D ear Friends,

I have been thinking of writing something on the fact that AID is ten years old, but nothing seems to come to mind because of all the action that's going on that leaves pale any general article or poem or speech. Which is good because one of the goals of AID during its forming years was to induce people to act not just talk or write and now its difficult to talk! Nevertheless I am attempting something on the 10-year anniversary of a committed volunteer group I have known since its birth and I also do not know in many ways.

Over the past 10 years what are some of the significant achievements that also serve to define us in the space of organizations? I think AID's volunteer base of hundreds of people is something that very few groups and movements have in India or the USA. While attracting new volunteers, what is even more important is whether those of us who volunteer are making the best use of our time and training we have accrued over the years. In sheer numbers and team work we are capable of responding to injustice in India by way of petition letters in hundreds, even reaching a thousand at the notice of a phone call or email. This state of preparedness, achieved over thousands of hours of meaningful awareness building, work and debate, is valuable to many causes in India.Now the point that most of us at our own individual level grapple with is not whether we relate to an appeal sent by a dalit or tribal cause but whether we people sending and forwarding those appeals as well as we people reading them actually bother to take a print-out, and sign and mail the letter or fax the reponse making our hundreds of voices actually count. The same holds true in our preparedness to contribute time and money, to seek donations, and to do things that each and every project and process demands from us in its own unique way. Focussing on ourselves, we need to realize that both individually and as a team we have combined in a special manner and 10 years of learning that has accrued within the organization implies that as many actions that we can do by applying ourselves and getting over things like dis-organization, depression, loss of motivation and laziness are bound to be useful for a diverse numbers of causes, projects, NGOs, movements and people all over the country. This is not to make the point that we should stop learning or be immodest or pat ourselves on the back -- this is seriously to say that there aren't many groups with the kind of volunteer strength and knowledge we have and this has come about through rigorous hard-work of 10 years and every minute of our time today is valuable for someone in India to whom we reach out. Let's make the best use of it and become really disciplined in the way we manage our times and respond to each other constructively and make even more and more things happen.

THERE ARE TWO FEATURES of development – internal development and external development, or micro issues and macro issues.  At the macro level we think of the scale of development – if we do anything to develop a village of India, will it really reach the full scale? 
      One of the things we say is that any effort by a group of people like us is like a drop in the ocean of things.  I want you to think about this statement.  Let us consider a group of a thousand people – maybe the size of an organization as it grows big.  The population of India is about a billion people.  So how can the effort of a thousand people really be called a drop in the ocean?   If you think about it, efforts by people like us are not drops in the ocean but more like a drop in something of this size [draws] – more like a water tank.

Turamdeeh The 295 families that were displaced from the villages of Laandup, Turaamdeeh, Banduhuraang and Taalsa in 1982 by UCIL (Uranium Corporation of India (Limited)) to establish the Turaamdeeh mines are still homeless. Under its policy of resettlement of these displaced families, UCIL constructed 295 one-room houses in the Laandup Resettlement Colony. Each such house constructed for resettlement has one room of 6 feet by 8 feet and a small verandah. The full translation can also be found here.

The town of Vellore is well known in Tamil Nadu for its historic forts and temples.  Surrounded by 256 hills and situated along the banks of the Palar River, Vellore’s location sounds idyllic.

C. Srinivasan with his rooftop garden. He claims it is possible to grow most vegetables in biodegradable containers, all using waste water from the kitchen.

However, Palar now runs dry and the hills are bare – a result of several years of deforestation by granite and timber companies, as well as villagers who live in the 96 villages at the base of the Vellore hills, who have few other livelihood options. The bare, rocky hillsides now radiate heat, giving Vellore its scorching reputation as the hottest town in Tamil Nadu.

Determined to change this situation, C. Srinivasan, a young college student in the early 90s, set off into the Vellore hills to find a solution. His search led him to several interconnected problems, all of which needed to be addressed if a solution were to be found.