The motto or watchword of the National Service Scheme is 'NOT ME BUT YOU'.

This reflects the essence of democratic living and upholds the need for selfless service and appreciation of the other person's point of view, and also to show consideration for fellow human beings. It underlines the fact that the welfare of an individual is ultimately dependent on the welfare of society as the whole. Therefore, it should be the aim of the NSS to demonstrate this motto in its day-to-day activities.

 

 

Constraints Faced in NSS:

  • Since N.S.S. is a government sponsored scheme, it suffers from bureaucratization and financial crunch. Low participation due to poor incentives for the students and teachers impedes its successful implementation. Besides inadequate qualitative documentation of the work done have affected the scheme's standing (Hans, 1995).
  • Discontinuation of the work done by the volunteers and functionaries on account of constantly changing Programme Officers and placements of work defeats the objective of the creation of durable community assets.
  • This converts the social experience of the volunteers into an ad hoc affair and leaves no
    scope for conceptualization.

 

  • In the highly competitive educational environment students can hardly spend time in social work, or even think of transforming social reality (Damle, 1989;Hans, 1995; Saraswati, 1999). In India 80 percent of jobs are generated by smallbusiness and among the occupations, social work is chosen by the least numbers of youth (Papa, 1998). The situation has become graver because career consciousness is overtaking idealism and service orientation.
  • Indian youth is confronted with a dearth of normative role models (Sinha, 1997).Absence of inspiring role models may not encourage youth to enroll in a programme like the N.S.S. that shuns fun and excitement and painstakingly addresses community issues. Suggestions:Today Indian student community is without direction and ideology (Altbach,1971; Choudhury, 1989) and requires credible youth movement. The N.S.S. is a useful exercise which provides student youth with a social apprenticeship. It also fulfils the criteria of Kulkarni (1988) that education and training are key to youth development.The scheme of N.S.S. has been reduced to a mere inventory of in and off campus activities. The philosophical base of NSS has degenerated due to lack of intelligent leadership. The scheme should be given in the hands of able and committed persons to train the students as sensitizers. For the better conceptualisation of the scheme permanent and dedicated programme officers (POs) should be appointed. Since POs have to perform complex task of human engineering and adolescent psychology, (Saiyidain, 1961), the government of India should establish training and orientation centres to plan, supervise and evaluate N.S.S. activities and to train and orient the POs in the philosophy of the scheme. It has been observed that social work educators and teachers are preferred as programme coordinators at the university level and as POs at the college level. This conventional association between the scheme and the subject should be broken and the scheme should be coordinated with other disciplines also. The inter disciplinary approach will helpin realizing the goal advocated by Frumkin and Lloyd (1995) that the relationshipamong practice social work and community should be rekindled to promote social change.There is need for enablers to stimulate the human resource development(Nanavathy, 1993). More and more students should be motivated to take up N.S.S. as itcan mould the students into conscientious enablers to expedite the development process and energize the functioning of society. The chief concern of the N.S.S. should be to identify the youth as a social construct in order to redefine and relocate their position in the society. The authorities concerned should work together for popularizing N.S.S. programmes so that the energy and vigor of the youth may be utilized for building a strong and healthy nation.