Empowering Villages in Rural India

Dear friends,

Hope you are well. Thank you for your continuing support. We are very grateful to you donations and inputs .

Every time with our letter to you, we wish to acquaint you with Seva Mandir a bit more. In this letter, you will get to know about the process of our business planning.

Seva Mandir focuses on communities rather than on individual/s. The belief is that in order to bring about the durable changes in the society; the constructive work involving all the community members is important because social problems are complex. It therefore, takes longer but the outcomes are more sustainable and long lived. Therefore, Seva Mandir has a three pronged strategy –

1)      To create and strengthen institutions for development (at the village, organization and society levels)

2)      To enhance people’s capabilities for self-development (both at individual and community level); and

3)      To create sustainable improvements in the livelihoods base.

Our bottom-up approach allows creating stakes for every section of society to participate in their own development. We very much hope that you will enjoy knowing about our business planning phase that we are going through right now.

It has been a very hot summer here in Rajasthan this year. We are now all prepared to welcome the monsoon which should be here in the next week and half. Gradually it is getting humid day by day and we are trying not to let the rising temperatures effect us and are currently in the midst of the exciting organization wide planning process to develop our 7^th Comprehensive Plan.

The Comprehensive Plan outlines the strategic direction and action-plans for Seva Mandir over the next three-year plan period (2012-2015). 

Seva Mandir has been preparing Comprehensive Plans since 1990 as a way to systematically review and evolve its near-term strategic priorities across all programmatic areas.  The process of putting together the Comprehensive Plan also serves as an opportunity for Seva Mandir to reflect upon the work we have done, examine the environment we work in and evolve our strategies accordingly, within the context of past lessons learnt and the overall long-term vision of the organization.

The process for creating the 7^th Comprehensive Plan began in late 2010 and includes all levels of Seva Mandir’s tiers viz. - from the villages where we work all the way up to the Chief Executive Officer.  The Comprehensive Plan process is consistent with Seva Mandir’s bottom-up approach, with the kick-off meetings taking place at the village level with the Chief Executive present.  After these initial meetings, the staff members at the zone and block offices had an opportunity to share their thoughts, observations and information.  Using the information gathered from the field, the Programs devised their strategies for the upcoming years.  These were presented to the organization as a whole, where debate, discussion, criticism and suggestions took place.

We are now headed into the final stages of this exciting process.  Programs are incorporating the comments and suggestions into their reports, and putting the final touches in to the operating frameworks. This is an exciting time at Seva Mandir and we are really looking forward to the next few years when we can put these strategies into effect and watch the change they make.

The integrated approach allows all our partners, friends, donors and well wishers to contribute to the holistic development of our communities. Any project/program that you support for Seva Mandir is a part of this comprehensive plan. Thank you so much for regularly supporting our cause and making a difference.

We will soon be providing you with an annual report of our programs you are supporting on Global Giving. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

With warm regards,

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Seva Mandir!!

I have three things to say before we talk about the project you are supporting.

One -we recently participated in a fund raising event on Global Giving UK. The challenge Top 10 wins challenge (1^st to 14^th March) required the participant projects to raise at least of £ 500 with minimum of 25 donors. Seva Mandir participated with its project “Improving Food Security for Tribal Farmers in India”. This project helps 5000 poor, marginalized farmers in rural Udaipur to have better crops and thus earn more money/food. This is done through a variety of programs including – seed bank program, using organic manure prepared with the help of earth worms (vermin-composting), growing cash crops like vegetables (preparing nurseries) for self sustenance and income generation. You would be very happy to note that this project raised £705 from 31 donors in the Top 10 Wins Challenge and therefore it won a bonus prize of £300. It is a perfect gift on this Holi for our farmers.

Secondly, on the 19^th and 20^th March we celebrated our festival Holi (festival of colors in India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi). The festival is also a symbol of celebrating the harvest of winter crop in our region. This festival signifies the end of our winters and beginning of summer. March is also our financial year end and therefore it is wonderful to end our year with lots of support from people like you and having a good harvest at this Holi. And

Finally, this year, at this point of time, Seva Mandir is going through some change. Our ex Chief Executive Ms. Neelima Khetan has stepped down on March 31st. She has spent 25 years with Seva Mandir and the last twelve years as the Chief Executive. The organization excelled during her time and with her leadership marked a number of achievements. Though she has left us due to our constitutional norms, we are very happy to have her as our Trustee on Seva Mandir Board. Her continuing association with Seva Mandir is very assuring for all of us. 

Ms. Priyanka Singh has taken over as Chief Executive of Seva Mandir from April 2011. She has spent over thirteen years with Seva Mandir heading Education and Health program and leading Badgaon Block (a geographical unit for our work). She has a post graduate degree in rural development from the same institute as Ms. Khetan did. She is very capable and a great person to work with. With her deep understanding of issues in rural development and support from all our friends like you, we are very much looking forward to seeing Seva Mandir keep doing its good work in the next years to come. At this point of time, we all look for your continuous support and faith for many more years of working together.

My colleagues have shared with me a note on a village meeting for the project “Building Self Reliant Rural Communities” that you are supporting. I very much hope you will enjoy reading about it.

As you know this project encourages villages to work on various social, political and development issues. One of the strategies is to encourage communities to establishing norms once an issue has been identified. For example – it could be protecting the forests or overcoming the use of alcohol by introducing penalties or ensuring quality education by raising their concerns with the Government or avoiding spending more money on weddings (as a social obligation) etc.

The following incident is one such example where the local communities are attempting to establish norms to ensure ‘good’ for everyone in the society.

The tribal communities in our region are dependent on forest lands for their fodder and fuel wood needs. These forest lands are owned by the Government and therefore the villagers are only allowed to harvest grass and fruits but the felling of trees is strictly prohibited. The forest land also helps maintaining the social solidarity amongst villagers as it is a shared common property resource. Therefore protecting forests is pivotal in this region for all these various reasons.

In Alsigarh zone (big area spread in few km of radius) there has been illegal felling of trees for many years in a patch of forest that has been managed and protected by the villagers in collaboration with the Forest Department (under the Join Forest Management Scheme). The five leaders from village Peepalwas. Kheriya and Undri decided to resolve this issue. Therefore they had a meeting in January this year.

The people from Peepalwas village complained that the forest land is shared by all three villages and therefore it should be a joint responsibility of all these villages to protecting it. Since people from Peepalwas village are working towards protecting the forest but the other two villages are not helping in this process. Peepalwas demanded to resolve this issue as it has been pending since last four months and asked all villagers to follow the rule. The leaders suggested a financial penalty on the offenders after much discussion. They advised for a serious action for recurring offenders. Everyone agreed and decided to further this decision by discussing it with everyone in these villages in the next few weeks.

In addition to the aforementioned issues, the village elders also discussed how a villager’s financial status has been affected by recent high inflation rates. As a result of heavy expenditures on social obligations such as weddings and funerals the people fall into poverty. In weddings people are burdened by the additional expenses of serving alcohol. It does no good to the hosts and the guests. Weddings can be hard on a person’s financial condition because they have to incur such expenses as part of the social compulsions. The alcohol leads to health and social problems.

They also brainstormed on engaging nearby villagers on the same issue, so that this burdening norm could be checked. It was decided to stop serving alcohol during weddings in their villages and later engaging with other villages slowly on the same issue.

This meeting exemplifies changing mindsets of people over the years. It has been possible due to constant capacity building of villagers on various development issues and building awareness. This meeting quantifies the efforts put in by these communities for bringing about the social change.

Thank you so much for supporting this program. With your support these communities are raising concerns and dealing with social problems. These communities are sowing the seeds of ‘better future’ for all of us also by protecting the trees and forests.

We are grateful to your donation and hope to receive a continuous support from you in the future too. We hope that you will be able to visit/write to encourage our new team and leadership.

Happy Holi to you and your family from all of us here.

Warm Regards

Deepti

deepti@sevamandir.org