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

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Issues related to enrolment and attendance were not quite as simple because
payments and promotions were tied to recorded enrolment and attendance
figures. To diminish the risk of our visits turning into staged performances
we had to take a number of precautions, including not revealing
beforehand which villages we intended to visit. It did happen a few times
that the local education officer took us on time-consuming detours so that
Shiksha Karmis and villagers could be forewarned about our arrival and have
time to stage the standard show.
One evening my Indian assistant and I arrived very late in a district town.
We went to the District Commissioner’s house to report our arrival and
were invited to spend the night there. We were supposed to start before
daybreak the following morning as the village we had selected was hours
away and had no proper road access. The Commissioner wanted to know
which village we were going to visit. We told him that we had made a
random sample of the project villages and as a matter of policy would not
reveal the names of the selected villages. He insisted though, and as it was
by then already past midnight we gave him the name of the village selected
to represent his area. He would not be able to contact the village before we
arrived anyway, as we were to start very early in the morning, and the village
had no telephone.
The following morning we arrived and parked our jeep by the school on
a hilltop right outside the village. There were plenty of children, including a
remarkable number of girls, in every classroom. We followed our normal
routine: I stayed at the school with the Shiksha Karmis and the village headman
pretending to scrutinize the attendance register. My assistant, Amita
Prasher, ran off to the village with her cameras, ostensibly to take some
pictures. Her real purpose was to meet village women and by talking to
them find out if and how the school was working and what the women
thought about it. Her fact-finding mission could only succeed if there were
no men present during the dialogue as a tradition in these villages is that
women do not speak when men are present. My task was basically to keep
the men at the school so that Amita could get on with the job. This rule
always worked. After an hour Amita returned reporting that early in the
morning a messenger had gone from door to door telling people to send
their children to school, washed and nicely dressed. How the District Commissioner
had managed to get the message to the village we never found
out. But we dropped this particular village from our sample.
Usually we succeeded quite well in establishing dialogues. During the
first couple of years we could visit each village several times and attend a
number of Shiksha Karmi training sessions. Through repeated meetings and
dialogues the Shiksha Karmis came to know us and realized that we were on
their side and that they, through our reports, could bring urgent issues to
the attention of the Board and the Joint Review. As the project expanded
and covered many hundreds of villages, most of them without road access,