It is a moment of delight that our initial activities of UJAN have been rolled out successfully and it is now moving from strength to strength. 28 members from 21 families were enlisted in “Bel-Mala” project. The project has been started in a village named Narrah in Bankura, where two separate groups have been created.
UJAN manages entire life cycle of the project, from distribution of raw materials to marketing of the end products. The unique strategy has created lot of excitement in local nearby villages where many villagers are urging to join in this program.
However, the cornerstone of activities of UJAN is not limited to providing Self-Employment to under-privileged people. UJAN believes that self-enlightenment and real individual development starts from education. In our last visit we took a detailed survey of education and health consciousness amongst those 21 families and to be fair, the picture is really worrisome.
71% of the children of these families are studying in schools; out of the children who dropped out for some reason, 33% dropped after Secondary Examination, 33% after 8th standard and 22% after 9th standard. The reasons are manifold – lack of finance to provide admission fees or tuitions etc. And quite likely, most of them currently studying may opt to drop out at those standards, because of the similar reasons.
UJAN has planned to provide necessary cooperation to these families to ensure that their children get education at least to the level of Higher Secondary. We are putting up a tutorial home where these children can get quality tuitions from qualified teachers. We would try to find out suitable professional or academic path for those who would successfully come out after Higher Secondary.
We wish to provide these facilities to all children in that locality or villages, but due to shortage of our funds, we have to limit the same to those families who have joined the project. Our initial idea was to generate some extra fund from self-employment projects so that education and health benefits can be accommodated from it. Though our “Bel-Mala” project is running successfully, but it has not yet reached a level where it can save extra rupees for us to continue these parallel welfare programs. So we are to start with contributions from our beloved members who have come forward with an exceptional sense of generosity to help these poor families. We would like to thank especially Sudip Narayan Choudhury, Santanu Chakraborty, Sourav Bhattacharya, and Krishnendu Bhowmick for their benevolent donation to this cause. And this selfless feeling and urge is the true motivation for all of us.