Planning for Train Journey

Uday is great volunteer. His work is professional. He does all the web work and so can not attend the train journey. He is actually needed to be in office for prepare briefings for web site and also to media throughout the day. Subbu is the one who was assigned all the people and communication work. For some reason, Subbu is not interested to attend Rail yatra. So it fell on me and Balaji. Balaji also started coming to party office only for the last two days. He is also very enthusiastic.

Subbu told he would be tired to go on tour and he could do some other work if I could take care of the rest of planning and organize the event. I accepted it with more than willingness. I asked Subbu's experience from youth meet he organized in previous week. Among the things he told, most of them are not related to this event. One thing that stuck is to write up plan like agenda, events, peoples and responsibilities. I looked at his event plan and so thought that is good start.

I listed out the responsibilities of volunteers like
* Before the tour: finalizing tickets, decoration, posters, planning events, assigning responsibilities.
* During the event: Attending, security, finalizing assignments, monitoring etc.
* After the event: Return journey, handing over expense to party office.

I came up with around 10 teams needed during journey.
* Food collectors
* Food and water distributors
* Fund raisers.
* Material managers.
* Pamphlet distributors
* Pollsters and surveyors
* Number crunchers: They count people in the train all the time and keep track who is missing.
* Swat team: lighter name for security team
* Fort protectors: They have to stay in train all the time and so miss out fun.
* Artists: singers, drummers etc.
* Dialers: They call the leaders of the next station and update them on the status.
* Coordinators who take decisions on plan changes and others have to listen to them since we do not want multitude of opinions when action is needed.

Before journey: preparing posters, buying tickets, decorating the train. Kiran garu, Balaji and me decided to work on this and call all the volunteers one day before the journey and request some people to help for decoration.

After train journey: I volunteered to pay myself and reimburse after journey, since we do not even have finalized names of all the people coming. However Kiran garu and Moguliah garu would make travel arrangements for Dr. JP, other leaders, women and journalists.