Rajaram and Bhaskar represented Asha Chennai during this conference. The conference was held on Feb 9th and 10th. The conference was hosted by the Mumbai chapter of Asha. Beautiful weather welcomed all the volunteers on the first day. The venue of the conference was an open flat in the 8th floor of a building. The view from the building was of the Lake Powai and the IIT campus. It was really beautiful. This was not the Mumbai we expected to see.

The first day we had mostly chapter presentations. Since the attendance was thin, this left us with enough time to see the centers being run by Asha Mumbai including the Maker Ghat that they have launched recently. The centres were running very well and the quality of the volunteer and paid teachers there made us envious!

The Maker Ghat is also a unique experiment in exposing students from weaker section to opportunity to tinker with the latest technologies like Robotics, 3-D printing, GIS (Global/Geo Information Systems), Virtual Reality etc.

The second day volunteers from another organisation, Mala Foundation, had come to present about their organisation. Asha is going to run the school started by Mala Foundation near Pondichery! There were also discussions around the trustees of Asha (volunteers vs. non-volunteers) as well as decision making in Asha India. There was also a small session on communalism by Prof. Ram Puniyani.

The hospitality provided by the Asha Mumbai volunteers was extremely good and made us feel very good there. Bhaskar and I stayed at the residence of Prof. Jitendra Shah. All the three meals were also cooked by the volunteers of Asha Mumbai. It was very good. The children who come to the centre made gifts for all the visitors. We really enjoyed being there for the conference. We stayed for one more day to attend to some more things related to Asha and then returned back to Chennai on Monday night.

Click here to see photos from the conference.