Thank you, Harinath garu for taking part in the celebration and also for sharing your impressions.
Forgot to add one important point: Ravi Shankar suggested us to register as voters and if possible to encourage others to register. He is very much inspired by Loksatta's ideals and the able leadership of JP. He requested to vote for Loksatta if we are convinced by its ideals. Coming to giving money for Mehdipatnam school, we followed a strategy. If govt. does not come forward to put 100% money for whatever reason, if we compel it to pay 80% by contributing the other 20%, it serves the purpose because the children gets class rooms and also a quality class room study and learning. The impact of it would be more. There is always a trade off. How much the govt. has to be spent on each school and what percentage for the basic requirements? We need to know these details and there can be umpteen number of excuses for the officials for not doing things or sanctioning goodies to schools. We have to take a decision on which approach would be great given the constraints and limitations. If we remember we even mentioned that we are not going to spend for infrastructure as Govt. has to spend. We followed the same. May be this is the first step and as we gain experience, may be we can get to know all the possible schemes and options and try to let the govt. spend 100% of the money. Coming to the observation of doing charity only instead of something more meaningful and of impact, we conducted awareness sessions on RTI Act. We are trying to do our bit. We also need volunteers who buy in an idea so that they can take it forward with zeal. We thought that it would be great if some of us can spare some time to visit govt. sites, read information on different schemes and guide us so that we can maintain a database and will be in a better position to take things in the right direction with a correct approach.
