Child Rights
CRY-ERA collaboration was renewed in the year 1998 by introducing the Nodal concept in Uttarakhand state. This meant extending financial support to grassroots initiatives, which were struggling to improve situation of the deprived child. The support began with 10 organisations, gradually expanding to take many more in its ambit. These included both, the ones that had emerged from ERA’s fold and those working on a similar agenda.
As a result, ERA’s role transformed from working directly at the grassroots to supporting, monitoring and strengthening grassroots interventions focusing on child rights in Uttarakhand. This was a new approach both for CRY and ERA – truly a collective approach. It was thought of as a process from the very beginning.
The process, in the following years, continued enriching experience, further building on ideas and consolidating action to simultaneously improve strategies for grassroots action together with policy advocacy.
The programme witnessed a rational shift from service delivery mode to campaign mode, i.e. from supplementing government efforts by running Balwadies, NFEs and formal schools to holding government accountable and making it work for the status of deprived child. This shift was in the renewed understanding that providing basic health care and elementary education is the responsibility of the government.
The entire effort is now directed towards organizing communities and strengthening Panchayats to reactivate and hold the government institutions responsible for providing basic health care for all and for providing free & compulsory elementary education to include all out of school children. This shift has shown remarkable impact on the community’s response, which, with each year passing by, has increased manifold.
Encouraged by the response, the nodal programme is continuously improving itself to match with the aroused aspirations and felt needs of the community. It has gone into the realm of issues that pertain to Livelihoods, Natural resources (Water, forest & land), and large-scale involuntary displacement, caused by gigantic projects and natural calamities.
The programme, with in purview of child rights, now entails a major component of public education on the issues of development and capacitating people’s institutions to foster real development in the direction set by their own genius.
The development issues are addressed by meaningfully blending vibrant elements of individual action (all under same scheme of things) at the grassroots and through collective action at the Policy level.
The collective action at policy level is realized through Sarokaar - a state-level alliance that synergises efforts of nodal & networked partners with similar efforts in the region for accomplishment of common goals.
The entire process meant a rigorous effort at the nodal level. This included reorientation of partner organizations to develop a common perspective and capacitating them to strengthen people’s institutions. They are being tempered to function in a collective manner and shed away their individualistic tendencies that are detrimental to the attainment of set objectives.
Interestingly most of the partners, while adapting to the shift in approach, continued to grow. The ones who could not align were replaced by the promising new ones. |
