Apurv! Thank you for sharing the thinking hat system with us. So right.. i’m going to adopt the green hat here.

But before that we need to be sure if we want our project to end at Kanpur or can we look at some way in which we can carry forward this project individually after the session at Kanpur. in that case i was also thinking of whether or not we could as a group, continue this webinar sessions from time to time and keep updating our progress through our projects.

In this regard i was thinking of 3 things:

1. Adopting a small farming community or a farmer-family at a village/town/place close to us and building a self sufficient ‘community system’ in the village. This community system may include a biogas plant or mud ovens for each house/farm. Although the area of biogas has been explored before and many projects have been carried out successfully throughout the country, a trip to a farm in a small town called Doddaballapur in Karnataka made me realise that this was still an alien concept to many farmers there. the aim here would be to create alternative options for them to generate more income, reduce investment and expenditure so on... but even though it looks like a very nice concept, unless we have a concrete way of building on this idea , it still may not be a feasible/doable concept. Which brings me to my next idea of

2. Creating a creative learning center in the village which could be a place where children and women are educated on these practices through unconventional mediums like puppet shows, educational toys( this again opens up another topic of educational toy designing.) like apurv mentioned, the concept of using toys that they use everyday to convey important social messages,agricultural practices and other information is a wonderful idea and we could actually consider that as one of the other list of topics areas that we could possibly work on.

This learning center would host a variety of activities from time to time and the main aim here would be to generate an interest and create awareness among these families about the existence of such practices and make them more self sufficient.

It could be in the form of a library/ museum of educational learning tools/learning space where activities could be held and organised. A space like this would also encourage the next generation of children to look at agricultural practices with a fresh perspective and not get disillusioned by it instead and Etc... we could organise activities initially and then slowly involve the community to participate and organise these activities themselves.

Will contribute more ideas by this evening.