Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) as its name suggests is a growing family of participatory social research methodologies that takes into account of local knowledge and local people to make their own appraisal, analysis and plans. PRA uses community mobilization and various exercises to facilitate information sharing, analysis and action among stakeholders. BISWA is presently conducting the PRA exercises in villages where water and sanitation programme implementation is proposed. The objectives of conducting such exercise in a village are to get an idea about the problems of the village, get an idea of the resources that can be exploited for the success of our project in the village, to have a broad idea about the availability of space for the Water & Sanitation infrastructure to be constructed. On 24th April, a PRA was conducted at Amkuni village under Dakara Gram Panchayat in Maneswar Block of Sambalpur District. It was organized by Mr.Ajit Srikanth Barwa Village Leader, Mr. Sanjib Kumar Sahu and Mr. Giridhari Munda BISWA staff members. Prior to conducting the PRA, community mobilization was carried out in the village. In this the opinion leaders of the village, elected representatives of the village, members of BISWA SHGs and teachers belonging to the innovative schools run by BISWA were contacted and requested to organize a village meeting for conducting the PRA exercise.
With the help of these people a village meeting was organized a day before. After explaining the procedure to go about with the various tools of this exercise, the stakeholders were asked to go ahead with their participatory activities like drawing the village map, social map, resource map, Venn-diagram & seasonality map. The villagers had discussion among them and drew the maps using powders in various colours. The exercise was participative and enjoyable for the villagers.