Travel to India Report by Basab Chatterjee

March-April 2011

Visited AALO 23 in Mongolpur, North Dinajpur district on Mar 31. Went down to the school unannounced and met the teacher Lipika Das. I arrived at the school around 8:30AM. She was at the school room cleaning the room but there were no students. She told me that since the last school year ended two months she had not admitted any new students per Lily India’s instructions. But then she had recently received go ahead to restart admitting new students. She had admitted 5 new students already and expecting to get 5 more shortly. The classes will start from Apr 1 (next day). One of the issues she mentioned was that the local vicinity had been seeing development and the number of poor children had dropped and it is difficult to have young children (class 3-5 students) to walk to school over long distance. The school room was clean with lot of natural light. I left at around 10:30 and planned to return the next day when the school start. I asked for the board school marksheets for the students who had graduated last year. She was able to pull them up with 5minutes and we reviewed the scores. Per regulations She is supposed to send the marksheets to Kolkata. She said that she was still waiting for 2 more marksheets and once she receives all of them she would send them as one packet. I also asked her to show me the actual test papers from last school year. She was able to show them and we reviewed the answers and the scores.

Next day (Apr 1) I returned at round 9AM. I found there were 5 biys sitting on the cot and being instructed by Lipika. Two students were from classes 3 and 4 each and one student was from class 2. Each student had new text books in excellent conditions with brown paper covers and names written on the books. I stayed for 1 hours and taught the students along with Lipika. I found 4 of the 5 students to be pretty good and very sincere. They were able to read, verbally answer and write answers very well. The 5^th student was youngest was somewhat behind the rest. I was very encouraged to find that the students were very helpful towards each other, very energetic and seem to enjoy the school. I had taken some gifts of chocolates and pens which I distributed as rewards for them for coming to school. Lipika then showed me the roster where she showed me names of 5 more students who are expected to come from May 2 which included 2 girls

Then I met Mr. Pranabesh Chowdhury who was running AALO 24. He reported that he would not be able to continue that school any more as he has become busy with a business. He however has proposed another tutor Mr Mahato who lives in a village which a large concentration of poor people. I asked him to forward the application and the bio of Mr. Mahato to Kolkata for approval

Then I went to meet Mr Biplab Adhikary at his home. I discussed the status of the SMILE scholars. He mentioned that he had not received the latest list of SMILE scholars which I (later) reported to our Kolkata office.

On May 4th I attended a general meeting at the Lily office in Kolkata from 4PM – 7:30PM. The meeting was attended by all the lily India representatives including the President Keya Mukerjee. We also had a telephone conference with Lily USA. A variety off issues were discussed including status of FCRA, magazine publication, publicity and fund raising.

***************************