I was aware that the ward officer is good. He is not only aware about Participatory Budgeting (PB) but also has been active in making it a success. He has been doing it since the inception of PB around 7 years ago in 2006 - 2007 when it was initiated by the then Municipal Commissioner Mr. Nitin Kareer. In spite of all this assurance. it took me an entire week or even more to break my initial barrier to go out and start meeting people in my Ward.
While doing the pilot study for the current project on PB, 6 months back in November 2014, I had met him. Now as part of "Know your Ward", we, the community facilitators are also supposed take a lot many interviews. Ward Officer's interview is one of the most crucial, important one.
The questionnaire was made by SM, also drawing some inputs/ experiences from her research work. It's a long one but a comprehensive one. I was afraid if I will be able to engage the person, in this case the W.O., to answer all the questions. So we had discussed beforehand which part we will exclude in such case. It's about a personal initiative for ensuring people's participation and the experiences related to that.
The easiest was part 4 where we seek the support and acceptance from the W.O. or any other interviewee like the key informants/ Corporators from the ward as I didn't have to convince him to accept the proposed alternative way of doing PB in our chosen wards. But this can be very difficult in some other cases especially where they feel that people's participation may increase their work as well as its delays the process (which to some extent is true.) But participation in decision making is nothing but deepening democracy. Democracy is an abstract idea while participation is the manifestation of it. (These are not my sentences, I heard them somewhere but liked them a lot and felt them at the heart of my heart!!)
At the end of a successful interview with the W.O., we were about to leave when he, pleased with our job offers us roses which were there on his table. That was, I felt, a moment of joy, bonding, empathizing with the system and understanding it. We celebrated it throughout the day and are still on the high of it. It gave us more encouragement for rest of the interviews of people from varied backgrounds playing various role in the society.
More than that I also swear to myself that there is no point cribbing about the system and saying it's bad. It's not. It can be made better, no doubt, and there are good people in it striving to make it better.
While doing the pilot study for the current project on PB, 6 months back in November 2014, I had met him. Now as part of "Know your Ward", we, the community facilitators are also supposed take a lot many interviews. Ward Officer's interview is one of the most crucial, important one.
The questionnaire was made by SM, also drawing some inputs/ experiences from her research work. It's a long one but a comprehensive one. I was afraid if I will be able to engage the person, in this case the W.O., to answer all the questions. So we had discussed beforehand which part we will exclude in such case. It's about a personal initiative for ensuring people's participation and the experiences related to that.
The easiest was part 4 where we seek the support and acceptance from the W.O. or any other interviewee like the key informants/ Corporators from the ward as I didn't have to convince him to accept the proposed alternative way of doing PB in our chosen wards. But this can be very difficult in some other cases especially where they feel that people's participation may increase their work as well as its delays the process (which to some extent is true.) But participation in decision making is nothing but deepening democracy. Democracy is an abstract idea while participation is the manifestation of it. (These are not my sentences, I heard them somewhere but liked them a lot and felt them at the heart of my heart!!)
At the end of a successful interview with the W.O., we were about to leave when he, pleased with our job offers us roses which were there on his table. That was, I felt, a moment of joy, bonding, empathizing with the system and understanding it. We celebrated it throughout the day and are still on the high of it. It gave us more encouragement for rest of the interviews of people from varied backgrounds playing various role in the society.
More than that I also swear to myself that there is no point cribbing about the system and saying it's bad. It's not. It can be made better, no doubt, and there are good people in it striving to make it better.
No comments:
Post a Comment