Each Year, SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, one of the top 10 B Schools of the country, conducts a project for its students of PGDM batch in the rural parts spread across the nation. The 6 weeks project termed as DOCC (Development of Corporate Citizenship) aims at making the management students aware of the demographic or similar issues faced by the rural citizens. The students get sensitized to this environment and get a hang on of working in an unstructured environment. This year 4 girls of PGDM 2011, Divya Gupta, Esha Juneja, Swati Jassal and Umang Sota began their journey of 6 weeks from the “gaon” of Mohali, BadMajra and Maloya. As they say, the villages are the shadows of the “city Beautiful.” This opportunity was provided to them by one of the biggest NGOs of the city YTTS- Youth Technical Training Society.
YTTS was created by Vineet Khanna to redirect the misinformed and unemployed youth of Punjab during the period of insurgency; YTTS turned its attention to the migrants who formed slums around the city in the 90s, when a large number of Technical Institutions emerged. However, it chose to retain its original name. The girls say, “Our key responsibility was to study the demographics of Badmajra and the Project mainly focussed on the Women Empowerment and the daily issues faced by the ladies of the village. Over the last few weeks that we have spent with YTTS we have found some answers to these and other equally important questions the easy way and the hard way.”
Rehabilitation and settlement of people in the new areas is a big issue in front of the State Government in Punjab. Provision of all the basic health, education and other general facilities becomes very important when the government settles down people in the new areas. A study to bring about the problems being faced by the people of an area who have been rehabilitated by government of Punjab was done by surveying a small village, Badmajra. Also, the focus of the project was to work for the empowerment of women in these areas pertaining to issues like healthcare, educational facilities, basic hygiene and general awareness. Various methods such as participatory information focus study groups, on field surveys were used to seek the information from the village population. The analysis of the surveys and the findings from these methods were used to make recommendations and suggestions for the improvement of the village colony. Also, these findings proved to be the key information providers for implementing and adding various new initiatives to the already running program by the organization which was named as ‘Saheli Aangan’.
‘Saheli Aangan’ is directed towards empowering the women of the local BadhMajra village. It aims to improve the conditions of the women by educating, training and imparting vocational training to the women and girls of the local community. The primary analysis by means of the visits to the location helped understand the basic problems and requirements of the women of the village.
The basic problems faced by the women include various physical and psychological barriers in the improvement of their conditions. The physical barriers include the absence of various educational institutes in the area for their education and the psychological barriers include the mindsets of the people regarding the education of the girl child.
The revelations from the analysis proved that the educational, health and basic facilities like sewage etc were not adequate as compared to the population of these areas. They also revealed the fact that the state of women in the area needed to be improved by making them aware of the importance of educational, health and other matters concerning them like pregnancy and basic hygiene.
The implementation work done by the girls includes conducting workshops for the people of the area, initiating evening classes for the ladies of the village, proposal for better health facilities through the practitioners associated with the organization.
Through the work done by the girls, they hope to provide like-minded individuals and organizations a roadmap across this vast, if not unexplored, territory.