Mahavir is a member of the Thati Baal Panchayat and his village comes under the Bilangana Development Area, District Tehri, in Uttarakhand. The 25 members of Baal Panchayat work in the areas of Health, Education and cleanliness of the village, with help from the Mountain Valley Development Association (MVDA), an NGO that occasionally provides training on various issues.

In Jan 2009, the Baal Panchayat received training from the Mountain Children’s Forum and MVDA on the “Right to Information Act” and how to file an application. The two-day intensive workshop culminated, after great discussions, in filing a number of RTI applications which have helped the group solve a number of problems.

“The applications have to be filed by an individual and not a group so I decided to file an application asking the Block Education Dept to give me information regarding the attendance requirements of a primary school teacher," explained Mahavir. "Our village has a primary school and there are 46 children who attend this school. In the last 3 years the teacher has been present for only 10 days in a month.”

“On receipt of the application, the Block Education Officer along with an 11 member team visited our village. The teacher was absent on that day as well and had to be called from his residence. During the course of the questioning it was learnt that the not only had the teacher not been attending school but he had not been distributing the scholarship to the children.”

“The Block Education Officer was extremely annoyed with the teacher and issued a warning – That the teacher was to distribute the pending scholarship money to the children in the month of March and must attend school every day. Information regarding attendance of the teacher and amount of scholarship to be distributed was handed over in writing to us.”

“Since then the teacher has been attending school every day, classes are being held regularly and finally we are all now learning something new every day.”

This story was reprinted under the headline Children use RTI to bring Teacher Back to School in the Pro-Poor Newsletter July 2, 2009. The picture of Mahavir was posted along with the story on the Mountain Children Forum.

Mountain Childrens Forum empowers children in leading their communities

One in 12 people (some 700 million, 245 million of them in rural areas and developing countries) live in the mountains (FAO, 2002). Yet mountain communities around the world—from the Andes to the Himalayas, the Appalachia to the highlands of Ethiopia—have long been marginalized and isolated from opportunity and choices, resources and services.

Children, too often, are also marginalized and have little say in the policies and decisions that impact every aspect of their lives, even though they will grow up to comprise the community and its leaders. Their parents, too, are most open to new ideas and willing to try new things if they believe it will benefit the children.

During the International Conference of Mountain Children (ICMC) in May 2002, young people from the mountains of India and Nepal shared experiences for the first time. They came from Nepal, Himachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Tripura, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and mountainous areas in Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh. 

While shared problems became clear, they quickly moved beyond complaining about their problems and started discussing how they would address them. Since then, many have made dramatic progress in changing their lives and communities, ranging from engaging their local government, getting a new teacher for their schools, cleaning up their villages, and raising awareness of health and hygiene in their villages.

The Mountain Children's Forum is a unit of a nonprofit society, the Mountain Children's Foundation which grew out of the UN's declaration of the year 2002 as the International Year of the Mountains. While the MCF is supporting chapter development in the other regions, its work is focused  especially on Uttarakhand, located in India's Northwestern mountains, which became a separate state (India's 27th state) in 2000 and thus offered a unique opportunity to influence the policies and programs that would affect children in its 13 districts.The children's network across the 5,300 sq. km of Uttarakhand is in growing demand to spread and highlight messages of education, agriculture, HIV/AIDS, etc. to these remote communities.

The hope is that as children become more accustomed to assuming leadership roles in their communities, the MCF will evolve into a broad-based, self-sustaining movement where the children and their communities identify and start to address their problems, institutions such as government and development agencies turn first to the children's groups when developing and implementing their programs, and the children's groups themselves reach out to each other and the outside world for help and resources.

The MCF's goals are to:

• Encourage the children to take an active part in identifying problems and finding solutions within their communities.
• Link children together so they can share their vision and ideas with each other and discuss and find solutions to their problems.
• Create a forum through which the children of the mountains can communicate with the rest of the world.
• Spread awareness and information through the children to the entire community.
• Promote citizenship and equity in mountain communities and help children become proud of their mountains and their culture.
• Help make children the ambassadors of the mountains equipped with the knowledge of how to participate in local and global affairs.
• Protect mountain ecosystems by making the children and their communities active stakeholders in their preservation.
• Help the children find and acquire resources to enable them to achieve the goals they have set for themselves.
• Prevent migration (and the resulting breakup of families) by improving opportunities and living conditions in the mountains.
• Build links between the children, their communities, and government institutions, thereby improving governance in the region. The children can also be a valuable resource for the government in providing accountability and monitoring how government programs are actually implemented on the ground, thus ensuring long-term solutions.
• Enable the children of the MCF to feed into larger movements, such as the Global Movement for Children.
• Discourage the hypocritical face of development that is too often perfunctory and rushed.

Contact information: MCF

63-A Vyom Prasth, G.M.S. Road

Dehradun, Uttarakhand 248001, India

Email

The photographs of New Tehri town (middle left), the ski resort of Chamoli Garhwal at Auli (middle right),

roads to the villages and Joshimath (bottom right) come from the wonderful Uttarakhand Photo Gallery.