Friday, October 15, 2010: At The CEE Project Site

Having the opportunity to visit the Centre for Environment Education project site located in the Little Rann of Kutch was an amazing experience. We had spent the past two days at the CEE campus meeting with the program’s departmental directors and executive staff, and this trip gave us the opportunity to view firsthand some of the work that CEE staff were doing in the field. It also represented an opportunity for us to see the communication approaches used by staff to ensure that stakeholder groups were kept interested and involved in the numerous projects that the field site was piloting, such as the use of organic fertilizers and pesticides as well as other sustainable and environmentally friendly farming techniques.

While I had a rough idea of what to expect because of the briefings we had been given by head of the rural programs group the day before, I was still completely unprepared for the extent of CEE’s operations in Kush. Established in the wake of the 2001 earthquake, CEE had begun by offering humanitarian assistance and then gradually developing educational initiatives which aimed not only to help farmers preserve their land and maximize production but also to combat poverty through education for women and children.

Most importantly, the visit to the CEE project site and the passion and enthusiasm displayed by the staff I was able to interact with convinced me of the commitment and dedication of CEE to bringing about a paradigm shift in the way Indians thought about the environment. Perhaps I developed a bit of cynicism after finishing the pre-trip readings on organizations that were overly bureaucratic and focused too much on artificially imposing solutions rather than actively engaging with local stakeholders to resolve issues.

This lesson reminded me of the danger of judging or conceptualizing an organization as a whole after only seeing a very small part of that whole. While my role in India as a student researcher necessitates a large degree of observation, experience, and analysis, I need to be more cautious about leaping to conclusions on the basis of limited or incomplete information. To do otherwise is to risk not only arriving at the incorrect conclusion (the bane of any academic researcher), but also to do a disservice to the critical work that organizations such as CEE perform in ameliorating the lives of millions of Indians across the country. Humbled by this reminder and impressed by the ability of the CEE project site to accomplish so much with a limited staff and restricted resources, I hereby resolve to remember that my role in India is to observe and learn...not to pass judgement based on shallow observations.