Documents of ADATS - Book 1
10th Progress Report (May 1986)
This is the last year that ADATS is going to work in the present 27 villages where we have been involved for the past 8½ years with staff paid for by ADATS. By the end of the 1986 all the ADATS paid VLWs will be withdrawn and the programmes, projects and activities will be managed by the Coolies themselves. Their elected CSU Representatives and forums like the weekly CSU meetings and Special Meetings, weekly Cluster Meets, monthly Bagepalli Coolie Sangha (BCS) meetings, periodic Review Meets, etc., will manage every thing with only a superficial support from ADATS.
At the Central Office, only one Field Worker (himself a Coolie selected from the Coolie Sangha and trained for the specific task) will represent and serve at a link between ADATS and these mature and established Coolie Sangha Units in order to tender our support and assistance from 1987 onward.
Therefore, the formalising and consolidation of the Coolie controlled structures has been the most pressing objective for us these past months. As early as in December 1984, all the Community Workers (ADATS staff, each in charge of the Clusters of about 6 CSUs) left and we refused to replace them. In September 1985, 12 VLWs (ADATS paid Coolie youth who worked under the CWs in their respective villages) were withdrawn from as many CSUs to work as Community Workers in the 60 new villages of the Chelur Expansion Programme. The experience of these CSUs with out staff for the past so many months convinces us that this objective of ADATS withdrawal and the Coolie Sangha taking over is very realisable and meaningful.
The following Progress Report has to be threaded together and read in the light of this paramount concern and conviction of ours.
We have begun with the narration of a very typical example of how each and every single detail of the Coolie controlled structures of the mass organisation has evolved at Bagepalli over these years. These have been grassroots processes with a very real and definite role for ourselves also in the processes. This narration also illustrates the process by which theoretical positions and philosophical stances have been arrived, through involvement with the Coolies, at ADATS.