ORGANISATION AND ITS STRUCTURE

RAMAKRISHNA MISSION LOKASIKSHA PARISHAD

(A multifarious development wing of Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama, Narendrapur)

The Beginning

Based on a unique theology of development, Ramakrishna Mission Lokasiksha Parishad initiated its activities around 1952- 54 under the proactive leadership of Swami Lokeswarananda who devised a new paradigm of development. The major premise was securing peoples’ participation through peoples’ organizations with the sole objective of making the rural youth technically. physically and spiritually competent to stand on their own feet through a process of training and retraining. He had chosen the hinterland of the ashrama consisting of sprawling mono crop area of Sunderbans, where people fight with the nature and predatory animals to survive. Poverty was all pervasive and obtaining two square meals a day was an endemic issue.

His modus operandi consist of rejuvenation of local institutions, make them stronger through spiritual indoctrination and structural reorganization to make them transparent and accountable to the people they proposed to serve. These are in essence tiny clubs doing mostly welfare activities for the community interspersed with sports and festivals. They had no idea about what development was and remained prey to fatalism. Swami Lokeswarananda ably aided by a group of dedicated monks one of whom was Swami Asaktananda, since expired, built the development infrastructure carefully brick by brick and introduced a plethora of development activities consisting of training and re-training in non-formal and vocational education. Presented below is a summary of the activities

List of Names and Address of different Guchha Samity:

The Infrastructure

During last 6 decades the infrastructure became a colossus with 260 Youth Organizations, 24 federations of these organizations known as Cluster Organizations, 3 project office (Local Karyalaya) spread over 198 Gram Panchayet/Municipalities, 73 development blocks, villages covered 1161 and 11 districts. All of them are affiliated and enlisted to Ramakrishna Mission Lokasiksha Parishad at Narendrapur, which has an efficient administrative set up to supervise, monitor and evaluate all the programmes undertaken by these organizations. These grass root level organizations are actual bastions of development activities either emanating from Ramakrishna Mission Lokasiksha Parishad or generated from below on the basis of broad consensus among the communities and their organizations