User:Prantakatha/sandbox

Prantakatha - (voice of margin)
Prantakatha (voice of margin)

a Non Profit organisation based in India working on Social Development by spreading Leadership Development skills  The programmatic understanding of Prantakatha

The Core of margin:''

Contrary to the popular belief, we at Prantakatha share this understanding that citizens especially youth, long to serve the society/community they belong to. The glitch lies somewhere else. We call it ESO factor: Exposures-Skills-Opportunities. Serving society or so to say Development is a political tool as our understanding goes. It helps hegemonising, therefore creating power and therefore all that follows from that. Hence “power that be” does never want Development to be experimented open ended. Rather it shall be captivated, it shall be into hands of few and therefore that will create hegemony-power and all that follows given a particular community set up. On the rhetoric, it should look like other way round to digress public attention. So it is always in the interest of the “power that be” to rhetoric that “people are indifferent”. Rather they are not, so they need to be put in that belief, so that the option to “development’ remain at the hand of “policy makers”.

The tool:

With this understanding, Prantakatha raptures the Domain Of Development (DOD) and creates spaces for citizens’ rights towards making “social change experiments”. To facilitate that the DOD needs ESO factor. Hence Prantakatha works on various ways and means towards invading the DOD with ESO factors and thus makes Development, open ended, participatory and bottom up. The whole programme focus of Prantakatha is creating spaces for new change initiatives to come up and to sustain. And Prantakatha looks into doing this through spreading of ESO factors to citizens, especially youth.

Prantakatha as an organisation works on “Promoting Active Citizenship” (PAC). The process of PAC has several permutation and combinations of ESO factors fitted to the grass root realities of the community Prantakatha serves. The outcome of the process of PAC is two fold - one, creation of innovative Citizen Led Development Programmes, two - strengthening Indian Democracy which we at Prantakatha draws all inspiration from.

Broadly speaking the process PAC involves two major segments - Melting Pot and BADAL(Beginning Action for Development And Leadership). Melting pot primarily comprises of various elements of Exposure component ESO and BADAL primarily comprises of other two factors i.e. Skills and Opportunities. Collectively Melting Pot and BADAL is part of the PAC process which is names “Eye through We”. It is both an eye and a journey with self or “I”. Through the journey the takers experience a different understanding of their selves. Therefore this journey on social work does not only end in creating a change outside/in community but also a change inside or in self.  The rapture:

In essence this process of promoting active citizenship becomes a process of making that part of ourselves heard which are otherwise less traveled, under explored and therefore marginal. Nurturing that marginal selves ultimately creates spaces in the community which again speaks of stories which again were rarely visited, dark and silent. In nutshell a journey of marginal selves thus creates voices in the community which were otherwise silent, thus the name Prantakatha which means voice of margins in Bengali.

The process:

Towards reaching that desired development goal, Prantakatha applies two processes

1. Melting Pot: which is an on & off ground exposure programme for willing and enthusiastic citizens. Through this they first come to know the existence and excitement of developing change

2. BADAL (Beginning Action for Development And Leadership): which is a on ground one year incubation support to change initiatives started by active citizens who are enriched at Melting Pot.

The outcomes:

With this process and idea in place out comes have been two fold

1. Currently Prantakatha has 477 citizens, mostly young connected with Melting Pot Programme across the State of West Bengal in all 19 districts

2. 5 change initiatives under BADAL at different stages of maturity, covering issues like - preventing child trafficking in source areas (NSS), community peace building through non violent conflict resolution (AAMAN), rehabilitating children rescued from trafficking through family supports (God Parenting), anti depression support group (MUSCAN), anti child abuse support service. Some other programmes are still in concept stage.  The vision forward:

In nest 15 years time line, Prantakatha with some other professional organisation look towards developing an incubation centre/institution through which it visions to co create hundreds of change leaders in the community and therefore ushering into a new dawn of social entrepreneurial era.