Thursday, May 17, 2018

A recent interview with Kamla Bhasin

At IDR " When I got there, I spent six months trying to start a literacy project. When we asked the community initially, they said they wanted the project. A few months later, when there was no progress, I grew impatient. It was then that I realised the problem. “You are blind,” they said to me. “Don’t you see that this village hasn’t had water for the last two years?” Rajasthan was at the time going through one of the worst droughts in its history and a literacy centre was certainly not what people wanted.
The villagers said they had only agreed to the literacy centre plan because they didn’t know who I really was or what connections I had. They were used to development workers coming to their communities for six months and then disappearing. Saying ‘yes’ to me was a way to stay out of trouble.”

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