This post has been long overdue for various reasons including my health, work and a busy schedule of extra career activities :P
I attended the Zilla Samakya meeting of Warangal district last monday. For the uninitiated Zilla Samakya is a federal body made of the indirect representatives of Self Help Groups, the vehicles through which SERP strive to achieve poverty alleviation in the state of Andhra Pradesh. A Zilla Samakya is registered under Mutually Aided Cooperative Societies Act. It will be having a general body made up of leaders of all the member Mandal Samakyas, an executive committee and OB made of elected leaders along with many subcommittees.
My previous experiences with ZS are limited to three viz. Anantapur, Nalgonda and Mahbubnagar. Of this Anantapur hangs in my mind as an impressive example of community resolve probably because of the high decibel discussions and the strong control of its leaders. The two ladies had hardly completed their inter and were communicating to me in English albeit with some effort. However the Nalgonda and Mahboobnagar ZS turned out to be starkly different. It was full blown cacophony in both the meetings, the discussions were not moving ahead and whatever they discussed followed the ....'s law- The less important the issue, the more is the discussion.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
King and the Kingdom
The last two days I have been to the nearby district of Warangal on a gratifying field visit. It also provided me an opportunity to experience up close the life of my classmate and dearfriend Kamal in the Tribal Agency Area of Etunagaram. Kamal is working as the Programme Manager, NREGS in the ITDA. Kamal being the second ranked officer in the 80x80 km2 area of Etunagaram reigns like a lord over his staff and the beneficiary subjects. The king and his reign are nothing less than magnificent and Augustus. His use of authority and the way by which he commanded respect from his staff and people made me tiny-bit jealous.
The hillocks with pristine green beauty and paddyfields extending to the horizon however mask the fact that the Kingdom is not in a pretty shape. This was the hot bed of naxalism around two decades back. Phallic menhirs coated in blood red profusely dot the landscape even now. The forest area apparently borders with Chattisgarh and tribal people sifts through the forest to both states occasionally. My local staff told me that even now in many villages they are occasionally surrounded by so called naxallites. In fact today morning when I entered a village named Royyur many young people surrounded our vehicle. They wanted to know whether we had come to start some microfinance activity.
Kamal and his league of ITDA PMs gets a bad weather allowance of five grants per month, an extra to the remuneration that is received by other IRMANs working in cities. Nevertheless after seeing the environment in which he lives I genuinely feels that the extra allowance paid to the people working here is quite meagre.
Tidbits:
We happened to have our lunch from a roadside eatery which had an impressive statue of a lady revolutionary in its tiny yard. The only decipherable writings I could make out of the plaque was "CPI ML" and two dates in 1947 and 1989. Eager to hear a riveting story I inquired about her to the two staff members accompanying us. The elder person retorted "She is INDIRA GANDHI !!!"...it took a moment to sink in, Indira Gandhi being part of CPIML ! In the end she turned out to be a lady named Fulak (or something near to that). She died in an encounter with Police in 1989.
The hillocks with pristine green beauty and paddyfields extending to the horizon however mask the fact that the Kingdom is not in a pretty shape. This was the hot bed of naxalism around two decades back. Phallic menhirs coated in blood red profusely dot the landscape even now. The forest area apparently borders with Chattisgarh and tribal people sifts through the forest to both states occasionally. My local staff told me that even now in many villages they are occasionally surrounded by so called naxallites. In fact today morning when I entered a village named Royyur many young people surrounded our vehicle. They wanted to know whether we had come to start some microfinance activity.
Kamal and his league of ITDA PMs gets a bad weather allowance of five grants per month, an extra to the remuneration that is received by other IRMANs working in cities. Nevertheless after seeing the environment in which he lives I genuinely feels that the extra allowance paid to the people working here is quite meagre.
Tidbits:
We happened to have our lunch from a roadside eatery which had an impressive statue of a lady revolutionary in its tiny yard. The only decipherable writings I could make out of the plaque was "CPI ML" and two dates in 1947 and 1989. Eager to hear a riveting story I inquired about her to the two staff members accompanying us. The elder person retorted "She is INDIRA GANDHI !!!"...it took a moment to sink in, Indira Gandhi being part of CPIML ! In the end she turned out to be a lady named Fulak (or something near to that). She died in an encounter with Police in 1989.
Monday, October 04, 2010
put the database online
It all started with a simple question of collecting a few thousand names for my organization. These names are to be linked with cascading geographical entities and they are lying in a few tables in an access file with neat primary keys. All I want to do was to put the input data form of access on web. I had read somewhere that access can be split into a backend and a frontend and the latter can be put online. But my brief search could not retrieve any results on that line.
Then I reached osalt.com, one of my favourite destinations to find out opensource programmes. This site gives info on open source alternatives to commercial softwares. They had listed wavemaker as the foremost contender to MS Access. The video accompanying the programme and reviews increased my expectations. I installed the programme, it didn't create any shortcuts on the desktop and I executed it from the start menu. An unassuming start screen appeared requesting to set the project directory and after two unsuccessful attempts resulting in some java error I am able to do it with the default directory. Then it worked on its own and appeared as a new tab in the browser. Take a look at this picture
Then I reached osalt.com, one of my favourite destinations to find out opensource programmes. This site gives info on open source alternatives to commercial softwares. They had listed wavemaker as the foremost contender to MS Access. The video accompanying the programme and reviews increased my expectations. I installed the programme, it didn't create any shortcuts on the desktop and I executed it from the start menu. An unassuming start screen appeared requesting to set the project directory and after two unsuccessful attempts resulting in some java error I am able to do it with the default directory. Then it worked on its own and appeared as a new tab in the browser. Take a look at this picture
The wavemaker site hosts a tutorial to migrate the access data using an inbuilt database engine. However I felt that I should be using a mysql backend to harness the full potential. Thus began my second leg of journey. My aim was to create a few tables and and put the access data in them. Mysql has replaced their query browser with a GUI tool called Mysql Workbench. This has made the creation and manipulation of data a lot easier. A commendable tutorial document is shipped within the programme itself and that can be accessed from the 'doc library' tab in the homescreen.
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