∆ यहाँ पर सोलह साल हो गया | ∆ हम तो क्या, घर की देख बाल ही करते हैं , और ये बच्चे लोगों को भी | ∆ देखो ना sir, इनके पास तो सभ हैं | Bag हैं , किताबे हैं , पर कभी पढ़ते ही नहीं | ∆ खेलते रहते हैं ! ∆ हमको तो ऐसा मौका ही नहीं मिला, जब से छोटे थे, घर को संभालते आए हैं |
We kept bouncing around for a while, with IIT saying that the contr actor s were responsible. We had to run to the office, then to the managers, then to the contractors. There was this casual vibe associated with all of this, as if a coconut fell from a tree.” They had to justify all of the reasons as to why a campus like ours needed to take such an action. Dealing with the Main Building certainly wasn’t easy. And none of this happened overnight. This group of post-graduate students - Bhuvanesvaran, S h i r l e y, S a r a n y a C h a n d r a s h e k a r a n , Saranya Nair, Praveen, Jayant, Snehalish, S o n a m , Ma n i , Ma t t h e w, S o n a l i a n d Sudheer, put in continuous ef for t to bring about some change. This involved o r g a n izi n g sig n a t u r e d r i ve s a m o n g students, faculties, and even organizing an open house session. Although not much enthusiasm was shown by the students, the faculty responded in larger numbers.
हम पाँच तारीक़ तक कोल्कता में टॉप करते थे क्लास को | बीच मे काम करने के लिए थोड़ी देर आ गये मुंबई, और फिर पढ़ने के लिए try किया, और पता चला की हमारा mind बिल्कु ल...मतलब यून हो गया |
“We used to talk on different roof-tops ever y evening t alk ing to interested faculty as we did not have any space.”
D
ecades back, right from the time when Hostel-10 was first built in the campus, there have been demands to build a creche. Involving the Mumbai Mobile Creche, an NGO creche service, plans were charted out to come up with a daycare center for fruition. After years of all that dialogue, a day care center was built, called the ShishuVihar. But it was meant for the children of faculty members, not the workers. This group of students tapped into all that dialogue to get some headway. While par allely tr ying to spread the awareness of reason for action among the student-body, hoping that it’d snowball, they first engaged in discovering all these camp sites and tried to interact with all the people involved, their issues - to know and understand the population better, and more importantly, to get some data from all of this.
Overturning the occasional indifference to create change isn’t straightforward. Creating sustainable and effective change is much much harder.
13
“We were newcomers. It was tough to break the ice with these workers. We can’t just walk into someone else’s lives and ask if everything was alright. We can’t ask them to share with us their fears and insecurities. They’ll always tell that everything is alright. You know, you can’t always just walk into a staff residents house with all such questions about their lives and their children. The contractors told them to not let us students interact with children and their families. We couldn’t take any photographs. It seemed as if we were just supposed to study.” Sonali Kulkarni, a PhD student in the Chemical Engineering department a d d s t h a t t h e r e a l w ay s we r e bureaucratic bottlenecks. There were times when the students had to convince the institute of the responsibility of building the creche. Around mid-march, some parts of the campus wanted to backout from the implementation of the Lakeside community hall, which was initially allocated as a center. No BTech students were involved in any of this. Till late September, the group had to stand through w ith all tr iv ial dealings. From the allocation of furniture, maintenance and a sustainable functioning of the center. Creating an entire system of managing the finances of the operation through the Estate office from scratch is what this student group achieved. Over tur ning the occasional indifference to create change isn’t straightfor ward. Creating sustainable and effective change is much much harder. The Aman Day Care currently takes care of kids across all three campsites, transports them both ways, and prov ides them w ith t wo c are t a ke r s i n a c e n t r a l l y l o c a t e d color ful easy-to -make- out building adjacent to the Estate office. Operating everyday from m o r n i n g t i l l e ve n i n g , e xc e p t Sundays, it caters to provide a residence for children, education, and frequently organizes sessions and trips for all children.