Narayanpur Workshop – Day 1

To engage the people that need it most, CGNet holds workshops all over Central India. CGNet can often be difficult to understand, so it is important to train people who can act as ambassadors and correspondents into the future. This series of blog posts will follow three workshops held in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh to give you an insight into how we work.

Harvest time in Bastar

Narayanpur is the District Headquarters for Narayanpur District in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh. Usually, this kind of town is only really written about in connection with something else.

For the past twenty years a Maoist insurgency, once called the ‘nation’s greatest internal security threat’ by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has been growing in central India with the dense forests and hilly terrain of Bastar as its epicentre. 

The government has deployed security forces all over the town: on the road here from Kondagaon (the location of another CGNet workshop that will take place in two weeks) it was hard to miss the camps of the Central Reserve Police Force or their militarized District and State level counterparts. The situation regularly explodes into violence: ambushes by the Maoists and reprisals by government security teams; burnt villages and dead policemen and suspicious disappearances. 

Talk to anyone with any knowledge of the area, however, and you will soon find out Maoism is only part of a complicated situation. These districts in Chhattisgarh score among the lowest in human development measures (literacy levels, child mortality rates, malnutrition) in the whole of India. There is a large tribal population here, a community that has been systematically neglected by the Indian government for decades. Government schools are often undersupplied and suffer from chronic absenteeism by their teachers; central funds for employment or development schemes disappear before reaching their intended targets; roads and electricity networks are badly maintained or missing entirely.

These are the problems CGNet was founded to address, and it is here that it is most important to introduce the services that CGNet offers. It is a platform for voices who would have no platform otherwise.

Gondwana Bhavan in Narayanpur

 Here we are, then, holding a workshop for seventy people in the Gondwana Bhavan in Narayanpur. The aims of this workshop are to educate people about the CGNet Swara system.

Today – not everyone is here yet, we expect another twenty to arrive tomorrow to join the fifty already here – is introductions and housekeeping. Everybody is split into groups for learning activities and also for the more mundane requirements of living: cooking, cleaning and fetching water.

 

Dividing into activity groups

Eating dinner outside