VA site visit report 2013Jyoti Gawade

It was my 2nd trip to India since I got involved in VA. In my pervious trip I was not able to visit VA due to lack of time and company. Last year Yogesh from VA had visited Seattle for presenting a paper at IEEE conference and at that time he invited all of us to visit VA. This time even before reaching India I had given Yogesh my India visit schedule.

Yogesh stays in Pune during the week and travels to VA almost every weekend. He arranged for my visit the weekend after I reached Pune i.e. 31st January. Dr Shrikant Palkar from Seattle was also planning to join us but due to family issues he was not able to come that day. Yogesh usually travels by bus but since we both were planning to come he had rented a car. We started from Pune around 7 and reached Pabal around 8:30 am. From Rajgurunagar which is the closet access point for Pabal on the Pune-Nashik Hwy, the campus is about 20 km. It is just outside the Pabal village on an elevated plateau with a nice view of surrounding land.

Campus is a collection of few small and medium sized rooms, some old, some newly built, dispersed in about an acre of land with ample empty space in between. The campus is maintained in a reasonably neat and clean fashion.

When you enter the VA campus, the first thing you notice is a new big shade type of building, the finishing school. Just outside the finishing school is a newly built room that can be used for meetings. Little further are the 2 new restrooms built for visitors. Yogesh’s own office is a small cabin inside an old structure. The accountant’s office is inside the same structure. Next to the old office is the kitchen and dining room. This whole area, especially the kitchen is pretty old and can use some renovations.

Opposite to the finishing school are student quarters and Amma’s (Mrs. Mira Kalbag) room. The student’s quarters also look pretty basic and inadequate from outside.

Next to the finishing scool is the classroom. Behind that are the new staff quarters. Right now the staff lives in a nearby village. Having couple of main staff members stay on the campus will be helpful for overseeing the after-school activities of the students. They have evening sessions where they are supposed to read newspapers and discuss current issues.

Walking further you can see the solar cookers facility and the shades for the cattle.

At the backend of the campus is the “social space” project done by the student with the help of EWB. Artworks from scrape created by the students are installed there making is a pleasant place to gather.

When we reached, the students were having their breakfast. Every day meals are prepared as per the number students and visitors expected that day. A blackboard with a calculation table for the daily meal is kept in the kitchen\dining hall. Meals are served neatly and cleanly. Everyone cleans up their utensils and puts them on drying rack.

We had Poha and warm milk that day for breakfast. After breakfast Yogesh introduced me to Ranjit Shanbag who took me on a tour of the Ashram. There was another visitor whose name I forgot. Looking at the monthly reports, it is clear that quite a number of people visit VA. They have designated Thursday as a visiting day for bigger groups like school children etc. They have a documentary to show to the bigger groups before taking them on the tour. For key individual people, Yogesh, Ranjit or whoever is available that time conducts the tour.

We first visited the Finishing school. It is fully functional now. The finishing school is basically a lab-cum-workshop where students can work on the projects that can be shipped outside. It is a big, roomy facility with several machines set up in separate areas. The machines had posters describing the usage.

Fablab is set up inside this finishing school now.

The school also has an area that can be used as a classroom and a study table kind of set up which can be used for group discussions.

Few students were doing reading and making notes there. One of the student was not able to complete the assignment on time and was writing his explanation in the book.

Other students’ workbooks were lying there which were in a good order with every days work recorded and lessons notes with diagrams etc.

One of the VA alumni also uses the facility to employ students as paid interns and produce goods commercially.

Pavan Bhise gave me some information about the Fablab. He is planning to work here for couple of years and then would like to go back to college for masters program.

Ranjit then showed the Oleoresin machine where VA students experiment on getting extracts of various herbs.

We then proceeded to Aquaponics project which is housed inside a green house kind of shelter that helps control the parameters. Water is sourced from a small tank outside in which fish are grown. Water is circulated to give plant’s byproducts to fishes and fish byproducts to plants.

There is another big water retention tank built with government subsidy and they are growing fish in that tank. Ranjit told me that few days ago a dog got inside, probably to drink water and it was not able to get out because of the slippery lining of the tank. Now they have a device that they created to repel the dogs.

We then entered a classroom in session. Mr. Anant Gosavi was teaching. We sat there for few minutes. The classroom was built using ferrocrete which keeps cool naturally and it was nice experience to sit there with outside weather getting pretty hot. The furniture in the classroom was pretty basic but they had a projector and using slides for the lesson. Students appeared enthusiastic about learning and were answering the questions by the teacher.

We then looked at the solar cooker facility. It is used daily for making rotis. At times it is used for other cooking purposes too like roasting peanuts for making chikki. Detailed log of everyday’s usage has been kept.

We also met Amma (Mrs. Mira Kalbag). She and Yogesh had a chat about routine VA issues. Yogesh told me that Amma keeps close contact with the students and they confide in her for the things that they hesitate to talk to Yogesh.

Next stop was at the food processing unit. A group was working on making Kavath (wood apple) jelly. Wood apple is a seasonal fruit with a peculiar taste which can be enjoyed year-around in the form of jelly. The unit had number of machines for various stages of preparation. There was a list of Food processing projects for the current batches taped on the wall. I chatted with the students and a VA alumni overseeing the process. They were able to answer my questions.

Behind the food processing unit was Azola production bed and VA’s plant nursery. Azola is a fast growing plant that is cultivated in a water bed. It is used as a biofertiliser but at VA they use it as a nutritious food for the cattle. It needs a controlled environment of weed-free water in shade. It multiplies in a matter of a day. Excess can be harvested leaving some as a seed for the next production.

I met a boy in early twenties who I assumed to be the student but he was an instructor there. I chatted with him about the Azola project. He was knowledgeable and was expressive about his work at VA.

In the nursery, some of the plants were a part of one of the village’s planting program and were kept in care of VA to save them from the draught.

We took a break for lunch. Lunch was served in the same manner. It had a curry, roti, daal and rice.

After lunch I went around the campus talking to more students and staff and taking pictures.

Near the staff quarter is the INDUSA CARE center facility which is being used by the Agriculture and animal husbandry for now till the computers are purchased. I looked at the posters and student’s notebooks there. Notebooks had logs for the daily work. The notes were centered on practical work students did and the theory for that project. Attention to details shows up everywhere.

I visited their food packaging unit where students and instructor Alka Jadhav were packing kavath Jelly. They had other products too on sale. I bought jelly and pickle. I also went back to the finishing school to watch students work there. Anand was present there guiding the students.

By this time Yogesh was ready to leave for Pune. He asked me if I wanted to stay there for a day. But I was yet to get over the jet lag. And we were planning to do another visit with Srikant soon so I decided to take off with Yogesh.

We had a good discussion on the way back. With so many experiments and innovations, I asked Yogesh if the invest in getting patent. He told me that they have started taking patents only to avoid the situation where someone else takes it and makes VA pay for using them. Other than that they don’t want to monetize the patents. They want their technologies to be used freely by rural area people.

That day Yogesh was getting many calls and he told me the reason. He had arranged a group of students from naxalite area in Assam to come to an institute in Pune. The batch had arrived that morning but one of the students was not admitted in the institute as he was underage. It would have been difficult to send him back so Yogesh was trying to arrange for him to come and stay at VA. Overall I saw Yogesh single-handedly tackling all the logistics related issue taking quick decisions at times and Ranjit and Anand helping him implement them.

The 2nd visit we did on Feb 14th was mainly to discuss INDUSAPTI issues. Shrikant joined us this time. We did a quick tour of the campus for Shrikant.

We met Pankaj Shirke, newly recruited program manager for INDUSA CARE. We sat with Yogesh, Ranjit, Anand and Pankaj in the visitor’s room which had projector, internet access etc. They explained the current status of the INDUSA PTI website. The main problem seems to be that the Web developer working out of Pune is was able to deliver the content but not the expected user experience. VA people had a good idea about the user experience but were not able to convey that to the developer. I suggested them to take help of UX person. It seems they were able to get an intern to develop design for website. That work is complete and the website is being developed as per the design.

This time we also got to see the Egg incubator and Fodder growing experiments.

It was a great experience to see the campus and various project that we had only read about in VA status reports. Talking to the students was a pleasant experience too. I think the student’s enthusiasm, confidence in explaining their work and lack of hesitation to talk to an outsider showed that VA has been successful in imbibing its culture of facing the world with an exploratory mindset in its students.