Nutrition

Interns: Anubha Prakash II

During the last two weeks of my stay in Karnataka, I have come to realize the importance of communication more than ever before. It can sometimes be so upsetting to depend on others to communicate. I really wish I were brought up in a multilingual environment.

However, sometimes I also end up making a fool of myself. I know only Hindi and English, in the initial days I would keep confusing shopkeepers with English words and at the end of my failed attempts they would ask me in Hindi "What do you want?" Therefore, now I first try Hindi.

On the work front, so far, it has been smooth sailing from the last week to the third one and soon we are going to start witThe past week has been lot of hard work, library, books, reports, data, and documents. We finally managed to come up with a research design for the study.h the work on field. 

The project under study is the Community Monitoring Program functional only in the state of Karnataka, primarily in the two districts of Raichur and Gulbarga. It incorporates an interesting model for the empowerment of the people. To monitor the delivery of basic health and education services the Government of Karnataka, UNICEF and NGOs came up with a design where the onus of ensuring the proper access to services, would lie with the people.

The project came into effect four years go and since then this will be the second review of the project. On paper, the idea seems to be relevant and very powerful. However, in practice umpteen factors play a role in the functioning of a system.

The dynamics of a community may no longer let 1 and 1 equal 2. This is what we are going to look at, the working model of the program; its efficiency; benefits; and the barriers to its execution (if any).

The next ten days on field are going to be a valuable experience to me. This is my first work in the rural area and so I expect to enhance my expertise. My training is in Child Development, but I always wanted to extend myself to development work.

Here is the opportunity and I am preparing myself to make the best use of it. There is always a concern for those who are 'subject' to our study. I hope that in this process they do not feel exploited. I am happy to be a part of a group that is equally sensitive to this. Thus, our effort will be to include the community in the research as far as possible and to ensure that we share our perceptions with them.

Anubha Prakash
Bangalore