Site Visit Deriya Sanitation Project - An amazing experience

My father always told that one need not wait for right things to happen in life but rather be prepared mentally and physically in order to participate in these right things. The last few months have spanned just the way he said. It was at the same time when UTC announced its green initiative mini grant program that supports  “green projects” to protect, beautify or enhance our neighbourhoods,  that Shashikanth Subramanya from Kaleido- a volunteer group had visited a tribe near Dandeli and was proposing to build a sanitation facility for the tribe with the help of an NGO, CUBRAD. These two initiatives came together when UTC announced that it would support the sanitation project through a grant of 3000 USD, the highest the program offered.It was indeed a joyous moment for me, Kaleido and the Tribe.

With this background, we i.e. UTC Aerospace System Employees, Kaleido and CUBRAD formed a team in order to execute the project. We came up with a schedule to execute the project through awareness,construction and maintenance of the sanitation facility.

As a part of this, we planned a site visit to Deriya village where we had planned to develop sanitation facility.This post describes my experience as we went about completing our planned activities of what I would call as a successful visit.

After completing a hectic week, I was very eager to visit the project site along with the team of 4 from UTC and Kaleido. Skandan Kuppan and I were the team members from UTC while Kaleido had Shashikanth Subramanya, Aravind Bhat and Pratiksha Sunder. We left Bangalore at around 10 PM on 13th June i.e Friday. We boarded a bus from Bangalore that took us to Dandeli, a town in Uttarakanda district known for its wildlife and water recreation by around 8 AM, next day .At Dandeli ,a KSRTC bus was about to leave towards Joida.

Joida Bus-Stand

  

We had to travel further to reach the road that lead to Deriya. It was a 30 minute walk from the main road into the forest To get a feel of this walk take a look at this video

Walk towards Deriya

As we neared the village, the school compound greeted us with kids playing around and an amazing greenery at the backdrop.It was prayer time at school and indeed brought back the memories of my school days. What was amazing was that, at the end of the prayer, they recited the details of the village, town, district and country and also the names of the officers and key persons with the position that they held.I was very happy about the reach of education to this remote place. The school housed 14 children upto grade 5 and served mid day meal.

School (Grade-3 to Grade-5)

After witnessing the nostalgic prayer session, we headed towards Jayanand, a Deriya resident's house. Jayanand is the only person who has completed a degree in the whole village.Jayanand is also part of CUBRAD with whom we will be working in order to complete the project.After freshening up, we were in for a treat with some amazing North Karnataka cuisine which was completely organic and grown at their own backyard.This is where I need to highlight the unmatched hospitality and love that was extended to us by Jayanand's family who mainly spoke Konkani and Marathi. Jayanand has two brothers Ravi and Yogesh who helped us in surveying the location. Jayanand and Ravi also work for the Wildlife conservation society, India and are largely engaged in reporting illegal activities and relocation of tribes.

Started our trek around Deriya

Yogesh with his exploits,,THE JACK FRUIT

After our breakfast, we trekked around the borders of Deriya and also got a chance to look at the farmlands. Yogesh  accompanied us and helped us navigate through the harsh, leech filled and bear-attack prone route .It was a mini-monsoon trek with slight drizzles around as we made our way through farm lands. Yogesh  helped us identify many plants and birds as we trekked.Bear marks on the couple trees were scary.Yogesh has an extensive knowledge of the place and was very alert all the time.He took us through one of the farms , where we feasted on a huge Jackfruit which Yogesh had plucked for us. Yogesh also took us to the shiva temple where he says that a bear was resting last night.

Shiva Temple at Deriya

We completed our trek in 3 hours and came back to Jayanand's house for Lunch. Again a big feast was awaiting. Once we completed our lunch, we came outside and sat for a discussion with Jayanand. It was raining heavily and was also cold. Jayanand was gracious enough to raise a small camp fire for us so that we remained warm.

Discussion on the Project : L-R Yogesh (standing), Skandan, Jayanand, Gnanaskandan,Pratiksha and Shashikanth

During this discussion, we covered topics including our roles, scope of the project, maintenance, awareness, and UTC's mini-grant related details.We dwelt largely on understanding the construction of other buildings around the locality, material availability, labor availability and explaining our design. Pratiksha Sunder who is the architect for this project had very good inputs for her design. She also explained her design and advantages of one over the other among the various options that she had drafted. Shashikanth wore a Visionary's hat and explained the need for having a toilet at every house in addition to the community toilet that we planned to build.He specifically emphasized on the need for creating a habit of using toilets which was equally voiced by Jayanand. Skandan Kuppan and I discussed regarding progress reporting, costs and the hurdles we were likely to face while transferring funds from UTC to CUBRAD. Skandan Kuppan's experience in asking the right questions clarified a lot of things concerning project reporting between us and CUBRAD.

Anganwadi Visit

After this discussion, we went to the construction site, where we took measurements of the land that was allocated. Especially, Pratiksha had a busy time deciding on the location of toilets, septic tank and water source. Pratiksha's detail-oriented thinking proved that she had done a lot of homework before coming to the visit.

Proposed Construction Site Visit

Overall, this discussion was very fruitful for all of us. I personally was convinced that all concerned in this project were very competent and completely involved in the project.I felt confident as UTC representative that this project would make use of the UTC funds quite effectively and make it a successful initiative. 

Shashikanth had earlier asked Mr. Jayanand to announce the start of the project to all the villagers. Accordingly, he called them all and made them aware of the existence of the problem by initially posing questions Later he explained about the project and the effects that it would have on their future. I have read that there are four phases in learning i.e Awareness, Understanding ,Resistance and Acceptance.I realized that there was a phase before awareness and that phase could be initiated only by a local person - a person among the community and Jayanand did just that. Jayanand's skills in creating awareness and talking to the community clearly explains his contributions at Wildlife Conservation Society-India.I was especially moved by the women’s reaction when Jayanand was explaining. They had a nervous laughter initially and later they were surprised to realize the danger. Some of them even acknowledged that they knew about it and were living with these problems. Some of the problems that they posed were privacy,danger of snakes and leeches, rain,during heavy rainfall the excreta gets mixed with water bodies among others.

Families gathered around to hear Jayanand's announcement of constructing the toilet

With these inputs, we were very happy that we were solving a high impact problem in the community.At a macro level we are helping them to maintain the harmonious relationship that they have with the beautiful ecosystem around them.

We closed the day with yet another amazing dish, the famous Neer dose for dinner. The tiring day immediately dragged us to bed at around 10PM when we had a sound sleep at Jayanand's house.

DAY 2

It was around 7 AM on a Sunday morning.We used up the first half of the day strolling through the fields. We saw couple constructions which existed at the school and Anganwadi established under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan initiative. These toilets were to be used by children and were not designed to handle high utilization with only 14 children studying at the school.However, the existence of local skill in construction was a major takeaway for us.

Kids playing at the School Playground

After the visit, we had a good time cycling around the village, trying time lapse shots and trying to understand the physics of lifting water from well.

Cycling was fun

Later after the traditional organic lunch, we were playing around with Jayanand's daughters Neha and Nethra. Neha has a beautiful voice and watching her recite the poems that she had learnt at her class was truly a bliss while Nethra charmed everyone with her beautiful eyes as evident in the pics. Aravind Bhat likes children and takes a special interest in understanding them and tries to teach them. There was no ice-breaker required between Aravind and children.He blended so well with them so well that we failed to realize Aravind is an Engineer.

(L-R Shashikanth, Neha and Aravind)

It was around 4 when Jayanand and Ravi drove their bikes to drop us to Kumbarawada which is around 3 kms from the settlement.By now, entire team had a sense of accomplishment of a successful visit. Jayanand and Ravi expressed their happiness through their smile as we boarded the bus to Dandeli. 

The Team- (L-R) Jayanand, Aravind, Shashikanth, Pratiksha, Skandan, Ravi and Gnanaskandan

At Dandeli, we relished the local savories i.e Vada Pav and Dharawad Peda. The taste of the peda forced us to pack few kilos of peda to our home for our parents.

At Peda shop in Dandeli

This marks the end of a beautiful journey which had some enlightening experience of our varied perspectives of life.When I left Bangalore to this place, I was of the opinion that we city dwellers were more privileged. But after this experience where the families are living as one big family, with healthy food , calm and peaceful life amidst all danger and inherently brave and enthusiastic folks, I am confused whether we are privileged or they are.

Standardizing Education

Standardizing has been a common practice across industries primarily because it enables a better control and understanding of the organization.A similar intent when extrapolated to education, would be worth an effort.Standardizing educational curriculum would,just as in industries, allow better decision making, better understanding of the educational capability of the nation and also enables the nation to focus on their weakness areas with more thrust.A decision on making the same national curriculum may come with some assumptions such as uniform infrastructure, teaching, Intelligent Quotient which may not be realistic.

In countries such as India with a vast diversity in Infrastructure, Teaching,  Standard of living, Regional languages,Intelligent Quotient and varied environment; it is very difficult to visualize such a standardized environment.Assuming we have a standard mathematics syllabus, a problem may be very easy for a student studying in South India which may be attributed to qualified teachers and better infrastructure .This may not be the scenario with the rest of the country. There are places where there are schools without teachers, teachers who aren't qualified and students with language barriers in which case this recommendation may not be appropriate.

In spite of such factors, standardization may bring in some benefits on the long run through uniform knowledge base,.better synergy between students across the country and also better assessment of students for college education. Under VT University Belgaum in India, around 113 engineering colleges share the same syllabus for a given branch. This has resulted in easier working environment for peers from different colleges under the university.Also, it is easier for the university to improvise on its present syllabus. Training program of the Tata consultancy Services also enjoys such benefits through a common syllabus. Although we are talking about education before college, we may take stock of these examples and implement a standard curriculum across the nation.There may be some hiccups initially but on the long run it seems to be advantageous.

Impact of Technology on Human Intellectual Development

The impact of technology on the intellectual prowess of human has always been an aspect to be concerned about.Technology has evolved and made a lot of things easier to us. However, we can't deny over reliance on technology .Today, our world is completely dependent on technology right from Space program, Stock Market, Grocery store e.t.c.There are two aspects of looking at it, one- that we are progressing and focusing more on the bigger picture and passing all the redundant work to the computer, on the other hand we are so much dependent on technology that we neither have any alternatives nor we have the practice of doing it.

A space program for instance has so many decisions such as constant tracking of the trajectory, monitoring the health of the external structure,feedback from the fuel chamber e.t.c. These tasks are virtually impossible for human being who is right now working on the bigger picture of successful payload deployment, experiments in outer space and more such holistic milestones. Someday technology may make these task easier when man will be working on a bigger problem than this.Today, we boast of long distance medical support. When we look at this in the perspective of its impact on human development, we find that technology has only reduced the problem related to accessibility.Further, it has given the doctor to work on  the new disease and eventually contributing to intellectual development.

On the other side, the use of technology to simple calculations and aspects where decisions are made just by the results from machines are also increasing. This has resulted in people not understanding the reality . During a structural analysis class, we were asked to use Finite element analysis for solving a problem. The Software package threw  us a value which was impractical but it did not create a shock in us.We did not understand the practical numbers that we have to expect and also the underlying error in calculation . These instances may be indicative of such a conclusion made by this statement.But when I have to weigh the technology's impact on intellectual development, I would conclude that the use and misuse of technology lies with us.Whether we want to use it to our advantage and work on more complex problems or rely on it for simple problems and escape the mental exercise is a decision that we have to take.