What the gram sabha actually asked us

We went to Kolvan with a plan for a learning centre, and a slide deck about it.

The gram sabha listened politely and then spent an hour on water.

What they said

The school exists. It has a teacher. What it does not have, for four months of the year, is children, because in the dry season the older ones walk to fetch water and the younger ones go with them.

Nobody in that room needed convincing that education matters. They were telling us that our sequence was wrong.

What we changed

• The learning centre in Kolvan is now scheduled after the check dam, not before
• The survey we had already paid for is being reused for the water work
• We stopped bringing slide decks to a gram sabha

What this costs us

About four months of delay on one centre, and the cost of a survey we scoped for the wrong thing.

We are publishing it because a report that only lists successes is not a report.