Essay on Students and Social Service:
There is a view now that social service for one year should be made compulsory for students before they are given the degree at the end of their academic course, for education is not complete unless the students learn to work in the villages of India. The part to be played by students in the national life of the country mainly depends upon the training they receive at the university because many students develop a feeling of false dignity and think that it is below their prestige to go and work in villages. If this attitude is not discouraged, there can be no village uplift. The main aim of education is to make students play a significant role in rural areas as doctors, nurses, teachers, health and sanitation workers, administrators, and agriculturists.
India is a vast sub-continent with the population mainly living in villages depending on agriculture. This fact should make us alive to the problem of educated men and women settling down in villages rather than in the much-crowded towns. Unless the young men and women acclimatize themselves to village life, they would not stay in villages and work for their reconstruction. Hence it is necessary to insist upon students do social work in rural areas. When these young men and women become officers and are posted to work in the villages, they cannot understand the problem of the village folk unless they have lived and moved with them. How can they find solutions to the difficulties of the villagers?
Social work is of diverse kinds. For example child welfare work, slum clearance work, adult literacy problems, night schools for the laborers and their children, propaganda work for health and sanitation of the surroundings, education of the illiterates to observe health rules, prevention of diseases, etc., in the rural areas. Besides these, the preaching of family welfare, tackling the problem of juvenile delinquency, helping the enforcement of prohibition, solving beggar problem, widows and deserted women welfare, and leper asylums, all these are ways of doing social work in rural parts.
During student life, young men and women may be taught some kind of social work. They may be divided into squads for being trained as workers, each group under a leader to visit the slum areas and distribute milk powder supplied by the philanthropic organizations and thus help the poor and the needy. Students can also visit hospitals and help the patients to write their letters or read out some magazines and drive away their boredom by conversation, and cheer them up to forget their physical and mental anguish. Also during the short and long holidays, students can be made to organize social-cum-labour camps in villages where they can donate their Shramdan, by building roads to the village or to the Harijan streets, with the cooperation of the villagers, and the Community Development Blocks and the Gramsevaks. Such work should always be followed up by frequent visits to these selected areas and maintaining contact with the village. By these means, a volume of manpower, and skill which is latent in the students can be channelized under proper direction to improve a lot of the less fortunate members of society. Such kind of social work would make the students take an interest in selfless activity later on in their life also.
Grants are provided by the Union and State Governments for social welfare programs and these should be utilized with proper care and supervision by the agencies to whom the funds are entrusted. There is much scope for wastage, corruption, and defalcation and this item requires an Argus’s eye to watch its careful utilization. Both voluntary cooperation and Governmental coordination will go a long way to tighten up the work of amelioration and produce the desired results.
Training can be given to a selected batch of students in social work. In big cities, we find that there are schools of social work giving such training and awarding diplomas to their students. Thus social work is done on scientific lines instead of haphazard ways. The Panchayats can take up the task hereafter in right earnest and the students can do social work at the end of their college life. The Indian Conference of Social Work holds its session every year and passes resolutions and gets together delegates from associations all over India. It can do the maximum service if it is held in villages instead of big cities.
The future of social work by students in India is bright. Instead of taking part in politics and going about the streets shouting slogans, these students of today, who are the citizens of tomorrow, may contribute their share to the building of a New India by doing social work on the lines indicated above. They have the energy and the enthusiasm, activity, and ideals needed for the task. The volunteer organizations will be a good training ground for their future, and keep alive in them the spirit of service and dedication to their motherland. Students are also capable of hard work and the youth festivals, youth conferences, and other All India activities are very useful in this regard.
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