Writing the Kudumbashree story and presenting it in the form of a web portal has been a challenging, yet absorbing task.
The five member team which took up the task traveled in Kerala meeting and interviewing a large number of important persons. In addition, the team traveled to Jharkhand and Assam to look at the PRI-CBO Convergence Project and the Enterprises Project that the Kudumbashree NRO supports. The team traveled to Delhi to meet some of the senior officers.
It was Ms Sarada Muraleedharan, former Executive Director of Kudumbashree, who said that nobody associated with Kudumbashree would leave un-affected. It is a movement that can consume huge amounts of energies, and also people with huge amounts of energies. Two former executive directors of Kudumbashree sat with us sharing their experiences for 16 hours and 12 hours spread over multiple days, kindly taking out time from their current busy schedules.
Several key people got excited during the interviews, many had touching stories to tell, and several had tears in their eyes, while one person stopped midway and wept.
It has been a consuming task for us too. It was a uniquely emotional task, where one tends to get involved. However, we have tried not to, made our best efforts to stick to a third party narrative, kept reminding ourselves that we are not players and that we are only documenting a nuanced if poignant story. We have also tried our best to be objective, to the extent allowed by the nature of the task at hand.
Still, standing here, at the end of this assignment, we realise that we can never have enough of telling this story. We had to pick and choose, try to keep a balance across events and years, and of course across personalities and contributions. We had to leave out more than what we could include; and find solace in the possibility of including all those episodes in a now-improbable book.
The team is indebted to everyone who contributed to this work. Special thanks to those who set aside long hours to explain the nuances and details to us.
We stand in debt to the NRO team in general for their support; a special mention cannot be avoided when it comes to Liby, Meekha, and Shashank.
The Team:
- Sajith Sukumaran, Team Leader
- Beena Govindan, Gender Specialist
- T.G. Kannan, Media Specialist
- Anas M.P., Web Designer and Developer
- Prakash Prabhakaran, Logistics Manager
