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The Indicorps Internship Program allows individuals to spend 3-6 months at the Indicorps office in Ahmedabad on a variety of individualized projects tailored to meet Indicorps’ needs, intern interests and strengths. The Internship allows individuals who are passionate about India to work directly with Indicorps staff to support the Fellowship program and local projects. Internships are available to anyone unable to make a one-year commitment. In the past, we have had interns in high school and interns with graduate degrees (including a PhD) join us.
Currently, we’re looking for a Communications Intern. Interested in honing your communications skills, learning about the inner-workings of an NGO and being a part of the Indicorps Team?
To apply, please send your Statement of Purpose and CV to hr@indicorps.org.
Responsibilities
- Create an overarching long term strategy for Indicorps social media outreach.
- Engage staff to build and maintain an overall communications strategy.
- Create calendar (academic and socio-cultural) for potential outreach events, especially in the US, UK and India.
- Maintain existing media contacts and create new media contacts for publishing Indicorps Fellows’ public columns, reviews and Green Papers.
- Represent Indicorps to media channels and establish relationships.
- Create outreach materials such as fliers and visiting cards.
- Organize creative outreach events throughout India.
- Facilitate staff training on social media tools.
- Compile and organize all existing Indicorps outreach contacts.
- Organize Indicorps photo library.
- Edit Fellows’ public columns, reviews and Green Papers.
- Be open to interesting, non-Communication related projects!
Candidates should possess
- Understanding of Indicorps’ philosophy of service.
- Strong oral and written communications skills.
- Ability to clearly present findings and translate them into recommendations.
- Motivation, initiative, and the ability to work in a fast paced, forward moving environment.
- Excellent computer skills, including MS Office products. Willing to experiment and learn new software and communication tools.
- Proven record of dependability.
- Strong analytical and organizational skills.
This is an unpaid internship. Accomodation will be provided for the intern.
Update on the Indicorps Fellowship Application process: the Application Deadline has been extended to March 10th 2012, 10pm IST.
As we reach out to more dedicated and talented individuals of Indian origin, we have decided to extend the deadline to encourage new applicants who have just learned about Indicorps to apply. We look forward to reading your applications and learning more about you.
What is the value of land? If you asked me this question a year ago when I was living in New York City I would have asked for the dimensions and location of the land, then I would have considered market conditions and provided an estimate. Living in rural India provides me an entirely different perspective. Not one based on monetary value, but rather on the importance of land as a livelihood source for so many.
Let us consider the situation in the village of Ganeshwadi where I am currently residing. The village is one hundred percent adivasi and it is an entirely agrarian economy with the primary sources of income coming from the sale of cotton and farm labor earnings. While the villagers are farmers by profession, the majority of them are considered landless as they do not own the land on which they are cultivating. The land belongs to a private trust that was formed over sixty years ago, and the villagers pay a small fee to cultivate on this land each year. The most distressing part of this scenario is that the original owners of this land are the indigenous tribal populations who are now paying to cultivate on it. They have been living on and using this land for generations before others came along and claimed it.
What are the problems associated with this setup? First, because these farmers do not legally own the land on which they are cultivating, it is exceedingly difficult to get loans from banks. Many are forced to use moneylenders and pay flat biannual or annual interest rates of 50 percent i.e. on a crop loan of 15,000 rupees they will have to pay back 22,500 rupees—an interest rate that is unimaginable to most of us.
The concept behind Good Deeds Day is to do one good deed, big or small, a day. March 25 is set as the official day when everyone is encouraged to do at least one good deed. It was initiated by Shari Arison in Isreal six years ago, and now efforts are made to spread it worldwide. Indicorps is listed as the organization in India to contact if you need inspiration on what good deed you would like to do.
As I was getting prepared to engage in a year-long organic farming project in India, I was constantly getting startling reactions from concerned family members; not because of the difficulties that would naturally arise from launching my project, but because I was going to Bihar.
“Picture a Clint Eastwood western. That’s Bihar. Everybody carries guns and gangs are highly prevalent,” said one family member. When I asked another family friend for advice before I began my journey, he jokingly replied, “Yeah, if it’s Bihar, don’t go.” These instances were generally reflective of everyone’s opinion about Bihar, which naturally incited a great sense of curiosity within me about what the state was truly like.
After arriving in Bihar, I (not surprisingly) realized that the outside perception of the state was hyperbolized to a great extent. Thereafter I progressed to the next stage of my curiosity, and wondered how the people of Bihar reflect on their own culture and heritage. For a state that is sadly patronized by the rest of India and burdened with the baggage of negative stereotypes, I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of how Bihari people view themselves and the aspects of their culture that they feel uniquely define them within the diverse nation of India.
Luckily, the structure of my project allows me to speak with twenty to thirty community members each day. So in the seven weeks I have spent in the state so far, I have been able to synthesize a general underlying quality that all Biharis take incredible pride in- that they are in every sense of the definition, self-made.
Mumbai stands as the entertainment capital of India because of its Bollywood presence, which compliments its developed financial institutions quite nicely. Delhi is home to numerous foreign Fortune 500 companies that have extended their branches into the city, and is matching this corporate expansion by building a new mall seemingly every day. Ahmedabad continues to develop its manufacturing sector, namely in textiles. Bihar, at this stage of time, has none of these qualities or developments.
Interested in learning more about the Indicorps Fellowship? We’re holding outreach events in various locations throughout India. Join us, learn more!
Chennai on Feb 16, 2012 at 6:30pm outside Spaces opposite Besant Nagar beach. Please note, if you are running late, the interface will not be at Spaces, but at the beach across the street, so we urge you to not disturb the Spaces team with queries about the event.
Bangalore on Feb 18, 2012 at 10am at the Ashoka India office (54, 1st Cross, Domlur Layout) and at 5:30pm outside the State Central Library, Cubbon Park. Please note, if you are running late, the interface will not be at the State Central Library, but inside Cubbon Park, so we urge you to not disturb the Library team with queries about the event.
Ahmedabad on Feb 22, 2012 at 5pm at the Indicorps office – Ashram Road, Opposite Bata Showroom, Navarangpura.
Mumbai on Feb 25, 2012 at 10:00am at the Bombay International School and at 5pm at the August Kranti Maidan.
New Delhi on Feb 26, 2012 at 10:30am near the Sikander Lodi Tomb, Lodi Gardens.
Hyderabad on Feb 26, 2012 at 3:30pm until 6pm at Lamakaan (lamakaan.com).
Pune on Feb 27, 2012 at 3pm at the Jnana Prabhodini Competitive Exams Center.
We aim to tap the latent potential of more resident Indians. Join us and please spread the word about Indicorps outreach events amongst individuals and groups that you think would be interested in knowing more Indicorps!
RSVP and/or send your queries to info@indicorps.org . For queries on the phone please call 079 26574791 or +91 93776 99950.
Mid-Year Public Progress Report
Bakhel, Rajasthan
Indicorps 2012 Fellow
Community and NGO Background
This year, I am serving in Bakhel, a small subsistence-farming village in Rajasthan’s Udaipur District. The Bakhel community includes about 200 families spread over five mountainous hamlets. I have been living with one of these families for the past three months, learning and sharing their daily challenges. Most families, including my host family, live well below the poverty line, struggling to afford two meals a day. The main sources of income are selling any surplus crops and migrating for labor work during the dry season. We have no electricity or latrines, and the wells and hand pumps are predicted to run dry in the coming dry season. Healthcare is very limited and requires at least a four kilometer walk, and infectious disease and malnutrition are common. The literacy level in Bakhel is very low, especially among women. Children often do not go to school because they are taking care of livestock and doing labor work or because they feel no motivation to go. Girls attend even less as they frequently stay home to take care of their siblings. Women are married as teenagers and stay in a state of childrearing for many years. Women and girls do the vast majority of domestic work, everything from chopping firewood to making enormous corn rotis, and I have been trying to learn how to do them as well. Outside the home, women often respect and sometimes practice purdah (veiling of the face) in front of older males. Because Bakhel is an adivasi (indigenous) community, it also faces a lot of discrimination from the outside world. Bakhel is often dismissed as an “impossible” area to work in and has been neglected by both non-governmental and government organizations.
By Preethi Sundaram
“Let’s give the villagers soup – we’ll start a soup kitchen.”
“I’m going to bring sprouts to the school today – they kids can eat it and be healthy.”
Great ideas- except one thing. Nobody understands what you’re talking about.
International development, grassroots field work, poverty alleviation are all very trendy words nowadays, especially outside developing countries where citizens, for the most part, have never been subjected to the conditions of the people they purport to speak for. Much development on a local level requires changes in behavior – from using contraception to limit unwanted pregnancies or using a mask when spraying crops with pesticides. To successfully convince a population to accept these small changes, however, is no easy task.
Behavior has deep roots in a community and we don’t.
We have no idea why certain behavioral patterns prevail over others and while our education allows us to dismiss certain types of behaviour as ‘backward’ they often make a lot of sense to they people who practice them. Improving family planning in a community is not as easy as throwing money into condom supplies at the local level. Improving female participation in sports cannot be solved with the availability of expensive sporting equipment. Dietary patterns, while they may not be to our liking, cannot be changed with a plantation of bean sprouts.
Money cannot solve these problems.
Thinking now about why I wanted to do the Indicorps fellowship feels like trying to remember something from a past life. It’s a bit hazy and very diluted by what the year would eventually become. I remember that I wanted to challenge myself, I wanted to do service, and more than anything, I wanted to resolve a growing disconnect I felt between myself and India. India was not so much of a choice as a pull that I was finally surrendering to.
Indicorps appealed to me because of its emphasis on personal transformation as an integral part of service. The application process itself was a testament to that; it was an exhaustive experience that forced me to delve deeper than I ever had, a small taste of what the year would bring. Indicorps’ structured approach to service also attracted me; I was applying to work with a specific NGO on a specific defined project–this much structure was a lifebuoy that I latched onto in the chaotic sea of service opportunities in India. I anticipated that India might weaken that structure, but had little idea exactly how much.
I came to India two months before Indicorps orientation to get a head start on learning Telugu, the language I would be speaking at my project site. Telugu is my mother tongue, but I had long since lost the ability to speak it after moving away from India at a young age; re-learning it was a central reason for why I wanted to come back.
The fellowship is a three-way partnership between the fellow, Indicorps, and a local partner organization that works on development issues at the very grassroots level. I was excited to be going back to the state of my ancestry; I was partnered with Rakshana, a leading rural development organization in coastal Andhra Pradesh.
In August, I arrived at orientation in Gujarat with few expectations. But Indicorps still managed to tear them apart, re-molding my outlook on service and re-introducing me to India in a way I had never seen it. I also learned about the Indicorps philosophy, which at the time seemed like a collection of catchphrases like ’sustainable empowerment’ and ‘community immersion’ which sounded very nice but held little meaning for me. However, over the course of the year, every aspect of this philosophy would resonate with me.