Eval Part -2

It is been long that I have written my Eval Part –II. But the busy schedule had never allowed me to publish it in my blog so let me move back to it.
Has the first visit to the village was little unsuccessful .we again had to visit the village again . This time we sketched out a proper plan and detailed milestones were worked out to achieve it with proper time and resource allocation.
Somewhere in my mind I felt that I should visit my professor to explain him how we had accomplished our first part of visit. I also planned that I should get some ICT tool. I mean the videos of the PRA techniques which will morally uplift our team. This time we planned that the visit will be for more than a week, till we accomplish our plans. From our last visit we were tempted to get some NGO people to work with us has they have better understanding of people and area.
A short term before our visit I had entered all the data which we collected last time during our household survey. Sorry for the FIRST person which I used in the above sentence which should be “we” as Mukesh always wanted me to address whenever I talk something in front of anybody.
Pardon me Boy 
This time I was happy that we had core members of our team I mean Suvendu sir and another reason was that our request for extending time for report submission was granted with his support.
As missionaries of early 15th century who lead themselves to different unknown land to spread the name of GOD. We too proceeded in the name of water for watershed development.
Hail Rural Development !!
We were in a mission to uplift people, free them from all encompassing indebtness, towards the glory of a new Shining India.
I had talked to Amaresh Sarkar many a times on the D-day. Sorry somewhere I missed to mention this central character of my narration. Sarkar( Government) as we all call him is a highly qualified engineer from IIT with three patent in his name. Eventually till the date I could never ask him for what inventions are these patents for because he was so busy in his work. I would really wonder how dedicated this person is, but only problem is that he will change your gender from tha to thi.
Ok now let me move back to the story, we started from Gandhinagar in our newly registered Bolero. Prakash was the happiest man in whole trip. Has he was the youngest of all of us he got a reserved seat near the driver.
The vehicle arrived DA-IICT campus around five. We were packed into the vehicle and started toward the Promised Land.
Deep in my heart the little Robert frost was singing ,
” Two roads diverged in the mehsana road ,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
Roads are wide Tarred and bright, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.”
Sorry if someone was hurt by my little creations
We reached to Radhanpur by nine at night thank to Tulsi bhai’s driving skills.
This time the room allotted to me was really chaotic, Ok anything in the name of rural development is done with me.
Lot of plans was jotted down with a focus on community and their aspiration in our mind. On the night I dreamt that a small girl child was carrying a pot of water on her head and me as a messiah made it to rain and prosperity was back in the village.
Woke up asking god can it be true will this drudgery decrease.
All the village plans especially budgeting according to components were done in night. Awareness generation was the main agenda. We reached village around 9.45. We were aspecting a Sahib type of reception in the village but no one was there except Praveen, head boy of the village school.
Slowly our ground staff called some villager. I was furious that why these people are not there when we are here with 210 lakh rupees. I calculated that roughly when distributed in the village each family will get around 1.3 lakh rupees. Then I came to know from the people that they knew 10 for govt officials were 12 for them. In short govt officials are always late.
Then our village leader and sectary of our watershed committee came Jilu Bhai Sama greeted us. I was confused and was wondering how come in Gujarat too they keep names of sweets like Jelabi as they keep Imarthi, Rabri etc. I even asked him but he got annoyed on my childish question but regrettably I was a Sahib so he explained me patiently that it was Jilu-Ba not jelabi, Ba is short form for bhai.
Slowly villagers gathered and we discussed with them how these various components of budget were distributed. I was a learner so was more involved in understanding the dynamic of village folks. Suddenly my ears fell into a conversation of patwari(village sectary ) with his Sarpanch, “Aare these sahibs have brought lakhs of rupees If you are late the you will get nothing, come immediately”
Within few minutes the Sarpanch came. The person who was nowhere in the locality appeared from cloud nine. He had a good excuse too that he was late because he had to arrange lunch for the sahibs. Whole day was full of discussion with different groups of people.
Second day our facilitators from NGO came and we planned to visit different sites which we had marked in our maps.
Now the happiest person was our driver Tulsi bhai. He can practice his driving skill in the desert too. With new radials it will be a real fun.
There goes the Tata Sumo and behind it was our Brand New Bolero. As we entered the sumo had already raised a big sand storm behind it and thus we were lost in the desert.
For one full hour Tulsi bhai was leading the trails of the sumos’ wheel and we were nowhere in the desert completely lost.
I got a call from Amresh and he said us to come to a common point and at there we had asked our Paagi Kaka to guide us. His name had a great significance Paagi means he could identify anything from their foot print. He could predict the time and location exactly. That was a sort of person whom we were looking for.
Thanks to tulsi bhai we were lost in the desert due to his trials of identifying the paag of sumo Wheels.
Further we were talking to the great paagi kaka about his life and slowly he opened up and started discussing his life story. There is a very famous story of Paagi kaka.

Once in the village there was a robbery someone stolen some sheep. Paagi Kaka was invited for the crime investigation and he found out the thief by his foot prints. This raised a outlandish thought that we should counsel such people to Indian intelligence. Thus I became a fan of Paagi Kaka. He also said that he always visited to Pakistan to meet his relative in night on back of his camels.
Next day we visited the left over sites .our new Bolero’s look have changed with a thick sheet of sand over it.
Next day we too had exposure visit in the areas nearby to have a closer look of the livelihood of people in the area. Salt packaging, Salt pans , charcoal making lot and lot of things going on.

Mission Eval part 1

It was wondering many of my friends why was it called “Mission Eval”.
To all of them my reply was that this was a mission impossible in which tom cruise was me Binoy menon.
As I am narrating I have all the very rights to consider me the one. The time limit which was allotted by my boss was adding that term impossible in front of the mission.

Secondly it was one poor arid village called Eval which was bordering Pakistan and for the villager it was just a ride through unfriendly salt desert of Rann to Pakistan.

It was not my first village visit, but it was my first village visit as a part of a government team which is going to do development worth millions of Dollar.
Our first visit to the village was with long caravan of vehicles which included almost four Bolero and two of which were having a Red light flashing in top.


This has helped a lot to spread rumors between the villagers. It was said that certain sahibs where there into the village with some big land maps and records of landholding. This raised a fear about the revision of land taxes or that of some land acquisition.

The first and important thing to start our process was to do some surveys. The format says we need to do both social survey and natural resource survey. To our intimation of social survey there was a guarded response.
The patwari and Sarpanch provided us with the names of some of the people who could help us.
They where even introduced but the language barrier was putting a barricade in between us.
We got a mixed response from the people who were gathered for our help when we discussed about the participatory rural appraisal has this jargon is called has PRA.

Somewhere in my mind clicked Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan ‘s Piya Re Piya Re lyrics and I was almost lost in scenic beauty of Kodai where the video of song was taken, when suddenly Mukesh woke me up from my day dream. This made me realize how difficult it is to explain a villager the purpose of our visit. Our team leader tried to explain the group of villagers with better reference to those few gathered to help us the reason of our visit.

One major question which they asked or even I wonder, I would ask was that “How this will benefit me ?” “Will I get canal water for irrigation?” “How much money will I get from Government?” “Will they give us job?” The questions where shooting from all sides and sitting somewhere in the crowd of officers who where outnumbering the villagers. I asked myself aren’t these questions my challenging theoretical knowledge. The physical comfort which I used to find in mind has long vanished with the distorted truth of reality.

That night I was sitting with Prakash and was discussing with him. How can we move through these problems? Hundreds of theories piled into my small mind. Hundreds of pages which I had jotted down during those lectures were counting to be worthless before this small experience.

There was another concern which was haunting our mind that a day is wasted with no fruits. Our desire to seek valuable information from villagers were nowhere at Horizons and we were feeling that we were lagging in the survey schedule.


Day two of our arrival, we had planned lot of thing in the village regarding the survey which we had discussed with the team. At a distance I could identify the village from the hilly terrain and a signal antenna of BSF out post which stand welcoming us into the village.

We split ourselves into two groups one would continue with the household survey and other will go around the village collecting the soil samples and taking GPS reading of the resources identified. I proceeded with the other group which was a group of three people including me, accompanied with a forest guard who was said to know each and every bush in the area.

We walked a kilometer towards the only source of water in the village. It was like an oasis with a flock of sheep and herds of cows waiting for their turn to drink water. Other side of the well was a check dam of irrigation department.

We climbed a small hill, too far to the horizons there were ubiquitous Babul and to one corner of my sight was the village. A narrow lane with small brick houses with asbestos roofing on either side of it neatly arranged as block games. These houses were newly constructed after devastating earth quake that rocked whole Gujarat.

We proceeded in search of more wells with our GPS machines.

Some of the villagers were drawn to us fascinated by those fancy equipments we were carrying with us. We felt that now the villagers where free to interact with us. They showed us a small stream which leads towards Rann. I tried to start some conversation in Gujarthi with a mutual adjustment in my pronunciations with help of the guard who was accompanying us.

I learnt some of my lessons. One I understood during the long village walk was that to carry a water bottle secondly, wear a turban or a cap.
Third, and most important never write anything in notebook which generally alarm the villagers and make them speechless.
In third day we got good hospitality in Sarpanch’s house. We could sit with villagers and sketch out some PRA techniques but in short it was not so successful. But this visit was a good rapport building exercise in short.

System approaches to Indian Family System

"A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another. If these minds love one another, the home will be as beautiful as a flower garden. But if these minds get out of harmony with one another, it is like a storm that plays havoc with the garden."

— Buddha

Family as a System

Family is a system of interconnected and independent individuals, none of who can be understood in isolation. Each and every family member plays a particular role. There has to be set of rules about how it operates. Family tends to develop a pattern about these sorts of things. These sets of Pattern become unspoken rules. Each and every family develops their pattern and thus the rules. These rules and roles played by each member of family keep the system doing things as they have been done known in general as homeostatic or system’s equilibrium. The patterns are formed by various relationships between each element like the marital relationship parents or child relationship. The family system generally causes a phenomenon called circular causality which means each that each family member’s behavior is caused by, and causes the other family member’s behaviors in circular channels.


The Indian family system is rather complex and is highly partilineal in nature. The family formation is celebrated by marriage which is generally arranged opposite to the practice of rest of world. The families here are generally joint family, unlike that of the west. The marriage is Indian society are generally status oriented (social, financial status) not like than individual oriented. Each family value and culture helps in transformation of it into society as whole. Conceptualization of these structures of Indian family and residence oriented household is so necessary to have a great deal of analytical clarity. Unless the planner and policy maker understand whole gamut of issues, they may come-up with inappropriate policy frameworks.

The authoritative power in Indian family rest in the hands of male while women in background develop an attitude of compromise and acclimatization with the circumstances. While the males (either Husband, Brother, Father, Sons) are given preferential rights and carry the family name and tradition. In the background this has indirectly resulted in poor literacy and empowerment of the women. The decision makers are male who are internal to the system and who can change the performance of other entity of the system thus it is highly centralized. While interesting part of Indian family system is that the designer of the system is one who is concerned with the system is the same entity which is the decision maker. Thus conceptualization of family system ultimate lies in the hand of male counterpart of system.

Figure 1: A Family Control System (Indian Family)


The above diagram shows the highly centralized and dominant status of elderly male, in Indian family system, who plays an important role in making decision, rules and formulates goals of family. He who was the one who discriminate what is right and wrong to the family. While, in family women were passive players. As education is entering into the rural society; the polar orientation is shifting and which thus result in better detection of opportunity and threats in society. Consequently it would therefore result in appropriate relation and execution of chosen response.

Family is an open system which always interacts with the environment of the system or other system. For example, religion is a conceptual system which regulate the life any Indian family system. It is controlled by information and fuelled by financial, social and political stability.
While women as a sub system of Indian family system had a passive role to play in the core process of system. This incase always resulted in high amount Entropy. In present context lies has reduce seldom applicable but these ought to be laden into consortium.

Figure 2: Family System


The above (figure 2) shows the family system model, its boundary and various external factors which directly or indirectly affect the input and output of Family system.

Environmental Orientation

As family is a sub-atom of a whole social system there is profound interaction between system and environment. While the environment affects the system, the system in turns affects the society or result in formation of society. The boundary of family is so less than occurring that there is an intensity of interaction with the environment. The system should be highly conscious for averting the entropy by importing financial, informational energy source from the environment.

Hierarchy of Family

There is high level of hierarchy in the Indian family systems while the higher levels are been dominated by male member as father, husband, brother. This hierarchical structure helps the ability to learn, evolve and adapt to the environment in a dynamic way for goal seeking changes.

The hierarchy of Indian family systems always helps to understand the main three measures to how it contributes to society.

1. Effectiveness: There is need to analyze how a family will respond to the external environment, how well it can face the challenges to achieve its goal through transformation.

2. Efficiency: Since to achieve the sustainable parameter there is need to optimize the input of the family with a use of minimum resources to achieve the intended transformation.


3. Efficacy: It is measure of extend to which a family contribute to the society of which it is subsystem.

To achieve all the above their ought to be a proper feed-back mechanism with proper buffer regulation this feedback regulation can be the tool of ICT which can help to achieve a proper deviation correction mechanism to the family system it can be recognized in the event of population growth family health, Economic shabbily.

Process of the Family

The table shows various processes which are a set of interdependent and linked procedures which, at every stage, consume one or more resources to convert inputs into outputs to achieve the family goal. The processes are divided into the core process which are directly related to the goal of the family and the support process which will help in achieving these core processes.

ICT4D News

Two PhD scholarships at The School of Information Systems within the Tasmanian Institute of Agricultural Research (TIAR) at the University of Tasmania

The School of Information Systems and the Rural Social Research Group within the Tasmanian Institute of Agricultural Research (TIAR) at the University of Tasmania have TWO PhD scholarships available for commencement in early 2009.

Two scholarships, each with a stipend of $30,000 per annum (tax free), will be for the study of social issues associated with the adoption of advanced Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) in agriculture.
One scholarship is specifically for research in the Tasmanian DAIRY industry, the other for research in the Tasmanian VEGETABLE industry.
Students from any relevant background (e.g. information systems, computing,business management, geography, environmental studies, social science,environmental psychology, agriculture) interested in innovation and adoption research, social issues associated with ICTs, rural sociology or social aspects of agriculture, are encouraged to apply. These scholarships are offered with support from CSIRO's Tasmanian ICT Centre and with support from TIAR's Vegetable Centre and Dairy Centre. The supervisors of this research will be Professor Frank Vanclay (Professor of Rural Sociology in TIAR) and Professor Peter Marshall (Professor of Information Systems in the School of Computing and Information Systems).

In addition to the stipends, each project has ample operational funding to cover all fieldwork costs as well as conference funding and training costs. Both projects have close connections to industry and each student will be embedded in larger programs with ample support.

One of the ICT scholarships is in the form of a "top-up" scholarship.
This means that the student would need to be successful in securing an Australian Post-Graduate Award (APA or University scholarship).These Scholarships are available only to Australian citizens. Students will be expected to have received (or expect to receive) first class Honours or upper second class Honours. In addition to academic merit, students will also be selected on the basis of their 'fit' with the project and their interest in the research topic.

The scholarships will be available until filled by an appropriate person. However, the nominal deadline for completed applications in the first instance will be 31 October 2008, especially as this is the closing date for university scholarships and APAs.
Please discuss your intentions with Professor Peter Marshall or Professor Frank Vanclay early on. In addition to the normal University of Tasmania
(UTAS) application forms, applicants will be requested to write a short
1-2 page proposal to assist in the selection process.

Information about the Rural Social Research Group is available on my website http://www.agsci.utas.edu.au/vanclay.htm

Nokia Life Tools: SMS-driven Agriculture and Education Services

Nokia Life Tools is a range of innovative agriculture information and education services designed especially for rural and small town communities in emerging markets. Nokia Life Tools helps overcome information constraints and provides farmers and students with timely and relevant information. These services use an icon-based, graphically rich user interface that comes complete with tables and which can even display information simultaneously in two languages. Behind this rich interface, SMS is used to deliver the critical information to ensure that this service works wherever a mobile phone does, without the hassles of additional settings or the need for GPRS coverage. Nokia plans to launch the service in the first half of 2009 with the Nokia 2323 classic and the Nokia 2330 classic as the lead devices in India, and expand it across select countries in Asia and Africa later in 2009.

Communitisation of Nagaland concept with respect to INDIA

“Communitisation is a vision to recreate a relationship between people, governing structure and institution with an inclusive, egalitarian and democratic vision”. It is a unique partnership between the social capital rich local communities and resource pool of government with a provided legal frame. In other words it is empowering the end-user.

India has rich culture and vast pool of resources. The concept of Communitisation will be apt for the rural villages. This will have to primarily include capacity building of the local community. This will lead to the attitudinal change and enable them to fulfill their role and responsibility in the society. Secondly one has to rejenuate the reposed trust in government functioning. Transfer of public resources and devolution of the funds to village committee .These committees has to address the spearhead problems that the as a community they are facing like education, sanitation, road facilities etc. These all efforts have to strengthen with government supervisory and monitoring mechanism. Slogan of no work, no pays will strengthen the dedication of the public worker.

Communitisation will strengthen the social capital available of the villages. Since this exercise will develop the skill and knowledge. Ultimately, resulting in understanding of the role, which a person has to play in his community and social environment. This will also invoke tolerance and trust. They can act as a change agent in the community with proper interaction within context of individual and social institution.

BINOY MEAN

BINOY MEAN : A HUMBLE REQUEST
ORIGIN : SANSKRIT
REFERENCE http://www.babynology.com/sanskrit-mnumerobinoy.html