Role of Empathy to Identify Unmet Needs in Indian Villages through Service Learning Program - A Case of the Unnat Bharat Abhiyan Program

Service learning in India is witnessing a large-scale adoption in higher education through the Unnat Bharat Abhiyan (UBA) program, a national-level service-learning program launched by India's Ministry of Education to promote community engagement and foster social responsibility among undergraduate students. The mission of UBA is to enable higher education institutions to partner with communities who live in rural India and engage in service-learning activities. The program advocates to build long-term engagement between academic institutions and nearby communities so that they could collaborate toward sustainable reciprocal partnerships. One of the goals of UBA is to establish linkages between academia and the community so that the knowledge created in the institutions could be targeted to solve complex societal problems. Higher education institutions that are part of this service-learning initiative were encouraged to do field studies through household surveys and informal interaction with the community members with a goal to identify unmet needs in the community. However, it was observed through prior research that the members of the community are only comfortable sharing their problems after faculty and students gain their trust. The paper presents a case study of a rural immersion experience that was introduced as part of the Unnat Bharat Abhiyan program at a private engineering institution in India. The 2-day rural immersion experience was designed to facilitate discussions among faculty and students with the community's various stakeholders, build trustworthy relationships, and empathize with their problems. The study employed a qualitative approach to investigate how students who were part of the rural immersion exercise described their experiences in the villages. Seven focus group discussions were conducted with 28 students who shared their highlights from visiting the villages and the process taken by them to identify unmet needs in the community. Thematic analysis was conducted to analyze the data and the results revealed the role of empathy in critically identifying challenges faced by the community members. The paper at the end presents the list of unmet needs identified by the students because of the rural immersion experience.