100% Literacy program at a village

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Progress is great - Information and Communicaton is poor

Amongst several challenges I encountered at Bakaram Jagir literacy program, two challenges were related to information and communication. Information related to the number of people attending the learning centers, number of people studying at home, people not attending etc. I have been waiting for this split information for long. The second one being communication. Communication with the village level Sakshar Bharat volunteers. If somebody's phone does not work, then the other person has several other problems.
I needed the information badly to chart out further action plans. Rather than waiting for them to provide information with the poor communication system I dashed to the village on the day of Ramzan, that is July 6. I sat with them and made an analysis of the illiterates and found the figures as following, out of 268.
5 illiterates - Not started yet but are now ready to start
1 illiterate - Resides a little far away
6 illiterates - No Time, working from morning till night
2 illiterates - Patients
9 illiterates - Not interested in learning at all
TOTAL (illiterates who have not yet started learning) - 23.
I was happy that merely 26 people have not yet started learning.
My next question to them was about count for the day before. That is Tuesday's illiterates attendance. Pat came the reply that as it rained the day before, Tuesday, there were hardly any training centers.
Later in the week I had been chasing people to let me know the count for each day in the week and also the number of people who have been attending regularly. As expected the bad communication did not allow me to get proper information. I needed this information to buy gifts for the illiterates. Hence, again I had to dash to the village on Saturday, that is 8 July. Here I get the figures for each of the day as below. Shocking!!
Monday - 163
Tuesday - 201
Wednesday - 191
Friday - 183
It was shocking because during my last visit, on Wednesday, I was told there were hardly any learning centers on Tuesday. But now I see Tuesday had the biggest count. The reason I was told was that the illiterates were learning inside their homes. I really wanted to check this out. This day also being cold and raining slightly I thought was ideal to check and confirm. I visited 10 centers, as time was already 9.10 pm I could not check more, I found people learning in their homes. That is for each of the volunteer they themselves identified somebody's house and they were studying there. The count came out to be more than 50. So, for 10 volunteers if the count is 50, then for 50 Volunteers the count could be easily 200 or so.

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