Constructivism

After several years of deliberation on whether Asha Bangalore should fund physical infrastructure in government schools, it was finally decided to go ahead and build a compound wall around Chandranagar school and also fund for drinking water supply and additional bathrooms.

The government funds were not sufficient to build the compound wall and further the money spent towards it was able to create only a half-constructed wall. The teachers and students felt that a compound wall was an absolute necessity for the school considering the hostile local environment.

• There had been repeated instances of local youth loitering in the school premises and pestering the students.
• Tourists cars were also frequently parked in the school campus and sometimes disturbed the classrooms by playing loud music.
• The school play ground was unusable since it was used as a public garbage dump and latrine

Considering the above factors and also a hope that a more formal school space would improve the sense of a school amongst the students, Asha Bangalore has decided to go ahead and construct the wall.

Asha Bangalore has also been trying to get the parents to be more actively involved in the school issues, but the response has been lukewarm. The last time when a meeting was organized to go and demand additional teachers from the BEO only 20 parents (for 340 students) turned up. It was felt that Asha’s involvement was not visibly felt in the community and if we contribute to a visible asset may be it would motivate the parents to participate more. This theory is yet to be tested!

The construction started on Oct 9^th, 2007 and here are some photographs of the work in progress

Sump for drinking water (15000 litres)

Wall (to the right of entrance)

Wall (to the left of entrance)

God of learning!

Yesterday I was so pissed off that I didn’t go to school!

The Chandranagar school (where I teach) is a public space that is utilized for everything, including tying up cows, parking tourist vehicles (sometimes with music blearing out of them) and such. For the last 3 years Asha Bangalore has been trying to get a compound wall around the school so that there would be a sense of a separate school space within the community. The hope was that it would bring a notion of sanctity to that school space. We could have easily raised funds to get that wall built. But, as you all probably know by now, we don’t do things the easy way. We do it in a way so that we can complain and gripe about it, may be just so that we can get another blog entry!

We wanted the local ‘community’ to make some contribution towards this compound wall. All the usual reasoning like ‘ownership’ and ‘empowerment’ has been thrown around quite liberally in this context. For three years we have been trying, trying and trying. Recently one of the parents who happened to be a construction person even made an estimate of the costs for the wall, plus additional toilets and drinking water facility. It came to about a lakh of rupees. This included around 15000 of labour charge. Since many parents are construction workers we were trying to see if they can contribute labour in kind along with Asha volunteers (our volunteers have no skill in the construction industry or for that matter....). No movement... “how can we work for two days without wages”?

Yesterday I go to the school and I see this huge Ganesh pandal. So many lights and decorations and I asked the guy working on it how much did that cost. He said it was around 10,000 rupees. The local folks are quite happy about the pandal. I don’t think they paid that out of their pockets, some local politico-goonda must have. Nevertheless, why couldn’t they channel that to improving the school infrastructure? What do they expect this pandal would do to them? Do they really believe that Ganesha, god of learning, is going to help the children learn better? This country, I tell you...

In any case all this fretting and fuming (and blogging) has helped me calm down. With tail between my legs I am back to school today. Out of the 43 kids I teach may be one of them might find reason not to invest in Ganesha pandals, may be not... It seems like any focus on the end-result is a route to disaster. Just focus on the process...just focus on the process..