Swanirvar - site visit report Chandrashekhar Shetty (cmshetty@yahoo.com) 6 March, 2002 All throughout the trip we were conversing in Bengali sprinkled with English words. But my ability to read Bengali lags far behind - reading some of the school material and understanding the more formal words was difficult. Sujit Sinha was the contact person at Swanirvar. When I landed in Calcutta we got in touch over the phone and decided to first meet and chat about the site visit. Sujit turned out to be this grey-haired mild-mannered bhadralok. He was at work typing in at the WAH template when I walked in. For the next half an hour he described Swanirvar - history, activities and local information. Swanirvar was started in 1989 by Sujit and Tirthankar Mukherjee along with locals in Baduria block, North 24 Parganas district in West Bengal. Starting with 1-2 villages today they work with well over 15 villages in the area. Their motivation was integrated rural development - education, health, agriculture and village planning (panchayat). Sujit explained that they had tried various experiments over the last 10 years. Today they run 3 primary schools and a lot of pre-primary schools. They also work with high school students. Their members are actively involved with the government in trying to improve education via participations in various DPP committees and gram panchayat planning boards. They have been funded over the years by lots of organizations including CRY, state government, CARE, Asha Madison and the late Tridip Sarkar's trust (Friends of Swanirvar). Since Tridip Sarkar's death they have run into funding problems and various projects will run out of funds at different times this year. At the end of this first meeting we decided that on Wednesday 6 March we would leave in the morning for Baduria and spend the day there. So on Wednesday morning Sujit and I took a taxi to Sealdah station. We caught the 8:20 am Bongaigaon local. This is supposed to be the worst of all the lines from Sealdah. Our destination was Malchandapur around 1.5 hours away by train. I think the area we finally were going to was around 80 Km away from Calcutta and not far from the Bangladesh border. During the train journey Sujit described their various efforts at trying to influence state education and the general condition prevalent today. At Malchandapur we caught a bus. It took us about half an hour to get Adharmanik village. So by 10:30 pm we were there. Swanirvar has a pukka office here. We walked to this building. On the way we saw the local government primary school with the post office attached. The school looked old and weathered. In the office I met some of the other members. The first one was Debraj - Debraj was a phd student in a school in London and he had decided to leave it for rural work in Bengal. He had just joined Swanirvar. We also met Manju, Niranjan and Subhas there. Over a cup of tea Sujit and Debraj showed me their office. First was the working area - space for all supervisors of various activities. There was a telephone there, the computer was away for repairs, the office walls were full of maps, charts, reports and statistics about their work. One of the charts was a detailed listing of the three primary schools - number of students etc... I noticed that they had an almost equal number of girls and boys. Debraj took me for a tour of the building. There was a conference room which had a tv and also served as the place for all training. A library room was under construction. The upper floor had rooms for people to sleep and another conference room. Outside the building there was a garden and a small pond. Debraj had woken up at 4 am in the morning to watch fishing here. That was our lunch in the making. During this time another gentleman Dr. Misra joined us. Dr. Misra had worked a long time in a bank in Bengal and was now working with Swanirvar in their women's self-help groups and micro-financing schemes. Just after 11 am Sujit, Debraj, Dr. Misra and I left for the primary school. It was a 5 minute walk. A brief aside on the village. This part of the West Bengal is extremely dense compared to rest of India. So even though most of the land is cultivated year long majority of the villagers are landless. Caste is not a big issue here. There are equal numbers of Hindu and Muslim population. Access to a primary school is easy - typically 15-20 minutes walk. The area has a known case of arsenic poisoning. Poultry farming is pretty popular in this area. The primary school building looked quiet new. They no longer need money for any construction costs as the trust took care of them. The other two primary schools are also built along the same lines as this one. There was construction going on in the school. On one side there was some bamboo scaffolding erected with some workers on them. There were bricks resting and some cement mixing also going on. The building had two floors. On the ground floor were two classrooms, teacher's room, toilets and one generic bigger room. The upper floor was one big hall. Using a temporary partition the hall was converted into two classrooms. The hall served also as place for all cultural meetings and in the last floods as refuge for the villagers. It is the biggest such structure in the village. There were chappals lined up neatly outside the classrooms and I could make out children sitting on the floor and an instructor. The classroom consisted of a blackboard in the front and the rest of the room was filled with mats/carpets on which the children was seated. There were approximately 40 students in each class. 3 instructors were male and one of the instructor (class 4) was a female - I think her name was Sandhya. As we walked past the class the children got a little excited as they had spotted their Kaku Sujit. In one of the classes there were more girls than boys and the girls were loudly proclaiming it. All the children were in uniforms - dark blue pant/skirt and light blue shirt. The instructors are all locals trained by Swanirvar. There are regular workshops and lectures for instructors inviting people from Calcutta and other places with expertise in education research. We then went upstairs and wandered into each class. Sujit did all the talking and interacting with the children. The rest of us were observant spectators. The first class we walked into was 2. The children were sitting in groups of 4 scribbling in notebooks. The instructor explained that the kids were working with study group cards. There were around 50 such cards. Each group picks up a different card in every class. Then they do the exercise listed in the card. They are supposed to discuss the answers among themselves and write it down. The exercises where information gathering and classifications ones. The few examples I saw asked for listing types of animals, plants, fruits. A contrived example - list 5 vegetarian animals and 5 meat eating animals. Class 1 students were learning language. A kid was writing on the blackboard. Then we moved onto the most fun class - 4. The kids here were the most energetic and enjoying themselves. The children were reading a textbook - a novel. Sujit then started testing the children on different things. He pulled a couple of students to come and read from a newspaper (bengali). There was a roar when the headline turned out to be Saurav Ganguly's antics against Zimbabwe. Then he started quizzing them with maths problems - standard multiplications. There were the right and wrong answers and a lot of voices. The children were very active. The class had a fair share of the extremely eager ones and the shy and nervous kids. We then moved on to the science studies. The children explained how they were given an assignment to study different types of soil. Each kid had to obtain samples and then compare them - porosity, fertility etc... The kids also pointed to a rows of bottles in the front side of the class. These bottles contained specimens of different plants and insects which they had collected. The children also go out on field trips. On their last trip they had gone to Shantiniketan. Inspired by cultural programs organized by students at Shantiniketan these kids also had done a sahitya goshti in the school. Two boys enacted a small skit about a dog and cat. Then a girl and boy recited the poems they had written for the goshti. Despite public demand for more time we had to move on. The class 3 kids were making a map of the village as part of their geography class. Sujit asked them to measure the length and breadth of the room. We had some interesting answers about foot and inches also with some prompting by the construction worker peering through one of the windows. Sujit mentioned that they have been implementing environmental learning. For example the kids were asked to find out why the course of a river had changed near their village. The kids investigated asking village elders and others and finally came up with some 3/4 possibilities. At this point a bell rang signalling a break. After a few minutes the students of class 3 gathered outside for some cultural activities. The kids started dancing with dandiyas in synch with a song sung by some of the instructors. After this they went into the bigger room in the ground floor to do some exercises. It was almost 1 pm and time to head back. One small incident - while we were starting to leave one of the instructors brought to Sujit's attention a kid who had potential signs of drinking arsenic poisoned water - his feet had dark dots. We then walked back to the office. After the meal we sat down in the conference room to watch two videos on. At this stage Samir Biswas the supervisor for their Youth and Culture wing also dropped by. The first video was aired in national television and produced by UGC. This was about the work they do with high school students. So what is this high school activity. From the video and talking to Samir I gathered the following. On weekends and when the children get time during weekdays (non-exam periods) they do some real interesting work education stuff with high school students. I remember for me work education was just a con job. Well here Samir started out first with a small group of 15 people in 1997. They were trained to do surveys - temperature, rainfall, diseases over the year. So armed with the right instruments these children proceeded to do that. At the end of the year they had really useful charts and graphs displaying all this data. Over the next few years leading upto now this program a lot - from 5 villages to over 15 villages. The high school students are really into it. They have developed skills like knowledge about diseases afflicting local animals - cow, chicken, goat, duck. They have learnt to apply vaccines and are in much demand for that in the area. The children also help organize blood donation camps and vaccine drives for cattle. In fact Swanirvar's supervisors in these areas are also in high demand to come and talk/show their work in other areas in this regard. impressive. The next video we watched was made by an AID volunteer. It talked about Swanirvar's activities as a whole. The schools, agricultural work, building covered toilets, vegetable gardens, treating arsenic poisoned water, women's self-help groups etc. After this I questioned Sujit and some of the other members more about their work. Sujit explained all the work which still had to be done. He is thinking of starting to create textbooks in bengali along the lines of digantar and eklavya. He talked about the attempts to influence government school teachers. Swanirvar has regularly invited these teachers to come and observe their classes. They also organized a workshop of teachers where a known educationist from calcutta came and talked about new ways of teaching. There also a followup workshop where the teachers talked about their results in applying these techniques. I asked about what happened to these kids after primary school. There was a mixed reaction. Some teachers don't like these kids who are always questioning things. Other teachers liked them and used them in cultural activities as the Swanirvar children had more skills. The good news is that these kids have had no problems in taking the government examination after class 4 to enter the government high school. Sujit also explained that they are trying to change the report cards - which presently don't reflect a true measure. He sounded very hopeful about these changes - textbook, report cards - since he was hoping to build on the work done by digantar and other ngos. They had books from these places. After this discussion we headed out to see old photos. I wanted to take back some photos as I had not got a camera. Sujit was busy with some work. So I sat with Debraj and Dr. Misra chatting. Debraj talked about his as yet short stay in the village. Dr. Misra also has some plans of doing something like this in his home village in Purulia. We also looked at charts prepared by the high school students. The charts looked professional - they used graphs, pie-charts and good colours to illustrate the point. Around 6:30 pm Sujit got back and we all headed back. It was dark by the time we got to the bus-stop. Debraj was also going back to Calcutta that evening. We talked some more about education, I found out more about the arsenic poisoning, funding possibilities etc.. I was pretty tired during the journey back. The jet-lag was starting to kick in. During the train journey I dozed off. Dr. Misra got down early. Debraj got off at Bidan Nagar. Finally me and Sujit reached Sealdah. It was quiet ride in the taxi back home and I reflected about my day. I reached home around 10 pm. I thought the work done at Swanirvar was fantastic. I came back from India knowing that there are these dedicated people doing amazing work. Swanirvar has over the past 10 years built a strong foundation in the community in those villages. Their model of integrated development is slowing gaining ground. These kids who grow up might just take part in the village level awareness and planning. I was also impressed with Sujit Sinha. He was extremely well-informed about the work and hurdles ahead. The state government seems to be making moves to involve ngos in changing things in education in West Bengal. Swanirvar is involved in all these efforts. Over the last 10 years they have tried different things in different areas and have constantly been innovating and figuring out the right mix. The primary school work and the youth and culture activities are making a difference.