Dear First time Visitors:   AID volunteers welcome you!

You must be familiar with the inequalities in the world, and the dire poverty in which much of the world still lives. AID is an effort to understand the causes and provide an alternate paradigm of development.

The effort assumes that there are concerned people who do not blame or pity the poor but admit that  there are forces at work that cause the situation which must be countered by our actions.  Part of the effort is to bring such people together.  We hope you will find the ideas, approaches and the work being done interesting, and will decide to pitch in with all your heart.

Q: Why does AID logo incorporate a sketch of Gandhiji?
A: AID believes in the dual path of the Charkha or constructive work and Satyagraha or Non-Violent Stuggle against injustice, as identified by Gandhiji

Nav-Nirman : Constructive Work to eliminate poverty

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• The government may have a school and a Primary Health Clinic in a village,but the teachers and doctors are absent.(See right: Basgaon School in Rajasthan)

• The rural poor cannot enter a bank as they are not "credit-worthy". They mortgage their lands to money-lenders and fall into the debt trap.

• Poor women are oppressed from many fronts and are usually deprived of every opportunity to improve their lives.

These are painful realities! What are required are interventions in education, health, credit, agriculture, etc. that actually work!!

The interventions that AID is involved are called Projects.   For example, the school in the Lodhar village,Uttar Pradesh; the women's savings and loans groups in Tamil Nadu and AP, pedal power electricity generator for villages without electricity etc. AID Projects are discussed weekly in various cities in USA where we have Chapters and you can attend these Community Service Hours.    There are nearly a hundred AID projects in most Indian states.  There are several ideas and interesting insights that go into projects that with some experience you can also enjoy learning, since we are interacting with some of the best work that is going on in rural India. AID depends on people like you for supporting its projects.

Sangarsh : Struggle against the creation of poverty

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• If the forest guards who are supposed to protect the forests are selling them to timber companies, then no amount of planting from our side will suffice until that is stopped.

• Mega-projects that displace lakhs of people overnight, to store the water we use (and more than that waste) in someone else's house and fields, create poverty faster than we can address it.

• If after several years electricity has come into a village and then it is not given to the dalit sections, what is needed is not a separate generator that we make for them (like digging a separate well) but their right to it.

We often see that if the government and other big "agents of development" are corrupt and impose ill-conceived methods of development, then the destruction that is done is much more than the constructive agenda of AID and such groups all over the world.  Human rights, environmental concern and fighting for justice are some of the Non-Violent Struggle directions AID has to lend its voice to.

Read about the current struggles in the daily AID News and make your voice count. 

People's Movements and struggles teach us that what is needed is decentralized development, with real people's participation.  Working in the dual directions of Sangarsh and Nirman, we are charting our way to elminate poverty

Seva: Act from where you are

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• Do you long to just take a flight back to India and work in the villages or with movements, but it somehow doesn't look possible?

• Do you feel powerless, as an individual, to change the pattern of corruption and poverty in India?

• Do you feel whatever you can do is simply a drop in the ocean and may be insignificant?

Don't let that depress you...We believe that you should in fact act from the position you are in even while thinking of the bigger picture.

AID and such efforts get their strength from the diversity of people interested in them. Maybe the person who quits her USA job and returns to India to do village work needs funds, and maybe another person who simply has no time from his software job can do that.  Thus AID has people who are donors, volunteers in USA, and those who have returned to India or those who never left India.   What we find actually happens is that once you open the window of actions from whatever position you are in, you start getting more and more aware and the situations in your life may also be changing.  As that happens you can make better informed decisions on how to contribute in deeper ways.  AID has a few thousand donors and a few hundred volunteers in the USA and it is closely working with several organizations, movements and people in India.

And AID has found that, after about 10 years of its existence (and those of other such groups) more and more NRIs today are contributing monetarily, visiting villages for a day or two, doing internships of several months in rural India,  making commitments of several years to do this kind of work, and equally importantly are spending several weekends a month in the USA working towards village development that is taking place in India and getting inspired by interacting with people like Anna Hazare, Medha Patkar, Dr Ramanujam and other social workers, activists and volunteers.