Centre For Education and Documentation About CED
1 Perspective &
Role
In an increasingly globalised
environment, information has been recognised as the key to
development. However, the form and the concerns of this information
are shifting away from the real needs of the marginalised people.
More serious is the lacunae of information at the middle levels of
agents of social change, particularly NGOs and Action Groups.
Besides providing development
information to these middle levels, CED sees its institutional role
in the long term as developing and bringing into currency open
democratic information systems. The end objective is to ensure that
such systems become part of the socialisation process in civil
society and an inalienable instrument which enable thinking and
democratic exposure to issues and concerns of the marginalised
sections of society, development, human rights and self-assertion.
Besides this general role of an
institution of civil society, CED also has a specific role as one of
the 'contending' associations in the same civil society, as after all
it represents, as an NGO, specific interests -- that of the poor and
marginalised sections of society. In this mission, it locates itself
within the NGO context and is basically a support and
advocacy-support organisation.
There is a definite "niche"
for information on issues of concern to NGOs. CED's USP (Unique
Selling Point) is its up-to-date, non-academic, social reality based
collection of clippings, articles, NGO and Government reports, etc.
No other centre seems to provide such a wide span of development
information under one roof.
2 Mission
To excel as an information organisation
on social and development issues, and make available to NGOs and
other organisations and individuals in civil society, information and
analysis on all emerging and latent issues which affect the interest
of the marginalised.
CED’s current mission is to go to
scale through Electronic Documentation and Specific outputs oriented
information packages for the target groups of NGOs, and students.
3 Project Areas
CED has its centres in Bombay and
Bangalore. These are Reading Rooms and Libraries, where the bulk of
the ‘visitor-users’ are from these two cities. Students,
journalists, other professionals, and NGOS/activists predominate.
Bombay also serves as administrative headquarters, but this is
gradually being shifted to Bangalore. The ‘tele-users’
are spread all over the country, and a few from even beyond. These
are basically our DOCPOST users.
4 Organisation: Form,
Type and Structure
Form: CED is registered Public
Trust, all of whose activities are its information centres, now In
Bombay and Bangalore.
Type: While CED sees itself as
an information organisation in civil society at large, its raison
d’être is representing the interests of the marginalised
as an NGO. And since its most significant target group is the NGO
community and change agents, it doubles up as a support
organisation. It can also be typified as an awareness generation
organisation among its secondary, though numerically larger, target
group of students, teachers, professionals, journalist etc.
Structure:
The basic structure of the organisation
is four tiered:
Tier 1: The Executive Committee acts as
the legal apex body and the policy decision group
Tier 2: The Documentation &
Planning Group, consists of the Executive Director, the
Documentalists, Senior staff like Computer Programmer who also act as
functional coordinator in Bangalore, Administration Officers and
appropriate Consultants; and,
Tier 3: The Support Group, consisting
of the Documentation Support staff, Administration Support staff and
Office Assistants.
Tier 4: Stipendiary and part time
researchers, writers and consultants. Until now those working on a
stipendiary basis, were integrated into the above three tiers.
However it is now planned that stipendiary staff be by and large
taken on a specific project basis. Thus their work will be related to
specific outputs, rather than time.
Core documentation work is shared by
all in the first three tiers, according to skills, and development.
In fact, almost all staffers have more than 80 percent programme
development work rather than administrative ones.
Financial and Personnel Management is
legally vested in the Executive Committee, acting through its
Executive Director. However, various functions have been distributed
to different members of the staff.
Critical Concerns
