Day 63, 64,65,66

20, 21, 22, 23 June. 2011

I prepared a schedule. Its like less than a month remaining for the completion of my internship. I now realize how much more do I need to do. The first thing I wanted to do was to get villagers opinion on computers. Based on their opinions, I would do my final recommendations. I started of with preparing for a FGD in Abhepuri. I planned a visit to Abhepuri with two purposes. One was to build a website for them and the other to conduct the Focused Group discussions. Well, the website is just a headfake. The real purpose is to get into the community and know them better. Well, this is the crux of any rural program. You need to know the need of the community. Its not like one size fits all. Every village is different. It is said that in India, the dialect changes every 100 KMS. Well, I have a corollary to it. The village needs and wants change every 100 KMS. Abhepuri is 25 KMS from Panchgani and 37 KMS from Mahabaleshwar. Its been raining cats and dogs in here and Abhepuri is all dry with a few drizzles. And hence due to such biasing of nature, the needs are different. Anyway, coming back to what I had been doing - preparing for FGD. So I prepared for FGD and then yesterday I went to Abhepuri to conduct it.

We reached in the morning. Ashok Mandhre was waiting for us. We first started off with the website. I had a team of 6 young people who were interested in making the website. We started discussing what should be there in the website and how should we approach them. It was finalized that the team would be divided in 3 sub teams. Each team would be responsible for collecting some information on a few of the predecided topics. Then, I started with the FGD. It was a sort of not-so-good FGD. I probably made a lot of mistakes and I probably expected more from the people. But some of the key learning that came from the FGD :

• No introduction about the moderator. This filters out the information.
• Need to do an ice breaker activity which would socialize the participators and make them comfortable.
• Speak less, probe less. Let them speak the most.
• Search for the tapering voices. Encourage them to make their points.
• Don’t make concluding statements. This would give a biased response.
• Make short questions. Once they provide answers in yes or no, then probe to ask the reason. This would make it comfortable in answering.

I am still analysing the responses. Would talk about it soon. I plan to conduct more such FGDs to understand the people better and probably giving them a better solution.

More Later.
SD