MCF Annual Workshop Feedback 2008

On the 6th anniversary of the NGO, Mountain Children’s Forum (MCF), I decided to attend their workshop being held at Dehradun. I had heard a lot about these workshops but had never actually been to one. Having spent 7 years in Delhi and Dehradun only being 7 hours away, I felt like it would be a new experience.
My expectations before leaving for the workshop largely centered around getting to know more about the life of children in the villages of Uttrakhand, the working of the government there and of course taking part in some of the activities!
Before attending my first ever workshop, the only thing that came to my mind, when I thought of an NGO, was that it was independent of the government and normally goes against them. But is that all a NGO actually is? Not quite. A NGO is a body of people who believe in a cause that the government doesn’t have enough time to put enough effort into. They do not necessarily always go against the workings of the government but only help branch out their job so that the people can benefit from them further.
This workshop was a review of the Five Year Plan on education and health that had finished its term. Children from all corners of Uttrakhand traveled miles to put their thoughts across and uncover the truth of the actual outcome of the plan.
First, the children were shown a PowerPoint Presentation, which they then were asked to compare with their surveys of ten villages and match them to find the holes in the government’s Five Year Plan. Highly informative charts were put up by each district present there and one member represented the group in explaining their findings. Each presenter spoke for about 10 minutes or more without stopping and with full confidence with a room full of people eager to know. This session revealed a major fault in the plan:

Either the government was not performing up to their mark by giving inadequate provisions to the schools. Eg: Gas for the miday meals hardly ever arrived on time.
Or the intermediates like the ministers or teachers were corrupt. Thus, the money was unable to reach the school on time and even if it did, it was not utilized in the correct method.

However, most of the presentations revolved around the former reason rather than the latter one. I believe that a mixture of both these reasons was required, but none the less this gave me an insight into to villages of Uttrakhand.

This discussion showed me that more people need to be exposed to the situation of India’s present education system. Children in villages do not have toilets in their schools or even clean drinking water. They may not even have 4 walled building surrounding them. Nobody realizes the intensity of such a situation until they either experience it themselves or learn about it from some who has.
As a result, I probably know more about the reality of a village than my economics teacher does! I wouldn’t mind attending another of these workshops.