Manoj Iragavarapu, a volunteer with AID Baton Rouge shares his thoughts after his recent trip to India. Comments about the article can be posted to manojtammiraju@yahoo.com


During my recent trip to India, I happened to make a presentation on AID at JNTU, Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh and I am glad to inform you that there was a raising ovation for the work that we have been doing and it seems like there may be ready volunteerism for any projects that we may commit to, in future. I had about 50 people (students and faculty) from that University who attended my presentation. Raising a toast for the commendable progress AID has made and welcoming the shift from search mode to program mode, this writeup is a direction of thought I want to bring to you.

There are a lot of NGOs and many other organizations like AID working for the development of India and the common factor in most of them if not all is that everyone starts with the basic assumption that we are responsible and concerned people who should do something for the fellow human beings, which is the part to be played by government but ironically accepted and taken for granted that the government is non existent or ill functioning.

There is this simple analogy that all our organizations or NGOs are trying to build their small bridges between the existing country and development, but taking into consideration the magnitude and complexity of problems, most of them are incomplete or too narrow. Even if one reached commendable lengths, they cease to function on many occasions after the visionary is gone. Nobody seems to see an already existing mighty and complete bridge that is misused or not used and this is called "administrative bodies and the government".

What all projects we were doing or did, always plan on leveraging our resources. We always thought of not feeding some one but to show him a way to self sufficiency. But for how many people, for how long and how many of us should do this or could do this. Is it not a much better investment if we think of finding someone who is already being paid and well structured to do this and make them functional? We even need not clean up political systems or eradicate corruption or do marches. We can take up some projects that would make people realize that it is their right to demand services from government, to make them see that it is their own tax money that is being taken into scams and ill constructed roads or in short bring more responsible citizen participation into our democracy.

There are examples of projects that are being done like right for information bill, anti-fragmentation of society etc that returns 100 dollars for the one dollar we invest. There are many volunteers especially students in India who see things in this direction and would like us to give them a guiding hand.

If any of you feel that there are some projects we can brain storm and come up with ways of getting better yield not by putting in more fertilizers but removing the weeds that are eating up the existing fertility, I hope we would be taking a much longer leap towards our goal.

Sincerely,
Manoj

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Visit the AID Baton Rouge chapter at: http://batonrouge.aidindia.org
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