Making of a Knowledge Centre
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Making of a knowledge centre in rural Uttaranchal |
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Gairsain is a small place in Chamoli district in Utaranchal. It is located in mountain valley terrain of
OneWorld South Asia and Plan International - Non Governmental Organisations based in The new initiative was born in August 2005 out of the concept of developing knowledge centre for the rural people. The beginning was done through a community consultation where mostly youth participated.
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| A group of twenty youth emerged as the leaders as they had interest in media and were assertive. They were from 12 villages. These youth facilitators called a consultation of the children below eighteen years of age from 120 villages and chose twenty child volunteers based on their assessment on writing skills, presentation style, assertiveness, and content of their stories submitted in a writing competition. Gajendra Nautiyal, an experienced local journalist trained these youths and children on writing skills and further honed their skills in vernacular language. In September 2005, a training programme was conducted for ten youths (ten other discontinued) and twenty child journalists to expose them to a variety of media like comics, photography along with ICT tools like Radio and Internet at state capital Dehradun. After this workshop, Mr. Nautiyal followed up with this group to continue writing stories on social and developmental issues in their communities to practice newly acquired skills. ‘Initially this group used to write stories as heard from others, there was no enquiry done and were no references’ recalls Mr. Nautiyal. ‘The stories looked imaginary and were not very reliable to the readers’ says Nautiyal. He continued and organised several meeting for them to give feedback and also learn from each other. Gradually they started writing good stories. They wrote stories on social problems like alcoholism and second marriages etc. They also wrote success stories and stories of innovations in their community. They got a chance to attend a further training on comics at This group who attended radio training started working on their radio production. They wrote scripts for their programme and came to OneWorld South Asia office in By March 2006 they recorded several programmes and took them to the community and played using tape recorders made available under this programme. They had sufficient media material with them. They planned a media campaign on child rights using wall papers, comics and radio in Dhargaidh village in Gairsain block. They put wall posters on panchayati chowk (common place of gathering of the villagers), placed tape recorders and played recorded radio programmes on alcoholism and girl child education. They invited Bal Panchayat members, Mahila Mangal Dal (women Self Help Group) to see the posters and listen to the radio. Visitors glanced at posters but they listened to the radio programmes and it appealed to them because of its local flavour. After listening to the radio programme they went back to comic stripe posters and paid attention and started discussing the issues highlighted in the comics and photographs displayed. One of the Mahila Mangal Dal member who generally do not used to participate in group meetings, came calling when she listened the radio programme being played by the children at panchayati chowk. She is now regular at the meetings and they play radio programmes during meetings. Later, when one another NGO was organizing a training workshop for the Van Panchayat Sarpanch (Heads of the village forest councils), invited SBMA to display the campaign material to the sarpanchs. The campaign was gaining momentum. Encouraged by the response from the community and also from within their own organisation and supporters, they went ahead and planned a computer and Internet workshop for the six youths who had shown some interest in taking this media further after the Dehradun training in September 2005. In May 2006 SBMA launched its first Rural Knowledge Centre (RKC) at Saliayana, Gairsain. This centre uses office computer and has a v-sat connectivity. This centre offers computer learning and Internet browsing facilities to the budding knowledge workers. The have also learned to put local news and other village information on the web portal powered by open enrich – a community communication software developed by OneWorld, National Informatics Centre and UNESCO using Hindi interface. |
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This RKC also produces multi media community content using stories written, photographs taken and comics made besides producing radio programmes on useful information.
KC has extensive community linkages, as they are regularly organising campaigns in the community.
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For more information Contact: Umang Group/Mr.Gajendra Nautiyal
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