TRAINING - WITH A DIFFERENCE

In spite of our conviction about the need for children to be heard, we were not sure about Lalitha’s idea of a capacity building programme for children. Lalitha Iyer, our colleague, was a keen champion of children’s right to participate in decision making. She had developed a module that would enable children develop their confidence to understand local issues and present it articulately to the adults in their community. But she was so clear about her ideas that we eventually invited her to conduct this programme in Myrada’s (a Bangalore based NGO) project area in Mysore that we were associated with.

It was a 2-week schedule, sometime in mid-2000. I accompanied Lalitha to Mysore and was there on the first day. It was a day of familiarisation. The children were there, about 20 of them from different villages. They seemed excited about this programme when they heard what it was about.

I then met the group on the last day of the programme. The group had been completely transformed. The very same children who had been so reluctant and diffident on the first day were now ready to make a presentation to a group of adults including their parents. They huddled into groups and busied themselves for a presentation. They were also to present their visions for their village. There was also the usual song, dance and drama played out, as normally happens during such occasions, but it was with a difference. They were around social issues that were of concern to them – discrimination against the girl child, lack of education opportunities, working children, drug abuse, alcoholism, poor sanitation conditions and even on the indifference of government officials to their problems, all of which had been conceived, scripted, directed and presented by these children!

The parents who had assembled there could not believe that it was their children who were articulating on issues that they themselves did not have the confidence to. They swelled with pride. It was evident on their faces, in their smiles. They knew their families and their communities would never be the same again. A slow but sure process of transformation had started.

Sure enough, in less than 6 months time, some of the children who had participated in the programme successfully negotiated with a local landlord with whom three children of the village worked as bonded labour and got them released, a feat that the adults had never managed to achieve down the generations!