ASHA PARIVAR OF BALLIA, U.P.

The first activities of Asha were started in India in Reoti town area of Ballia district of U.P. in 1994. Presently we have two education centers run for children and one sewing training programme for women. The programme is being entirely managed by local volunteers, which incidentally is also the first grassroots volunteer base for Asha in India. Click here for pictures from Ballia Ashram.

VOLUNTEERS
There are three main volunteers – Vijay bhai, Vinay bhai and Brajendra bhai, in the role of coordinators for various activities. The teachers presently associated with the two schools are Harihar Pandey, Ramji Chauhan, Sukhdev, Sri Prakash Pandey, Babu Lal and the sewing programme is run by Gudia. Tej Pratap Mishra has started helping with the computer training classes. In addition Mahesh, the present Asha secretary who spends time in Lucknow-Lalpur now hails from here and earlier used run one of the two schools.

BHAINSAHA SCHOOL
The Bhainsaha school was started in 1994 itself on a land donated by one Ram Prasad Yadav. With support from local population and Asha-Berkeley some preliminary infrastructure is up. About 100 students attend this school presently and classes from Std. I to VI are run. There is a voluntary fee of Rs. 11 per month and about 30-35 children pay monthly. The fees is deposited in a Post Office account jointly operated by Ram Prasad Yadav and another senior community member Sri Ram Yadav. Harihar Pandey, Ramji Chauhan, Sukhdev and Sri Prakash Pandey are the teachers here.

MAHAVIR STHAN SCHOOL
An experiment for educational reforms was first carried out in an already established Ved Mata Gayatri Shiksha Peeth school in Reoti since 1994 but because of the lack of cooperation from teachers here it had to be given up in 1998 and a separate school was started by Mahesh next door in a building which earlier used to be Post Office. This school ran for two years but a need was felt for moving this school to a more spacious location so that children would get a chance to play. Since 2000 this school has now been moved to outskirts of Reoti to the premises of a temple. About 40 children, including some teenaged girls, mostly belonging to firsherfolk and Bhar communities study here. The school presently caters to only primary level education. There is a voluntary fee of Rs. 10 but hardly anybody is able to pay. Babu Lal and Brajendra bhai presently teach here.

SELF RELIANCE ACTIVITIES
Among the self reliance activities candles, incense sticks, patchwork bed covers, chalk, hand made greeting cards, beekeeping, chyawanprash, etc. have been tried. Presently chyawanprash, beekeeping, hand made greeting cards are going on and three Asha volunteers have also decided to pool in resources and have taken up cooperative farming. They are cultivating aromatic plant jawa-citronela and have installed a distillation column to extract oil from it. This has been made available for public use also. The activities in Ballia today do not depend on regular external financial support from outside. A donation of Rs. 2,50,000 from a well wisher from Berkeley, which is now fixed deposited, provides a regular amount from interest. This coupled with the fees collected and income from self reliance activities meets the running expenses.

SEWING TRAINING PROGRAMME
It was on the initiative of Vinay bhai, a dynamic volunteer with good leadership qualities, that a tailoring training programme was started with the help of local resources, like used sewing machines, and a local volunteer Gudia, who belongs to a Muslim family who are by profession tailors. The first batch graduated on 2nd October, 2000 and the second on February 15th, 2001. The numbers had doubled in the second batch to about 50. On both these occasions public programmes were organized which were well attended by the local people with social concerns. A message of social harmony was communicated through these programmes. Asha has earned a good name in Reoti because of these programmes. Presently the training programme is very popular and is being run in different shifts. The girls and women belong to different class, caste and religion backgrounds. In the first programme when they came up to the stage to receive their certificates none of them were willing to speak into the microphone but from the second batch about one third of them spoke about their experiences. In a eastern U.P. gender biased and feudal atmosphere, it was quite refreshing seeing even women in ‘ghoonghats’ speak up in front of a predominantly male crowd.

COMPUTER TRAINING
A computer training class has begun from June 2001 on demand from the girls and women who were attending the sewing training programme. The children of the two schools would also get a chance to get trained here. Vijay bhai and a IIT-Khargpur graduate Tej Pratap Mishra will run this programme.

PROJECT COORDINATION OFFICE
The Asha parivar of Ballia also serves as the project coordination office, i.e., it helps in identifying new projects for Asha for consideration for support and in monitoring the on-going projects. Site visits are made by different volunteers and decisions taken in project coordination team meetings. The project coordination team presently consists of Vijay bhai, Vinay bhai, Mahesh, Arundhati, Parmita, Nandlal, Vallabhacharya, Shanmuga and Sandeep.

CONTACT ADDRESSES
(1) Vijay Kumar Pandey, ‘Asha’, Dakshin Tola, Reoti, Pin 277209, Dist. Ballia, U.P.
(2) Vinay Kumar Pandey, Uttar Tola, Reoti, Pin 277209, Dist. Ballia, U.P.