Don Bosco Seri - Outreach Programs

Past Outreach Programs

DBSERI - A Neighbourhood Institution for addressing Housing, Urban Poverty and Employment issues.

A part from activities within the boundary of the institute,DBSERI has been instrumental over the years in reaching out and touching the lives of many and is also a ray of hope for many because of the best practices it follows to address various issues in its neighbourhood like Housing, Urban Poverty and Employment issues.

Students of the Civil Engineering Technician (CET) department of DBSERI have been building houses for the utterly poor of its neighbourhood since many years building one house for one absolute needy family every year is part of a project and it provides onsite experience to the students as well as pukka house for the weaker section of the society. Thus DBSERI had become actively involved with the famous Valmiki Ambedkar Awas Yojna project (VAMBAY) funded by the central government, whose objective is to provide pukka house for the weaker sections of the society like SC/ST, backward classes, OBC/BC and physically and mentally disabled and handicapped persons.

The houses built by DBSERI follow the highest standards with low cost technologies DBSERI not only built the VAMBAY Project houses but also conducted interactive session with various municipalities officials of West Bengal at the Institute Public Health Engineers so that the experience could be shared and similar projects could be implemented in other municipalities too.

Number of houses build by DBSERI under this project: 21

Another unique project called Micro Enterprises was implemented by DBSERI specifically to address the urban poverty and employment issues.The objective of this project was to micro finance ,motivate and facilitate trained youths (school dropouts ) to set up micro enterprise of their own.This project was funded by the ministry of Human Resources Development,Department of Secondary and Higher Education as well as benefactors of DBSERI. This financial assistance was given by the ministry under the scheme Vocationalisation of Secondary Education to implement innovative programmes in the field of vocational education.DBSERI has financed 50 ex-students (23 males & 27 females) and they have established their own enterprises and are not only self employed but also have employed few other from their own vicinity.

Nature of few of the micro enterprises is listed below:

▪  Plastic goods vendor shop
▪  Eco friendly carry bag manufacturing unit
▪  Screen printing unit
▪  Garment vendors
▪  Hosiery manufacturing unit
▪  Refrigerator/AC repairing and servicing units
▪  Building Contractor Promoter
▪  Auto CAD drawing
▪  Plastic Moulding Shop
▪  Rubber Moulding Shop
▪  Rubber Moulding Unit
▪  Lathe Machine Shop
▪  Welding & Fabrication
▪  Steel Furniture Making
▪  Grinding Machine Shop
▪  Ice cream Factory
▪  Tailoring Unit
▪  Wool Knitting
▪  Sari Falls stitching unit

Of the many Out-Reach Programmes that the institute organizes to help the less privileged of the locality DEAD WELLS COME ALIVE was carried out by a group of past pupils of DBSERI with active assistance of AFPRO (Action for Food Production), an NGO.Majority of the group consisted of girls as it is they who are most affected by scarcity of water. In eight days,they repaired 25 defunct tube wells in different locations of the Bally Municipality and the Panchayat areas. People were surprised to see that girls could work with rusty pipes and large wrenches. But once the repair work was successfully completed and water began to flow out of the wells, they were convinced that gender bias was really a product of the mind. The institute plans to make this project into a workable scheme that would provide employment opportunities to a group of students while doing socially usefully work.

It helped in furnishing the Bally Municipality's Silver Jubilee Municipal Maternity Hospital and also in maintaining the air-conditioners and refrigerators, all done by our trainees.

It undertook widening and repair of local roads, local municipal primary school, local street lightening, widening of drainage and construction of embankment of the pond.