The summary of the meeting minutes held on
Wednesday, April 23 2003, at 9:30 p.m. by teleconference.
Attendees: Sridhar, Anirban, Manoj.
Minutes summarized by: Sridhar
We discussed Asha Princeton's involvement for the
FODRA project.
Chronology of project discussions regarding FODRA:
1998: Project introduced to Asha Princeton by
Madhuri, a visiting scientist at Princeton University
1999-2000: Funding for Remedial Education Center and
NonFormal Education center started by Asha Princeton.
2000-2001: Support for REC and NFE centers were
continuted
2001-2002: We decided to support only the REC
centers. Three centers were supported by Asha
Princeton.
March 2002: Madhav Acharya's site visit and proposal
for renewing the support for REC centers.
June 2002: Project review by Asha-Princeton.
Questions on Bal Niketan, a private school started by
FODRA.
June 2002: Reply from Madhab Nayak expressing
displeasure over Asha's involvement with the project.
In this message Mr. Nayak requests for funding till
March 2003 after which FODRA will look for alternative
sources.
After this, over a few e-mail exchanges, it was
decided that we will support the project till March
2003 and stop supporting the project after that.
It was not clear to us (Anirban, Manoj and I) whether
Asha Princeton's decision to discontinue our support
for FODRA was communicated to them clearly. If so, we
are not sure we received the new proposal from FODRA.
This proposal is a request for continuing our support
for the REC centers, and not a new project proposal.
If any of the current Asha Princeton volunteers have a
compelling reason to continue supporting the project
and is willing to be actively involved with the
project, we can revist the project once more.
Action items:
1. Ask Madhav Acharya if Asha Princeton's decision
not to support FODRA after March 2003 was communicated
to Mr. Nayak. Madhav, are you there?
2. If the decision was communicated to Mr. Nayak,
send a response to him indicating that we do not have
volunteer resources at this time to be actively
involved with the project.
3. If we did not communicate our decision to Mr.
Nayak, we may have to revisit our funding decision
(atleast for the near-term, say next six months or
so).
We decided that we will try to respond back to Mr.
Nayak in an expeditious manner (within the next week).
Sridhar