Amma’s Story… — Bada Kala

Transcribed and translated by Shweta Hegde

An interesting part of all of our field segments is getting to interact and learn from communities. There is often a wealth of undocumented culture, including songs, dances, beliefs, and stories. During my first DPS, I got a chance to hear many interesting stories. Here is one such story:

Processes of Group Formation

By Smriti Gupta

Development Practice Segment (DPS) was a very unique experience in my Tata-Dhan Academy life. It was the first time for me to stay in a tribal area: Malwasi Panchayat, Ratlam District, Madhya Pradesh.

The objectives of DPS 1 include:

• Building and shaping our attitudes: Learning to listen and learn from communities, adapt to any development situation, empathize with communities, and develop confidence to face uncertainties in the field.
• Developing people-focused skills in understanding diverse development contexts and needs: Establishing rapport and building trust with the communities, understand development issues as well as organizational issues, and designing intervention approaches and strategies.
• Converting our classroom lessons to field action: The concepts learned during our classroom segments should be applied, and new lessons from the field should be brought back to increase the knowledge-base available for forthcoming batches.

My actual work has started…

By Shweta Hegde

Development Practice Segment (DPS) is an opportunity work at the grassroots level to organize the community. During our earlier fieldwork segments, we focused on information collection, interpretation, and analysis. However, as the segment’s title implies, DPS is action oriented. Here, we have started our actual work!

Some Much Delayed Updates!

PDM 12 is back from their second DPS and are now in their final term. PDM 13 is just getting ready to develop their skills as development researchers. And, a lot has happened in between.

While we wait for stories from both batches, today, I’ll post a few pending articles that are much overdue. My apologies go out to both the authors and readers for this delay!

To start with, here is a brief slideshow of some experiences from DPS 1 for PDM 12.

Organizing the Community and Challenges Faced

By Rajeev Rajan

Firstly, organizing community is not as easy a task as it may seem to be. Perhaps if you skip steps that would lead to the sustainability of the groups formed, it may be an easy task, but the process of forming sustainable groups is one that should be taken with a systematic set of processes. To organize the community, I felt a lot of difficulties at the time of inception. However, once I was able to build trust between the community and me, everything went a lot more smoothly. In other words, overcoming these initial problems can make your work more easygoing.

What are the benefits of joining self-help groups?

Trying to convince communities to join self-help groups is not always easy. Many times, people have been cheated in the past, leading to a lack of trust. Or, they might not understand the strength of groups. Or, they just might not be interested.

Sandeep (PDM 11) compiled a video of some of the success stories from women who were able to start small businesses after joining Kalanjiams. He screened this video to communities to help raise awareness of self-help groups.

Note: Subtitles have been provided so that you can get the gist of the story. If anyone is capable and interested in providing more accurate subtitles, that would be fantastic!

IDRC Food Security Project: Two Videos from DPS 1, PDM 11

The IDRC Food Security Project is a research-based project which is focusing on small millets cultivation in rainfed farming areas of India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Three development NGOs have taken the responsibility to implement this project: DHAN (India), LIBARD (Nepal), and Arthacharva (Sri Lanka).