My Village

REPORT OF THE VILLAGE EXPOSURE PROGRAMME

Introduction
Our societies accommodate a large variety of people having cultural, linguistic, financial, religious differences. It is the nature of any society anywhere in the world, and it is the beautifying factor of human living. To get to know the lives of the people in various walks of life is always an enriching experience. We too had one such exposure to the villages undertaken by Ashalaya, a social service centre run by the congregation of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus, at Vidyanagar in the outskirts of Bangalore. Ashalaya has a vision – ‘An integral society, influencing policies and actions at all levels to safe guard the human rights and promote sustainable development’.

We as a group could stay at Vidyanagar learning the working of the institution and getting involved in its activities From 17th to 24th Oct, 2009. We could visit many villages and know more about the lives of the people. The Villages we visited are Bettahlsur, Hunasmarnahalli, Uthanahalli, Subash Nagar, Sonappanahalli and Chennahalli.

Objectives
As we were introduced to the programmes of the organization, the director pointed out few objectives that we could take more attention on during our exposure programme. They are rural poverty, women, children, community organization and government involvement.

Poverty of the People
Rural poverty is the reality in many of the Indian societies. There are number of reasons which directly or indirectly affect to perpetuate this poverty. In village communities there are caste discriminations and always the higher caste would be privileged one. They have more land, water, wages labors etc. Most of the people are depend on agriculture. I would like to mention some of the concrete reasons for poverty that I observed in the villages there. They are as follows.

Illiteracy:   It is one of the main problems of poverty. For, most of the people are not educated well and thus they are not well aware of the...