Dr. Geeta Balakrishnan, Principal – College of Social Work, Nirmala Niketan, New Marine Lines, tells Shraddha Kamdar, when talking about creating sensitivity among social work students
Looking simple and elegant in an earth-coloured saree, she welcomes me into her office almost immediately as I reach there, even though she is mighty busy with her other duties. She has this warm pride talking about her college, and mentions that she tells the students all the time that she is in love with every brick of the college. Not surprising at all, once you find out that not only did she complete her graduation, post graduation and PhD from the very college, she also started her teaching career there and is now the principal! But I think the pride also stems from the work that the college, its faculty and students are doing, tirelessly, year after year. Without much ado, let me present Dr. Geeta Balakrishnan, Principal – College of Social Work, Nirmala Niketan, New Marine Lines.
“We at the college pride ourselves in the work we do with the poorest of poor,” she tells me, as she talks about the numerous projects that the students of the college have taken up over the years. These projects vary from working with the underprivileged to working with commercial sex workers and children, among many more. Name the field of social work, and students of Nirmala Niketan have worked on it.
It is not a surprise that the students are equipped to work on all these aspects since they are well-trained in the classroom with the various electives they are offered – peace education, disaster management, criminology management to name a few. Dr. Geeta informs that once students are sensitized towards the basic methods, they can work on their own. Despite studying with electives, she firmly believes that as social workers, students should be able to handle all kinds of situations and think on their feet. And so, all round training is necessary. That is why they are taught different things – like working with individuals, talking to people, understating the communication channels in a family, conducting a home visit, and more importantly, how to see a problem. “You see, often, when the people are talking they may talk about a problem, but a social worker has to be alert to look at the underlying issues and the cause of the problem,” she says.
The college also has a strong research cell, which also guides the master’s level students with their research projects apart from conducting its own research. Together, the faculty and students have also developed field action projects, which according to Dr. Geeta is one of the high points of the college, since these have made a difference to many lives over the years. Some of the projects have also continued after the students graduated. “For the first nine or ten years our faculty remain as directors on the project, but even after, several students have turned their field action projects into full-fledged NGOs,” she mentions. These include projects that have worked with malnourished children, with HIV infected persons, for environmental causes, with the youth, with commercial sex workers and so on. The field action projects have worked in every social sphere that needed attention.
Once the students get a taste of the field work, they seldom turn back. Students have worked with all kinds of disasters in different states as well. “We also work in disaster management, whether it is floods, terrorist attacks, riots, tsunamis, or the like. Nirmala Niketan has invariably intervened in such cases. We have worked in the riots of 1992-93 with a peace-building project called ‘Salokha’. There are times when we have closed the college, and moved to the disaster prone areas with students and faculty,” Dr. Geeta explains. She mentions that apart from the work that is done there, parents of her students often come to her and talk about how these experiences are enriching their children’s lives, which is a source of great satisfaction and happiness for her. Once, after the Kandhamal riots in Odisha, the students and teachers of Nirmala Niketan went there and worked towards building houses for the homeless. “We set the thread of building the communities keeping the marginalised and the vulnerable in mind. And that is how we approach all our work,” Dr. Geeta informs me.
The idea of working towards community building is not new to many of her students, since they come from the weaker sections of society and are also offered loans to study in the college. “They come from families with no affordability or ones which have severe problems. The fact is that they want to be trained and go back and do some good work for the community,” Dr. Geeta says. She adds that slowly, students become so involved with each other and the college work that she linger around on campus, finding reasons to stay back and work and bond with each other. That is how the college nurtures them, and creates in them the sensitivity of work in such a field.
I start asking her about integrating the practical experience within the theory classes, especially for the undergrad students. Dr. Geeta says that every students puts in about 15 hours of practical work every week. This helps them to take their competencies to the field, and according to her the “growth of the students is phenomenal”. No wonder then, that most of them do not want desk jobs, they want to be working out in the field. It is perhaps also one of the reasons why the college has made a conscious decision to not place students in CSR departments of companies and has stuck to those organisations which offer opportunities of direct field work.
Doesn’t all of this field work take a toll on the students, especially those who have not seen such drastic circumstances in their lives before? “It does. Some of them feel sad, and some even guilty after their initial visits to such areas where the people live, work and survive in deplorable conditions. But then we have a process of mentoring in place, and we also have a full-time student counsellor on campus. I must say though, those who are able to come out of the stress, come out much stronger. A few students have given up in the process and quit the course since they can’t take it, but that is all part of the cycle,” Dr. Geeta explains.
Towards the end, she articulates in a few words everything that the work stands for. “The concept of the ‘other’ is so important. We need to create sensitivity about it among our students, and work towards being more human. And yes, the feeling towards humanity can be built, if it is not inherently present,” she concludes.
