Continuing Building Communities and capabilities

Ammamma wanted to give a bigger exposure to the girls in the adult school. She approached the Social Welfare Board and orgnaized a camp in Vishakhapatnam for them. This camp consisted of activities, sightseeing and talks by eminent people and officials. One of the speakers was the famous writer and Tatayya's friend in Delhi, Vakati Panduranga Rao. Ammamma had to make several rounds of trips at the Board for getting the sanction and even more rounds in the Railways to get a separate coach for the entire group. She succeeded in getting it for the onward journey. In those days getting railiway tickets was a huge exercise and there were not many facilities available for return booking. Often, this had to be done on the other side after you reach the destination.

She also had to find accommodation. She took the help of Deepak Bhattacharya (UNI Journalist and Tatayya's Mentee), who organized it in a school building. She also helped out in the return journey by ensuring that the group got seats together. The camp was a great success and the officials who came from Hyderabad for inspection wrote excellent reports of the same and stated that this kind of a structured exercise was not done earlier.

Based on this, Ammamma wrote out a proposal for the funding of 100 Adult education schools (6000 women literates!). For this, she had to learn the nuances of statistical data collection fromt he Bureau of Economics and Statistics, had to analyse it and present the costs and the strategy. She worked hard at it as it had to be self learnt - the Samakhya, till then was only orgnaizing protests and rallies and the real activities for development were started by Ammamma only. However, once the project was sanctioned, there were the usual organizational power games and the entire project was given to the chosen in a district of their choice! The irony of it was that - when the renewal of the project had to be proposed , it was again Ammamma who was requested to do this!!! Human nature does not mutate, does it? It seems so resilient even after so many decades!

If only many more people carried out development work at the grass root level with sincerity, India would have developed long ago. However, we have more development on paper and enormous funds have been spent with little to show for it.