Author: Cordelia Jenkins & Makarand Gadgil
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: August 15, 2011
URL: http://www.livemint.com/vairagadh.htm
Frustrated at the lack of development and
infrastructure, a village in Maharashtra tries to shame the state government
into action
On 30 April, the eve of Maharashtra Day, the
village of Vairagadh in Buldhana district of the state held a meeting of the
gram sabha (village administration). Tired of waiting for the government to
deliver basic infrastructure and services, the villagers decided to take matters
into their hands. They wrote a letter, not to their local leaders or even
to the state government, but to Narendra Modi, chief minister of the neighbouring
state of Gujarat.
"Dear chief minister," the letter
said, "we request the state government of Gujarat to adopt our village.
Our region is facing issues such as poor electricity supply, bad roads and
lack of agriculture development, and all villagers want to implement the growth
plan of Gujarat's ideal village in Vairagadh."
It was an extraordinary move from a local
panchayat (village council), variously dismissed as a publicity stunt (by
the local Congress assembly) and applauded (by Modi's public relations team,
who were quick to spread the story).
Vairagadh is not a border town, but lies right
in the middle of the state, at the western edge of the Vidarbha region, which
has become notorious for its farmer suicides. It is a poor region, and although
it provides an estimated two-thirds of Maharashtra's mineral resources and
is a net producer of power, many villages have limited access to electricity
as well as water. Despite media attention, a state sponsored relief package
of Rs1,075 crore, and a visit by the Prime Minister in 2006 (during which
he announced an additional Rs3,750 crore relief), the suicides continued.
The inhabitants of Vairagadh concede their
letter was a last resort, designed to grab the government's attention and
to humiliate local leaders into action. "One of the farmers here committed
suicide a fortnight back," says Amol Sathe, the young sarpanch (village
council head) of Vairagadh, "He didn't have enough money to marry off
his daughter. Since Independence, we've had only one road," he says,
indicating the main street of the village: a short cement track, which quickly
turned to mud. "I went to Gujarat last year and saw villages getting
electricity and water. Similar things are happening in western Maharashtra.
But here in Vidarbha, we feel discriminated against."
Vairagadh's stunt is symptomatic of a general
sense of disillusionment in the region. But not everyone thinks that getting
help from outside is the solution. In Ahmednagar district, villages under
the Adarsh Gaon Yojana (Ideal Village Scheme) have proved successful through
collective action at extracting money directly from the state for rural development
(read part II of this series). Their success contrasts with Vairagadh's frustration,
but both cases indicate an impatience among the populace with the current
systems.
Seeking secession
Vairagadh's choice of Modi as an adoptive
parent was not random. Gujarat has become a second home to some of the families,
who migrate there seasonally for winter work. Their experience of Modi's renowned
development schemes has been positive. "Even the beggars in Gujarat are
happy people," declared Sathe, beaming. "There are 10-15 families
here who are connected with Gujarat. They go there to work on construction
sites or as carpenters and factory workers. One man got a permanent job in
a factory and stayed. He is making around Rs18,000 a month now-much more than
we could earn here."
With a growth trajectory that outpaces the
rest of the country, Gujarat has been praised by analysts as a model state
(its percentage increase for 2010-11 gross domestic product was almost 12%
compared with less than 9% for the country). A recent Economist article compared
Gujarat with Guangdong province, the industrial powerhouse of the Chinese
economy in the 1990s.
However, Pravin Mahajan, who runs the non-governmental
organization Janarth, based in Aurangabad, questions the advantages of seasonal
migration. "Gujarat is one of the largest destinations for sugar harvesting,"
he says. "It becomes natural for people to cross. But I would hesitate
to argue that the migrants are getting a better deal there."
Janarth commissioned a yet-to-be-published
study by the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune, on seasonal
migration from Maharashtra. "My guess is that between 50,000-75,000 families
migrate each year," he says. "They have their own traditional links
to the destination states now."
Vairagadh's small community of Pardhi migrants
lives in a temporary encampment. The families have been employed part-time
in projects under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
(MGNREGA), such as building a farm pond for the village. But the money came
sporadically and after a three-month delay, and so the workers quit the project
before it could be completed, according to Sathe.
Shalik Ram Dinupam, an elder of the tribal
community who migrates to Gujarat and western Maharashtra to find work, says
that he makes about Rs250 per day in Gujarat doing small jobs and begging.
"I go there every winter, to Surat, to work on construction sites,"
he says. "There's no difference to us where we go, we are just interested
in getting work."
Governance hurdles
It isn't that money for development is unavailable.
Maharashtra's state budget of 2010-11 made substantial provisions for rural
development projects, including a special provision of Rs650 crore "to
remove the physical backlog" in irrigation projects in five districts,
including Buldhana. The rural development department has also begun channelling
more of its annual budget into district-level planning schemes (Rs75 crore
was provided specifically for basic infrastructure facilities in panchayats),
noting that they are "more effective and results are also good due to
the attention of local public representatives on the quality of works".
But too often, implementation lags because
village-level leaders are not aware of the options available or are caught
up in political infighting.
Vairagadh is in a Congress-administrated block,
in a Shiv Sena district, but Sathe is a supporter of the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP). "I went to the local MLA (member of the legislative assembly)
to get a cement roller at least 10 times," says Sathe. "But he never
came until we wrote this letter."
Others in the village are ambivalent about
party politics. "We don't believe in government-panchayat, state or central,"
says Sathe's brother, Ravikant, himself a member of the village's gram panchayat.
"The letter was a cry for attention. We wanted the government to get
its act together, it's been an embarrassment for them, but despite that, none
of the state officials have come here to see us."
Outside the village, along the banks of a
dwindling river, the concrete foundations of a half-built dam, promised by
the earlier Shiv Sena government 12 years ago, according to Sathe, are crumbling
into the stream.
"Twenty-five lakh (rupees) have been
spent already on that project," says Ravikant. "It could irrigate
about 1,000 hectares of fields-enough for four villages to have water. No
land would have to be taken from farmers."
As further evidence of the governance deficit,
Sathe pointed to a water tank outside the village. "Fifteen years ago,
that tank was built by the government," he says. "After four or
five years, it stopped working. It is still empty. Under the Vidarbha package,
the government was supposed to give us a grant for constructing wells. Five
people dug their wells, but no one got the money."
According to Sathe, the average farmer's income,
relying on rainfall for their cotton crop, is Rs6,000-7,000 per acre, after
expenses. With irrigation, he says, this would rise to Rs25,000. "There
would be no need for us to go to Surat or Pune then," he says.
But Vairagadh's problems pale in comparison
with some of the more remote areas of the state. The village of Kolzari in
Yavmatal district, a Naxalite area in southern Vidharbha, is eerily quiet.
Its main square is almost deserted, except for the mules that pick their way
around the debris from the tumbledown buildings. There is no school or medical
centre, no daily newspaper comes.
Kolzari was at the centre of what the media
called Maharashtra's "suicide epidemic". In the summer of 2006,
responding to the crisis, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was due to make a
condolence visit to the families there. One of the people he would have met
was Pramad Pawar, whose brother committed suicide that year, on the day of
his daughter's wedding, overwhelmed by debt to the banks and local moneylenders.
"He never came," says Pawar. "There
was too much rain that day and so the route was changed."
The few wells in Kolzari are privately owned,
so most farmers rely on rainfall. The villagers are third-generation migrants
from Rajasthan, and they speak Banjara, a mixture of Gujarati and Marwari.
Two of Maharashtra's chief ministers have hailed from the area, and yet the
villagers feel no affinity with politics, local or national. "I hate
politics," says Sunil Digambar Meshram, a young farmer. "It is self-centred.
It's totally a taboo for me; I could never be involved."
Despite the extreme poverty, no one from Kolzari
has left. Their isolation is such that migration is unthinkable. "Outside
it will be worse," says Meshram. "We don't know anybody in places
like Mumbai or Pune, we don't know how to migrate. We would be scared."
No one had heard of MGNREGA.
"I asked the Prime Minister, through
a journalist, to adopt our village, to provide education and roads,"
says Pawar. "But it's best not to rely on the government. It's not for
poor people."
cordelia.j@livemint.com
Villages across Maharashtra have encountered
problems of accessing funds for rural development projects at the local level,
but they are dealing with the issue in contrasting ways. Mint examines this
phenomenon in a two-part series.
Next: The model villages of Maharashtra. How
Anna Hazare's Adarsh Gaon Yojana is helping communities to organize their
own development
