Work An Hour 1998

Projects

1. Asha Ashram, Lalpur, Uttar Pradesh
2. Manviya Shiksha Sanskar Sansthan, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh
3. Astha, Delhi

Financials

Asha-India Center, Lalpur, Uttar Pradesh

The Asha-India center is focusing on value-based education that can impart love and trust and economic self-reliance and is also developing its own curriculum based on this ideology.

The foundation for construction of Asha ashram in Lalpur was laid in March, 2000. The first room (a meeting place) and toilets have been constructed with ferro cement technology. This rural campus of Asha, in the mould of an ashram, is going to be the center of an experiment in education based primarily on the Gandhian ideology.

The land for the ashram has been donated by the local people. A library, an open meeting place, and a few hostel rooms will be built with the local mud-based method or mud-bricks. Help of villagers would be taken in kind (e.g. labor). The center also got some land for farming where from this July two villagers will be starting farming. These two were selected in a meeting of all villagers on the criteria of most economically backward. The center will also start bee-keeping in future.

Asha volunteers currently spend 1-2 days a week in the village and take classes for the children. Regular school will begin after the volunteers finally settle there. The center is developing its own curriculum and methodology, taking help from other good experiments (e.g.Eklavya, Digantar, etc) and based on the thinking that the volunteers themselves have evolved over last 4-5 years. The caste system in Lalpur has definitely not been wiped out over the years. In fact the roots are still strong. The Asha team has publicly announced its resolve to break the caste barriers and has made it a point to visit each of the about 40 Chamar and Arakh households of Lalpur to accept food there, still considered a taboo by the upper caste of the area.

Targets for this Asha-centre will be:

1. The Centre will become economically self-reliant after within 2 to 3 years.
2. Construction will be complete in 1 year.
3. School will become fully functional in 2 years.
4. Villagers' organization and women's groups will be formed in 3-4 years.
5. Positive output from organic farming will start coming in 2-3 years.
6. An organised work on alternative energy will begin in 2 years.
7. Most internal disputes/conflicts will get resolved through villager' organization /groups. The hope is that the villagers will not have to go to courts/police stations for their inter disputes, after 2-3 years. Only for external disputes (e.g. disputes across villages, external dacoits, etc) will they have to go to courts/police.
8. The center hopes that it will develop a self-sustaining primary health-care system managed by the villagers, within 3-4 years. After this the villagers will not have to go outside for their primary health care needs.

Manviya Shiksha Sanskar Sansthan, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh

The support from WAH 98 has taken the form of an Asha-Kanpur center where innovative approaches are being taken to educate children of migrant laborers with emphasis on relevance to their eventual livelihood. The center is also looking at the root causes that force people to migrate and trying to address them.

This centre is being built to carry out experiment in self-reliance and human value-based education. The syllabus is almost complete and needs some final touches. The construction on a 1 acre land is also almost complete. A team of about 10 full-time people will be working in this center. Targets for this center are:

1. MS3 center expects to achieve complete self-reliance in 5 years, through activities like ayurvedic center, dairy, bee-keeping, etc.
2. Out of the existing 15 sites of migrant workers in Kanpur, it will be able to cover 6 with the education programmes, within 2 years

Astha, Delhi

Asha's support enabled Astha's Center For Children With Special Needs (initiated in 1993) to continue it's works with children with mental retardation and multiple disabilities such as Cerebral Palsy and Autism and continue an outreach project in the slum communities of Govindpuri, in South Delhi, providing rehabilitation services to children with disabilities such as Polio, Blindness, Speech and Hearing impairments, Epilepsy, Mental Retardation and Cerebral Palsy and support services to their families.