SE projects by XIMB students

[C Shambu Prasad]

Dear students,

Here is one of the responses to the SE projects. Anupama has been very supportive about the various initativies including the one she was directly involved with (Vikalp in some way). She also has useful comments to make on the project some of which did get reflected in the SE project grading.

Nevertheless I think she provides important suggestions not just to LG 5 but to other groups as well. LG 5 might want to think about this a bit. 

Your batch has made a big contribution towards taking your work outside the campus and I would like to congratulate each one of you for that. I do hope that the juniors will build on your work. you can rightly consider yourselves as pioneers though you cannot be one if you do not listen to feedback.

To help your grades look better the mid term marks are being brought down to 10 from current 15 and end term scaled up to 30 from present 25. The increase to the batch as a whole is about 63 marks or over 1 mark each on average. I am sure you do not mind that.

Shambu 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Anupama Muhuri <anupama...@crymail.org>
Date: Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 12:22 PM
Subject: RE: SE projects by XIMB students
To: C Shambu Prasad <sha...@ximb.ac.in>

Dear Prof. Shambu:

 

Thank you for sharing the projects.. Had a quick glance through those and a few are quite interesting with good potential to make meaningful impact—catch them young, Xavier neighbourhood times, rural portal etc…

 

Yes, Aparajita on behalf of her team had touched base with me a few times regarding the child rights initiative, which eventually shaped up as “Vikalp- ek chhoti si koshish”. When we started off, I had the impression that it would be child rights focus portal and hence my inputs (over mail) from the beginning was geared towards how to make a very relevant and unique portal to promote child rights issues in Orissa, which often doesn’t come in the radar the way it should be…

 

As I found in December, when the draft look of the portal was shared, that it tried to combine child labour and mental illness… My feedback at that time was:

 

a) It will be good to keep the broad theme on child rights and if your group feels have specific focus on "children with disabilities" (The thrust area and message have to be very clear and hard hitting in the home page). This then can include children suffering from mental illness.. Otherwise the risk is that it will remain restricted to pitying the children having this problem, which I believe is not the purpose of this portal or the message that it wants to send across... Rather if this portal gives an overview of some very pertinent issues related to children in Orissa, then it will make a significant contribution-- because those options are really limited

 

b) The vocabulary and terms used in home page, articles/ stories should be carefully chosen... Deaf, dumb are not used any more.. Rather words like visually impaired, speech impaired, hearing impaired are politically correct ones

 

c) It can have links to informative websites of organisations/ online research articles on children's issues and have an update of "children in the news coverages in Orissa"- would be very timely, relevant and garner lot of interest

 

 

On giving a detailed attention to the project report (as kindly shared by you), a few observations that I would like to share:

 

a)      The portal’s focus is on two themes: i) Mental illness; ii) Child labour/ rights: Ideally, the focus should be on one to do justice to the theme and make distinct impact and contribution. As mentioned and also as I had found, there is no mentionable mark on touching upon child rights issues in Orissa

 

b)      The purpose of the portal: feel it can be made sharper. It can ideally move beyond just awareness and try innovating with public opinion building and action strategies

c)       When the group mentions of child rights, does it like to restrict itself to child labour and if so, why?

d)      Education has become a Fundamental Right in India last year and that is a very critical development. The status of (elementary) education in Orissa is not anything to be proud of and capturing the scenario through facts, chronicles, opinions would be very informative and unique

e)      Aim of the project: the way I got it is promoting awareness and sensitivity on mental illness.. How the group sees it evolving into child rights?

f)        Mental health/ illness as a theme: there are lot of discourse and practice in vogue; it is essential to do proper research and background work to promote a cause or else it might have the danger of being misinterpreted. Use of proper terminologies, internalizing and then promoting the right approaches is essential! Words like deaf, dumb, handicap are strict no-no words (which I found on the portal) 

 

Am really thrilled seeing the focused work of students. Yes, given that I had a uni-directional focus on perhaps guiding the students to come up with something I had envisioned and shared, seeing the final outcome different was a bit of a dampener but I hope in the coming days, we can associate with XIM-B through such initiatives and beyond in promotion of child rights 

 

Warm Regards,

Anupama

 

 

 

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Anupama Muhuri   Manager - Volunteer Action (91) 9051049555   152,Kalikapur, Gitanjali Park,  (New No. 8, 2nd Street),  Kolkata - 700099  Tel: +91-33-2416 9507 / 2772  Fax: +91-33-24163322 I believe that every Indian child must be guaranteed equal rights to survival, protection, development and participation. As a part of CRY, I dedicate myself to mobilising all sections of society to ensure justice for children. This communication may contain confidential and / or privileged information intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed. If you have received this in error, please notify the sender by reply mail and delete this message from your computer. You are prohibited from copying , disseminating, retransmitting and / or delivering this message to anyone. Any opinions, comments, statements and / or other information in this message do not necessarily reflect those of CRY - Child Rights and You and are not endorsed by it and will not act to its prejudice.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: C Shambu Prasad [mailto:sha...@ximb.ac.in]
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 11:00 AM
To: Sujit Mahapatra
Cc: Anupama Muhuri
Subject: SE projects by XIMB students

Dear Sujit and Anupama,

I am happy to share the project work done by XIMB students as part of their social entrepreneurship course. There was a lot of limitation given the rather cramped academic calendar that was all the more so with 4.5hrs classes per subject a week instead of the normal 3. As you can see some of the ideas were based on interactions with you and I think a rather candid assessment of what they could and could not do. Placing this in the public domain can also help their juniors take this up and innovate.

Your comments and honest feedback is aprpeciated.

Regards

Shambu

The URL is http://ruralportal.in/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=44&Itemid=55 

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Dr. C Shambu Prasad
Associate Professor,
Xavier Institute of Management Bhubaneswar
Ph: +91-674-3983740 (o) 876 (r) 2302580 (r) 2300995 (Fax)
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Dr. C Shambu Prasad
Associate Professor,
Xavier Institute of Management Bhubaneswar
Ph: +91-674-3983740 (o) 876 (r) 2302580 (r) 2300995 (Fax)
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