Dialogue in Pursuit of Development - Are you looking for one of ...

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bers to be able to approach village women. University education was important
as the job required the ability to plan and carry out surveys and to write
reports in English. NGO background was helpful, as the job required that
they spent long periods in the field under tough conditions. This background
also made it easier for us to gain the confidence of the many local NGOs
involved in the project.
Dialogue at field, board and review levels
As Sida-appointed consultants we carried out the dialogue at three levels:
Field, Board and Review.
Field and Board
Already in our first dialogue with a group of Shiksha Karmis at a training
camp we came across a significant problem: in many project villages Hindi is
a foreign language. The pupils (and their mothers) do not speak or understand
Hindi. This problem is not mentioned in the Project Document, nor
dealt with in the basic training course. Our Indian colleagues on the Shiksha
Karmi Board and the Joint Review committee refused to acknowledge the
issue. It was politically too sensitive. The Shiksha Karmis themselves solved
it by giving all instruction in both Hindi and the local, tribal language.
However, the dialogue in the Shiksha Karmi Project does not begin with
the arrival of the review consultant. A dialogue between the Board and the
local education authorities is the first step in deciding which villages to
approach. Officials of the Shiksha Karmi Board then visit each candidate
village to discuss with villagers and the village leaders the possibility of
opening a Shiksha Karmi Project school.
Dialogue is not only verbal. Actions speak and observations played an
important role in our fieldwork and were often starting points for dialogues.
On certain topics a dialogue is not possible. For example, we observed
that many village records showed that the number of girls was much smaller
than the number of boys. We came across villages where there were only
50–60 pre-school-aged girls for 100 boys. This may indicate the practice of
female infanticide. Villagers as well as the Shiksha Karmi Board members
refused to talk to us about this.
During the first couple of years we concentrated on the supply system
(payments to Shiksha Karmis, lanterns for evening classes, blackboards, books
etc). If these seemingly simple issues did not work, the project would be
doomed: the Shiksha Karmis would stop teaching and the parents would
stop sending their children to school. These were straightforward issues: we
just asked the Shiksha Karmis when the previous salary was paid and checked
the equipment available against the list of what was supposed to be there.