The IITs are India's premier institutes for education in technology. Construction work is common inside the IIT campuses. Contractors usually employ temporary workers who set up shelters inside the campus. Ironically, inspite of having excellent educational facilities for primary, secondary and higher education within its campuses, the majority of the laborers in the IITs are either illiterate or semi-literate. Occasionally, some students have tried to change the status quo by conducting adult literacy classes or through NSS activities. However, most of these efforts fizzled out due to lack of enthusiasm and long-term involvement.

The Swami Vivekananda Youth group in IIT Kanpur has been an exception to this rule. It took up the issues of temporary workers in the IITK campuses and its activism led to the birth of "Jagriti". Mahendra Verma, a Ph.D from the University of Maryland, College Park, returned to India as a professor in IITK in 1994. He was instrumental in starting this non-profit organization with some senior student members from the Swami Vivekananda Youth group. Ever since its inception, Jagriti has been a trusted partner of AID.

Jagriti started out by educating children of temporary workers inside the IITK campus. However, very soon, the scope of its activities was significantly expanded. This transformation began when its volunteers realised that if they could be the agents of change inside IIT, then surely they could reach out to neighboring villages which required help and effect change there as well. Lodhar and Kalyanpur are two villages within a 5-mile radius of the campus with populations of about 3000 people each. Volunteers of Jagriti began interacting with the people in these villages and soon found out about their problems.

Lodhar village had a government school that was dysfunctional. Truancy among children and teachers in village schools is a major hurdle to the successful implementation of education programs in villages. There is a real danger of village schools being reduced to a mere statistic if teachers are not made accountable for the daily activities in the school. Teachers who skip classes set a poor precedent for the children and are unfortunately not accountable to local villagers. This is mainly due to the fact that they are not locals themselves. Many a NGO has proposed that government schools in villages should employ local villagers so that accountability increases and the school functions as expected. There may be practical problems to implementing this as a countrywide policy but it would make a big difference if an earnest attempt were made to find qualified teachers locally.

Nevertheless, the government school in Lodhar was in a dilapidated condition. Ravi's visits to Lodhar and the video footage in the AID library corroborates this fact. No amount of local intervention seemed to solve this problem and give the children of Lodhar access to a decent education. Something had to be done fast to improve the quality of life of the people of Lodhar. Jagriti started short-term non-formal education for children and adult literacy programs in Lodhar and Kalyanpur. The villagers of Lodhar were more responsive to Jagriti's efforts. Jagriti finally decided to start a regular primary school in Lodhar in 1995.

Initially, classes were conducted by locally employed teachers and no regular school building existed. Once the villagers realised the value of good education, they began thinking of ways to improve the existing infrastructure. In 1996, a low cost building (about Rs. 1 lakh), with three rooms was completed. While funds for the school building and a library were provided by AID, the villagers were deeply involved with the construction and many of them provided "Shram Daan"; i.e donated labor.

Jagriti's approach has been to encourage villagers to come up with solutions to their own problems and the positive effects of this approach are quite noticeable. Jagriti manages the school while the employees themselves are local villagers. The medium of instruction is Hindi and Uttar Pradesh state board curriculum is followed. The school functions very well and the villagers lovingly refer to it as "our school" as opposed to the government school for which they do not have any such feeling of ownership. This sense of ownership can very easily be the missing link between a successful and a failed village-level effort.

A village-level effort by non-local people is motivated by a desire to effect certain changes in the dynamics of the village. Often, the desired change is pre-determined. For instance, a NGO may want to increase literacy levels or improve health care in a village where the said factors are known to be poor. However, while the motivation may be pre-determined, the approach to causing this change has to be determined with collective involvement of the local population and its concerns must be addressed. Often, this will involve conflict resolution. For example, men may resent women's savings' groups because of aspersions that their authority will be undermined or due to social taboos. It is incumbent upon the NGO to implement projects with maximum involvement of the local population. The NGO must spend a lot of time convincing the people that its intervention is necessary for the benefit of the people. Projects that deal with a certain section of the population or with a particular problem like lack of education in a village cannot succeed in isolation. The approach has to be holistic in thought and deed. This is one of the first requirements of a good AID project. Another measure of the success of a project is its sustainability. Employing local people to do the job is necessary. Where this is not possible due to lack of training, the NGO must try to train the local people so that eventually they can take over the NGO's activities. The NGO must therefore only be a catalyst that initiates a local reaction and must want to eventually hand over responsibilities to local people.

Jagriti has definitely succeeded on the first count and has worked hard with reasonable success on the second. The evolution of this project has also helped AID formulate its seed and focus village plan better. Local funding for Jagriti's efforts has been increasing by the day. The school in Lodhar village has expanded to 5 classrooms and has other amenities like a lavatory and a compound. Instruction is offered up to 7th grade and the school is recognised by the state board. All the teachers and local people and are extremely enthusiastic about the school. This enthusiasm rubs off on the children as they discover the joy of learning. Children from many adjacent villages also attend the school at Lodhar. Classes are conducted from 9 AM to 1 PM and end with a nutritious lunch provided at school. Jagriti has also taken up other issues with the government like providing electricity to the village. A parallel effort involving education of children of migrant laborers in Kanpur city is being provided with materials and volunteer support. This paradigm of implementing an idea with local support to solve a problem whose solution is imperative whilst simultaneously learning about other problems and eventually solving them is dear to AID.

AID visualises certain villages in each of India's 546 districts as model villages that could catalyse processes in neighboring villages and cause a ripple effect. It hopes to realise each of these model villages with local interaction over a period of a 5-7 years. AID has not laid down a set of guidelines for its vision of a model village. It believes that such a definition is self-defeating as it would attempt to impose outside opinion on the people of a region and would therefore suffer from a lack of local participation. Instead, the vision of a model village must be developed by interacting with a community locally and this vision will heavily depend on the community's inputs. It would not be incongruous to have two entirely different model villages in two different places of India. Lodhar was the first village that AID decided to adopt as a focus village. The symbiotic relationship with Jagriti has played a pivotal role in many of AID's thoughts and activities.