’s primary section is from classes 1-3, with class 4 soon to be added. In many other places however primary is taken to be until class 5. SN’s experience is that now the parents of the children in SN’s schools are apprehensive of putting their kids back into the govt. school system, and there is great demand on SN to continue their education experiments beyond the primary level. 1998 promises to be a year in which a lot of the future direction of SN’s educational activities would be decided. If the education bill – making primary ed. A fundamental right – gets passed – say from classes 1-8, then it would give more room to try out the new techniques, and perhaps also more funds. (right now the ed. budget is about 40K crores, if the bill passes at least 95K crores will be needed).
Just to give an idea of what is meant by Non-Formal Education: Typically the standard govt. published textbooks are really not very relevant when used in a rural environment. There is nothing in class III to X textbooks on sanitation or toilets. When SN started off 7 years earlier they tried to use the textbooks but found that it just didn’t work. A more concrete example, a geography textbook would typically start off with Chapter 1 on the Solar system and earth and then come down to maps of the world / India / local state etc. Children in villages have difficulty associating with such ideas – say a map. How do you explain maps? In a SN classroom perhaps the teacher would ask the students OK, which village are you from? How did you come from home to school, lets draw out the route on paper – map – what all do you see along the way – etc.. this gives a better feel of the local geography than the textbook does. Similarly about history – rather than worry about the dates of the nth battle of somewhere, the effort it to make people understand history through local examples – the family history to start with - find out the oldest person in the family – ask him how the village was earlier. Who’s the oldest in the village, what does he know – thru such efforts, children in one village found out that the land for a mosque was actually donated to the muslim community by the hindus of the village.
SN schools try to teach kids thru the local environment. Also a lot of aids like study cards, puppets, toys, etc. (mostly manufactured from scrap objects – see picture taken inside the school) are used. The school building at Aandharmanik is one long hall (see picture) that is (virtually) divided into three classes. There is some complaint about cross-talk from other classes, and there are plans to make some sliding curtains/dividers etc. that would make things a little better, but funds are still not available for this. Another big difference compared to the govt. school is the effort to try and get the parents involved in the child’s education – this of course helps the teacher to know the background of individual students better. I’m enclosing the notes from a self-evaluation workshop that they conducted in which the teachers discuss how their methods are different from the "standard" ways, and also what their problems are. Still, the attendance at their schools is still much higher than at the govt. schools (which in many places have just one teacher for all classes)
Right now SN’s biggest need is people. There are other organizations who have done similar experiments with classroom education, and there are even some books and teaching materials that have been developed – notably "Ekalavya" in MP – these are in hindi and would need to be made locally relevant to be used at SN.
Some other things that aren’t in the Annual reports (I’m not writing details about the things that are described in there). SN is also trying to organize 10-16 year age group kids to do things that would be useful for them in the learning process as wellas socially useful. For example children were trained to go around, ask questions and take surveys – about diarrhea, sanitation, effectiveness of the herbal medicines that SN has been pushing, etc. – then they themselves are made to sit and (of course depending on age and skill level) taught how to analyse the data, draw up charts etc.. ( there’s always some opposition to such things – SN is using the kids for their work etc.) In ’98 they plan to conduct a disability survey in the villages via the "Kishor/Kishori Bahini" volunteers.
SN has its main center at Aandharmanik, a simple brick-with-no-external-plaster building styled refreshingly different: not the standard boxy rectangular construction, but with a lot of big circular / hexagonal rooms – mainly used for training sessions. Incidentally they’ve just got a telephone connection – the number is +91-3217-44446. (should be able to leave a message for Sujit there during the week, on weekends the calcutta number is better). They have some land behind the building which has been used for a variety of agricultural experiments, and also for growing vegetables for consumption by the people at the center. There is also a small pond, which provides fish, that is mostly sold.The agricultural part of their work is really interesting. If you notice in the pictures of the area around Aandharmanik most of the place is full of nice green paddy fields. West Bengal has been aggressively trying to maximize the production of rice– an extremely water intensive crop – particularly the "Boro" or winter rice which is almost totally dependent on tube-well water for irrigation. The extreme amounts of sub-soil water that has been drawn out has not only resulted in changes in the water table, but also to the presence of dangerously high levels of arsenic in the water, which is now a major health hazard. (The govt.’s green Bengal programme and self-sufficiency in rice is of course a big political issue, and it of course denies that intensive rice cultivation has been responsible for this) Anyway SN has been trying to see what alternative crops can grown – wheat for eg. requires 1/5th the water rice does – find out why farmers don’t want to grow wheat, what the problems are. Then again they have been really successful in developing organic techniques for crops – using green manure – growing a particular plant ("Dhaenchay", I don’t know the English/Hindi name) just before the plowing season – once it grows it is ploughed into the soil and acts like fertilizer. Some of the plants are not ploughed but allowed to grow – these then automatically serve as perches for birds, which then eat pests and hence again reduce insecticide use – Integrated Pest Management. They’re also spreading the use of Azolla – it’s a green plant (moss/algae? I’m not sure what family it is) – well it spreads really fast on water (see picture of Azolla being cultivated in a tank at SN) and its roots have nodules that fix atmospheric nitrogen – makes really good fertilizer. Also, once Azolla spreads over the water-logged paddy fields it not only reduces evaporation and hence the water requirement, but also prevents the growth of other weeds – again reducing the use of chemicals. The thing that really struck me during the visit there was that it is quite impossible to separately look at education/agriculture/health etc., one has to take a more integrated look at rural development. At SN they’ve tried to introduce people to mushroom cultivation (I had some curry of locally grown mushrooms for lunch which was excellent!), growing plants like cassava etc. – they produce more starch/nutrients per unit area, can be sun-dried and used later etc..
I think that should give you some idea about the agricultural side. Now on the health front: I spoke to Hafiza, a health worker (they have 6), she is responsible for about 8 schools and 2 villages. Sudden medical emergencies are what really devastate the people in the village – any illness that requires hospitalization, particularly if the patient is taken has to be taken to Calcutta – such an event easily cleans out whatever savings the family has as well as whatever they can get from relatives etc. The health workers are trying to emphasize prevention, and also the use of some easily available homeremedies than a reliance on drugs. They make regular home visits, check on expectant / nursing mothers, immunization….
OK, now to funding etc. The GoI has apparently approved some level of funding but there isn’t any money in as yet. As far as contributions from Asha are concerned they would rather receive it after April 1st, as it would make it easier for tax purposes. They have to spend a certain percentage of all money that comes in within a financial year in that year itself, and a sudden large sum that coming in towards the end would make things difficult. BTW, a usual $ cheque takes about 8-10 weeks to clear and actually a quicker way is to somehow transfer the money to their account directly, if this is in rupees that makes it even quicker. I believe it is possible to ask say State Bank of India, Chicago to issue a Demand Draft in Rupees (you mail them the form and a credit union cheque and they do it right away and mail it back to you). If you are going to do something like this the bank details are as follows:
Account is under the name "Swanirvar", a/c # : C&I 216 with State Bank of India, B.T. Road Branch, 22, B.T. Road, Calcutta 700002.
Also, since they are starting the 4th standard of their school, the budget which they submitted to us last year for classes 1-3 basically is now extended to classes 1-4, which means the total amount increases by about 4/3 times. Also there are some other things which can’t be covered by Govt. grants, which were not in the budget sent to us. There are things like 1) travel – to meetings, workshops – for training, exposure trips 2) Teachers monthly meetings, cross visits to different schools 3) Basic stationery and printing expenses for eg. for question papers etc. These all about Rs. 5K per head. Since we are anyway not funding the entire amount of the original proposal I don’t think there is any need to be worried about these things.
I guess this has been long enough. I’ll stop here… Do send me an email with questions, and keep me posted as to whats happening on the ASHA front, particularly with this project.
-Arnab