Annual Camp 2014 - Part I

Seven day long Annual Camp of NSS, IIT Kharagpur started today with 500 campers, mostly from 1st year UG students. The camp site is located at Balarampur High School. We are extremely grateful to help and support being received from school teachers and school mangaement committee, panchayat pradhan of Changual Panchayat under which Balarampur village comes, BDO of Khaargpur-II Block, management committee of Kasturaba Trust premises where kitchen and food distribution for campers are located, local residents specially village youth and IIT Kharagpur administration.

Today after a short inauguration, the campers went out for terrain mapping and a quick survey of village and getting an idea of the road-building, road-widening and other jobs they will be undertaking in coming days. Local youth accompanied them and helped them settle in that environment. There is already some presence of NSS in this village through activities of Unit 8 and Unit 10. Post lunch session, the campers took out an awareness rally in the village on social issues and also spread the message of tomorrow's free medical check-up camp for needy. In this session, we also had Mr. Ramdev Rao, General Manager, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eastern Coalfields Limited among us. He addressed the campers and had a Q & A session. There were informal meeting after that with selected students with him. Mr. Rao also discussed how his organization and NSS, IIT Kharagpur can work together for nation building work and possibility of participation in Unnat Bharat Abhiyan of IIT Kharagpur for which NSS Team is in the forefront.

Here are seven videos capturing some of the activities of today's camp. One may see the simplicity, the minimalist approach on resource utilization to get the camp going so that we can gel with the villagers easily and channelize the resource to where it deserves the most. The speaker of invited talk can be seen speaking standing on a sand mound as that gives the students a closer view and interaction while students can be seen listening captivated sitting on dusty ground.

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