I started my first job while I was still pursuing my post-graduation. After obtaining the degree, I immediately joined the electronic media without giving much thought about it. Being in a respectable position, I worked there for almost seven years. In course of doing my jobs, I always thought that I was really not cut out for a fixed 10-5 routine and soon it felt monotonous. In fact, I always had an urge to do something on my own. This led me to the start of a voluntary organization called 'Priyobondhu'. It was as if gaining a breath of fresh air in my life.

And there I was with a long list of to-do things in front of myeyes, and I worked on that to the extent of my capabilities and circumstances. In the midst of a variety of tasks and under the situation of having to divide my day's time into different parts, did I receive that special proposal. The proposal was actually a job offer from an organization named Assam Development Initiative, ADI. ADI, a non-profit trust for better education was getting ready to launch their new ambitious project called "Value based Education (VbE) and Child Development" in Assam and was looking for a Project Director. Following some preliminary discussions, the offer came to me at a time when 24 hours of the day was not enough for me. Obviously, the question came to my mind - could I manage such a huge task at this juncture of my life?

In reality. when this offer came up, another aspect of me spoke up relentlessly, 'If you do not take up this responsibility, what else would you do? This is the road that would most closely let you face with the reality of life.' I listened to the call of my inner consciousness and accepted the proposal. Why did I accept this proposal? Quite frankly, I believed that this was the path I was looking for a gratifying. meaningful life and the objective of the project aligned well with my personal goal for which I decided to be self-employed in the first place. The purpose of the project is to examine the current management conditions of a school and work for its overall development. Opposed to just an examination-based education system, the project proposes to promote happy, interactive. Value based Education among the entire school community; the management, teachers, guardians and the students.

The dreamer of this project lives in Houston, USA. Hiren Sarma, even after living abroad for more than four decades, carries his ardent desire to elevate the educational institutions in Assam by teaching core values to the children of new generation through a holistic approach. This dream of Hiren Sarma is whole heartedly supported by his dear friend as well as the Founder President of ADI Biswadip Barooah and the entire Executive Committee of ADI. People from different places of Assam expressed interest and willingness to provide all possible support for this project with a desire for change in our society. Dr. Pradeep Borthakur, an experienced educational psychiatrist has taken responsibility for mentoring the project and has rendered his service to implement a methodical process since its inception.

While all this forward march for the project had been good, why then there are slow down in implementation at many schools? In our project, we included a combination of government and private schools with medium of instructions both in Assamese and in English. In general, we noticed a lot of enthusiasm in many of the schools at the beginning, particularly among the guardians. In order to assure commitment from both the school authorities and ADI, the project intended to set up a non-legal Memorandum of Understanding before initiating the implementation phase. The implementation phase is based on an eight stage Methodology, prescribed by Dr. Borthakur. The whole school community including Managing committee, the Principal, teachers and the parents will be engaged in the process with close participation and instructions from ADI project members. The active participation of all these stakeholders is important to make the implementation process successful. That is where we started noticing lack of commitments from some of the stakeholders.

The main issues we noticed in some of the participating schools were:

1. The 2-3 year implementation process is too long, can this be done in 3 months timeframe?
2. Some schools wanted the project to give them a set of pre-selected values with instructions for implementation by themselves. However, these were the distinctive differences between currently practiced "Value Educationn and ADl's proposed "Value based Education".

Besides the above drawbacks, we noticed some unfortunate typical situations in a large number of Government schools:

1. Very low teacher to student ratio, primarily due to lack of appointment of teachers.
2. The teachers are entrusted with many additional non-teaching duties, like NRC, election polling duties etc. creating extra burden for them.
3. Lack of official helping staff. Headmasters are even distracted to work on arrangement for opening bank accounts for students. In addition to his/her administrative duties and teaching of students, the Headmasters have rarely time to think about improvement of the school.
4. Many teachers feel that they are more of a coordinator to fulfill the curriculum requirements than being good teachers.
5. The whole school community is only focused on examination results rather than creating excellence in overall development of a child.

One other noticeable observation is that many teachers feel any improvement (similar to this project) for the school is someone else's responsibility. This creates burden on the few teachers only when they show interest in new initiatives.

However, amid so much disillusionment, a couple of schools in Jorhat and Guwahati have sincerely embraced .our initiative. It is expected that even if the project can demonstrate the benefit of such a scheme in few schools, there will be many more in the future to embrace Value based Education for overall development of the children.

Students of various colleges and universities have come forward to volunteer in the project. The college and the university authorities have also consented to provide support. Many guardians at Jorhat and Guwahati have also expressed their interest to support. Both at Jorhat and Guwahati, Advisory teams have been formed under the leadership of Dr. Aditi Bezbaruah and Dr. Dipesh Bhagabati respectively. The members of the teams have been addressed by Dr. Borthakur and more details instructions will be provided to work closely with the smaller teams of the teachers and the guardians. Palash Kalita, an established life skill adviser and Pronab Puzari have been engaged as project coordinators for Guwahati and Jorhat respectively.

It seems we are facing some difficulties in moving the project forward at the expected pace. The primary reason for this is that in order to embrace such an initiative, we need to first change ourselves. We will not be able to move such a noble cause if we do not practice the values ourselves before we preach. I have brought myself to this realization again and again and commit wholeheartedly to dedicate for this purpose. For a peaceful, tranquil and meaningful life for our future generation and even for ourselves, there is no alternative, but to embrace a value-based lifestyle.