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In
1946, a year before India’s independence, Mahatma Gandhi visited
a small village near Pune called Urulikanchan and in an effort to
alleviate the terrible poverty there, started a nature cure centre
interconnected with village development activities centring around
his principles of shramadan (voluntary labour) and
self-help. He entrusted the nature cure centre, known as
Nisargapochar Ashram, to his associate, Manibhai Desai.
What followed for the next 20 years was a saga of study,
commitment, sacrifice and dedication. Manibhai researched areas in
agriculture, horticulture, soil and water management, animal
husbandry and rural health amongst other fields, and built up a
rich tapestry of people’s collectives working through
multidisciplinary activities for their individual and general
good. His interaction with the rural poor motivated him to start
similar development-oriented work in areas beyond Urulikanchan. In
1967, he called his organisation the Bharatiya Agro Industries
Foundation (BAIF), set up with the aim of spreading rural
reconstruction to the rest of the country.
Desai died in 1993. But today, even amidst the decay and widening
socio-economic disparities of the country, BAIF has provided one
strong line of evidence to demonstrate that today’s Gandhians
are not an obsolete small group of yesterday’s idealists that
have not been able to engage the country.
The organisation now works in 12,000 villages in Maharashtra,
Karnataka, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Madhya
Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh and is recognised internationally by
agencies like the European Union and the development wing of other
nations. It works closely with the National Bank for Agriculture
and Rural Development and Council for Advancement of People Action
and Rural Technology (CAPART) in India. The organisation’s
approach is a blend of research and training through activities
such as bee-keeping, cattle-rearing, planting fuel, fodder and
fruit trees, savings initiatives for women, people’s
organisations focusing on family, health, education, and the
improvement of general daily life.
One example of this quiet transformation comes from the
cotton-growing belt of Dharwad district in central Karnataka where
a micro-credit self-help scheme of BAIF has now snowballed into a
watershed, quite literally. Prakash Bhatt, co-ordinator of BAIF
Institute for Rural Development-Karnataka’s (BIRD-K) branch at
Dharwad, says their work, termed the ‘transfer of technology
project’, began by forming a rapport with and amongst village
members. Street plays and puppet shows were held and exposure
visits to other project areas undertaken. They even played with
the children to attract their parents’ attention.
“We do not go into villages with preconceived ideas of what
should get done,” says Bhatt. “We merely help in providing a
platform for people to come together and decide for themselves
what they want.”
The staff of BIRD-K thus first gained the interest of key people
in the village to the idea of getting together and helping
themselves. It was they who helped in holding village meetings
which led to a preliminary assessment in which information like
the number of households, land holdings, caste composition,
availability of natural resources, livelihoods and livestock
population was collated. Through these meetings, villagers formed
their own self-help groups.
BIRD-K then trained these self-help groups in record-keeping and
accounting and a bank account was opened for each self-help group.
Regulations for the groups and decorum for holding meetings were
formulated in consultation with members who chose their own
representatives for managing their finances. If all the members
were illiterate, then a literate young boy or girl was paid a
small amount to record each meeting. Members have been left to
make, and learn, from their own mistakes, but some regulations
have been mandatory, such as annual auditing by ‘barefoot’
auditors trained by the project, financial transactions only
through banks or setting up of clear agendas for meetings.
Disputes have black-and-white rules: disruptive members to be
evicted and the self-help group to be dissolved if difficulties
prove intransigent.
The results have been both astonishing and heartening. A
decentralised, finely-meshed network of sanghas (five to
fifteen members per sangha) at village, sub-cluster (of two
to three villages) and cluster (about 20 to 30 villages called the
mahasangha) level, have now emerged. Two representatives of
each self-help group are elected to the sub-cluster level and two
representatives from this group are, in turn, elected to the mahasangha.
Village self-help groups meet every week, sub-cluster groups every
fortnight and the mahasangha meets on the first Monday of
every month. The mahasangha is overall responsible for
various functions, including the sale of produce from the sanghas.
The system obviously works well: 2,488 poor and very poor
families, of which 2,701 members are women and 1,476 are men, are
now working in 152 sanghas. Their total savings are an
incredible Rs 26,00,000, with a further Rs 81,00,000 already
disbursed in loans. The groups have ongoing work on wadis,
or dry land orchards and soil-related interventions, forestry on
common lands, community health, women’s employment, cattle
breeding and sericulture.
The network has an amazing survival of 600,000 trees, 45,000 of
which are fruit trees. The planting gets done at a hasiru habba
(green festival) that the sanghas undertake annually during
the rains. Seeds of trees are collected during the year, dried and
kept at sangha venues, usually schools. Surashettykoppa taluk
in Dharwad has constructed its own furnished two-roomed office
and even owns a telephone connection, all with funds of the
self-help group.
Through tree planting, the self-help groups moved on to soil and
water-conservation activities. Land was surveyed and its past
history of water-retention taken note of and then trenches and
bunds were constructed to stop and store water from the hillocks
in the region. The average size of a trench is 10 by 2 by 2 feet
and ponds for water storage are 30 by 10 by 10. There are now 720
such ponds in 22 villages. The consequences for the water-table,
especially in an arid region, have been immense. The capacity of
one farm pond is 140,000 litres. “That means even if all the
ponds get filled only once in a year, ten crore litres of water
gets stored!” says BAIF with pride.
And the village of Harogeri, which constructed a check dam through
shramadan that set the example in community participation,
is very pleased with its results, as well it should be. Little
trees, not yet grown to full maturity, stand laden with mangoes
interspersed with mulberry shrubs dotted in a sprinkled sea of the
purple-coloured fruit. A circle-trench of one and a half feet in
depth has been dug around each plant to be filled with biomass for
manure, which also helps in moisture retention. The entire scenery
of green stands out in stark contrast to the aridity beyond the
area, drought-hit in 2001 and 2002.
In 1999, from all 22 villages 525 people worked for three months
to construct this check dam, 140 feet long and 12 feet wide, with
a water storage capacity of 20 lakh litres. So far, this pond
waters 15 farmers’ lands. The farmers have planted a live fence
of tree-species like subabul, glyricidia, acacia and
others to prevent cattle from entering their orchards and
vegetable plots. In other areas, 650 families have developed
kitchen gardens that include medicinal plants for daily health,
such as coriander, aloe Vera, lemon, papaya, lemon grass, ashwagandha.
BAIF has also provided training to these poor families for
income-generation activities like repairing cycles and pumps,
vegetable vending, grocery shops, carpentry, pottery and photo
studios. Approximately 3,000 quintals of vermicompost was produced
by these villages, of which a thousand was used by the farmers on
their fields. The rest was sold. And now that one notes this huge
hub of activity, it is small wonder that these villages with poor
people mainly from backward classes produced enough money to lend
out Rs 80,00,000 and have a balance of Rs 25,00,000 in its
kitties.
“We now have a little extra money for buying unnecessary
stuff”, grins 50-year-old Basavanappa Angadi, president of all
the 152 self-help groups. “We don’t want televisions”, pipes
in a woman in the meeting of the group heads, convened at
Surashettykoppa, about 15 kilometres from Harogere’s check dam.
“All everybody then does is watch telvision, not work”. The
women say they do not have time to watch television.
But how does all this activity go down with the village panchayats
and local government officials? Basavanappa explains the situation
succinctly, speaking of a member who is simultaneously a panchayat
leader. “He is walking the tightrope,” he says, explaining
the panchayat’s dislike of the village self-help groups.
But the existence, and indeed expansion of such people’s groups
and activities demonstrate that even panchayats who are not
able to show such results have to step aside.
The BAIF project also looks at cleanliness of the village and
human health simultaneously. So far, constructing a length of
17,170 feet of gutters have been undertaken by the groups and 734
toilets have been constructed, followed with hygiene awareness and
dissemination by BAIF volunteers. Two each of such volunteers,
living in, these villages, are selected by BAIF and given training
which they then impart to their communities.
“We have managed to reduce migration from these villages,”
says Prakash Bhatt. And certainly there is an air of achievement
and confidence in the people of these villages, coupled with a
sense of relief that they were now free from the trap of poverty
that bound them all.
If only these villages could tell the rest of India that there is
a way out of their mess of poverty.
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