Community Development Program

In association with the Rotaract Club of NSIT, Jaagriti has started a Community Development Program, with the following objectives:

· To understand education, economic and health and nutrition background, and various challenges faced by the families in the communities under Jaagriti, with special focus on need for micro-finance and status of women and infant care.

· To generate awareness and consciousness among the families about the importance and benefits of education, health-care and nutrition so that these are taken-up as a choice and not coercion.

· To evaluate what difference Jaagriti has made to their lives, how we can further provide support to them, and develop a bond of trust and affection between the children, their families and Jaagriti.

This would be helpful to Jaagriti in developing sustainable solutions for addressing the needs of the communities, taking into account the communities background and the challenges being faced by them.

Special focus will be on community of construction workers (migrant labourers) at our projects, as they are one of the most vulnerable sections of the society with very limited facilities, negligible government support and receive low wages.

The NSIT Rotaract and Jaagriti volunteers have developed a questionnaire (attached) for this and also done some studies (about state of construction workers, BPL cards, government schemes, micro-finance etc.) to conduct the survey more effectively.

The program is being implemented from today and will move ahead in a phased manner:

Phase 1: Survey of 50+ families of migrant labourers, along with focused group discussions to generate awareness about need for education, health and nutrition and various government facilities available to them. (April 2010)

Phase 2: Compilation of Data, result analysis and final report preparation. The finding of the surveys will be shared with relevant stakeholders at both, state and central level. (May-June 2010)

Phase 3: Discussions, Brainstorming sessions and presentations within community to generate awareness and also within Jaagriti team to make our initiatives more effective.

The above is a pilot program and it will undergo lot of changes during the various phases of implementation. Once completed, the above 3 phases will be replicated at other communities under Jaagriti and various follow-up sessions will also be planned.

NSIT Rotaract Volunteers: Medha, Rishab, Chanpreet, Nehal, Chandramohan, Mahima, Kamini, Vibhor, Shryans and Manish

As always, we need your suggestions and comments to make the program more effective and fruitful.