A first hand look at implementation of government plans by an IT expert spending a month on Rural Information Centers in UP.

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“Let us move into the battlefield, the heart of India” – Those were Rahul Gandhi’s words, but with something similar in mind, I thought to set out from the comforts of my apartment in California to a month of social work at village level. This was my first experience at working at grassroot-level in the villages in India, which account for 70% of India’s population. I contacted Sandeepji before leaving for India and he briefly explained his vision of ‘Janta Suchna Kendra’, literally translated as ‘people information center’, which would serve as a center to provide information to the villagers. I packed my bags, and landed in Lucknow on 28th July ’08.

The day I arrived, I went to MB club where Sandeepji was giving a talk on Indian Nuclear Deal and highlighting problems of nuclear waste. I also met Jonathan, from New York, who had been working on this project for a month and Anurag Tiwari, a journalist involved with Asha’s work who was helping out Jonathan. The project was at a stage where preliminary survey question forms had been made and we had to gather information from the villages and upload data. The next day, I was thrown into the battlefield so as to speak; we went to Sandila, which is a center for Asha Parivar’s activities besides Bharavan and met the fellow local volunteers. The trip from Lucknow to Sandilla was quite a bumpy ride, but nothing unusual for the Indian roads and I got a chance to talk with Sandeepji about the different government schemes like NREGS and MDM aimed at people in the villages. This gave me some context for these surveys and the fact that we were trying to capture the effectiveness of these schemes. There were also few pressing issues for the villagers which we had to bring before the authorities and so we also met Maneesh Chauhan, the DM for Hardoi regarding those matters.

A primary school where the children
had just finished eating

The next day, I synced up with Jonathan and Anurag regarding the survey forms, revising and printing them to get ready for a trip to one of the villages. We headed out first to Lala Mau Mawai¹ where we visited the primary school and conducted the survey regarding the school’s condition and that of Mid Day Meal (MDM), a government scheme which provisions for a free hot lunch to primary school children on all working days. We found few issues with the implementation such as the food was not cooked according to menu and 40% children were going home to eat because cooking was delayed due to late availability of ration.

We then went inside the village to carry out a survey for work done under NREGA. Although there was no active worksite, we found few villagers who had worked earlier to answer our questions and as we started to conduct the survey, a crowd gathered around us and everyone started giving inputs. We saw this trend everywhere later on also and it allowed us to not only ask questions to specific individuals but also to get a good overall picture. We found problems with this scheme such as people had to pay Rs 15 for their photo in the job card which is actually supposed to be free and the survey also revealed the absence of facilities at work site.  It was interesting to see the outliers, since on one hand, some villagers would lie and say all positive things and had to be corrected by other villagers whereas on the other hand, some villagers would exaggerate negative things. The extremities in the response revealed the underlying dynamics that some villagers were close to the Pradhan² while others were totally against him.
Next few days we revised the survey forms according to what we were seeing in the villages and also visited other villages within Bharavan block every alternate day. Our surveys tried to probe into five schemes, namely, Mid-Day-Meal, NREGA, ICDS, PHC, NMBS.

1. Mid-Day-Meal - We came across different kinds of issues with Mid-Day-Meal at primary schools. At many places the teacher was absent for large part of the school session because he was assigned on other government duties. The food was not being cooked according to the prescribed menu because it is easier to cook ‘tahari’ rather than roti-sabzi for all children. When we visited Majhgawan, we found that there was a gas cylinder there and the cook claimed the food was cooked using gas instead of wood. This did seem surprising, but we took it at face value. A few days later when we were going through another village, some villagers pointed out, citing this example, that the news of our arrival to a village would sometimes spread beforehand and things would be improved temporarily for that day. This prompted us to ask the children about the conditions also besides the school authorities.
2. NREGA - We saw lots of issues with work done under NREGA also. At many places even though the villagers had a job card, it was kept by the Pradhan. This leads to corruption in the system where the villager actually works and gets paid for lets say 4 days, but is marked as having worked for 50 days. The money for the rest of the days is kept by the Pradhan. However, with the recent change in system where the villagers have to open a bank account and the money has to paid to them through a deposit into the account, this form of embezzlement would be curtailed. On the other hand it has given rise to other problems such as the villagers being forced to give Rs 100 to open an account, which should have been free. Moreover, some villagers also pointed out that under this system, another form of embezzlement that is prevalent is that if 10 villagers are working at a worksite, then 10 more from the Pradhan’s side would sit there and when the payment has to be made, Pradhan’s people would also get paid according to Rs 100 per day. Besides all these issues, the biggest problem that I saw was the lack of work being done under NREGA. On a rough average, villagers worked around 10 days a year as opposed to the guarantee of 100 days. I only came across three different kinds of work being done – a) Deepening of lakes, b) making a drain and c) Building a brick road ‘kharanja’. The underlying problem seemed to be that firstly people were not aware of the fact that they need to ask for work and they just waited for the Pradhan to give work and secondly the Pradhan is not fully utilizing this scheme to get work done in the villages. For example, villages like Bengalpur noted that no work had been done in the last seven months which seemed shocking.
3. ICDS - The state of Aanganbadi (ICDS) in most of the villages was in dire state. In some villages it was being done at the primary school whereas at other places it was inside the village. In both situations we found that there was a general lack of facilities like drug kit, cooking utensils and playing equipment. Moreover, children were not being given nutritional items besides an occasional serving of dalia.
4. PHC -The state of general health care at the villages was also problematic. Although Primary Health Centers (PHC) have been set up, the nearest PHC to the villages we surveyed was in Bharavan which was often more than 10kms away and the villagers don’t have a proper transport in many cases. Moreover, a general complaint from the villagers was that the doctor does not see the patients properly and instructs the patients to obtain medicine from the outside shop. These medicines should be provided to the patients for free but they now have to pay more than Rs. 100 in some cases to obtain the medicines. This has prompted many of the villagers to actually go to private doctors nearby rather than PHCs. Various complaints also came regarding ‘nasbandi’ where the women either got pregnant again or were seriously ill after the operation. One hypothesis was that the operation was being done by the nurse instead of the doctor but it remains to be seen what the cause for such cases is.
5. NMBS -The NMBS and ‘Janani Surakhsha Yojna ’ schemes fared no better. There was an overall complaint from all villages that mothers who delivered at home or outside the PHC were not being given any benefits under the scheme. In many cases, they were unaware that they were entitled to benefits because either the ‘Asha’³ health worker was misinformed or the PHC told them such. The problem that expecting mothers faced during delivery was that it was hard for them to commute to the PHC at the time of delivery because of lack of transport to cover 10-15Km. Even if they made it to the PHC and had a delivery there, they were being charged Rs. 200 for medicines and other fees and were being given Rs 1400 as lump sum at a later stage. Moreover, few cases for death of children just after birth surfaced which the villagers attributed to the negligence of the health staff.

Fight broke out between the Dalits
and the Brahmins regarding land issues

Besides the schemes and the associated problems that I mentioned above, the issue that eclipsed all the above issues was that of ownership of land. Land is the biggest source of income for the villagers and as such it comes as no surprise that ownership of land and the disputes resulting from it is the foremost concern. Besides land issues there is also a deep rooted caste conflict at the village level. When both these issues combine, it can often lead to heated arguments and fights. During my one month, I was able to witness such a case where a fight break out between two caste group, Brahmins and Dalits, regarding land patta⁴. Jagjit, and his family members had gotten some land patta in there name under the land act 122 section 4 b, which states that if a Dalit occupies government land for more than 3 years than he can claim it as his own. Since other community members were also occupying the land and the lake, there was uproar to the fact that this land was taken by Jagjit’s family. On 12th August, we went to Gherwa where a meeting or a hearing had been called to resolve conflict between two sides and to find out the actuality of the matter in front of the Lekhpal⁵. Someone from the Brahmin side said an abuse and one thing led to another and a physical fight broke out. Few lathis came out and one person from the Brahmin side got hit badly in the head. Sandeepji pacified both sides and it was broken off for the moment. The Dalits left the scene to return to their village and both parties filed respective FIRs at the police station. However there was still tension in the air and Sandeepji went to each party individually to pacify them a little. In some sense, I was fortunate enough to see this shade of reality while on my peaceful social work mission.

While surveying the villages, many villagers informed me about the affects of the recent heavy rainfall which had resulted in their houses having fallen down. I took their petition and informed the DM of hardoi regarding this matter for any assistance. I was also given various complaint petitions by the villagers which I informed the authorities about. I am hoping my voice can escalate their problems and provide them some relief.

Our car broke down

My account of the experience would not be complete without elucidating our travel incident where our car broke down in the middle of our journey from Lucknow to Mahuwa Danda. Unfortunately there was no signal on one of my phone and there was miniscule balance on the other one. Moreover, the person whom we were trying to reach was also unavailable. So while I waited at the car, Sandeepji started walking towards a nearby village to find a mechanic. Luckily he found a motorcycle ride to get the mechanic, who took our car back to his garage and in exchange we drove on his bike to the village, Hirupur in Mahuwa Danda.

While Jonathan and I conducted surveys throughout the month, listened to people's grievances, and brought the complains to authorites, time had come to have an exit strategy which involved training the volunteers on inputting and upload the data. Initially I had devised a powerful database driven flow as follows -

But after implemting a first pass, I soon realised that this was fragile since if a new column was added to input, then someone had to update the database schema and write more php, etc. So still keeping in mind the fact that data entry should be offline, I devised a system where each village will get its own html page which will have links to various data sources for the village which will be excel sheets uploaded separately. This way, only data entry had to be done and a minor change to html file and then everything could be uploaded.

Asha center at Sandila, Hardoi

So we headed off to Sandila on 19th and met with Rani and Yashwant to teach them this workflow. One of the challenges was writing in hindi as the volunteers were somewhat familiar with using a particular font but not unicode. Since we did not want any dependency on a particular font, I taught them how to write in hindi using offline transliteration. After few hours of patience and hand holding, they were able to pick it up.
Towards the end of the trip, we had lots of surveys with lots of data that had to be typed and uploaded. So we spent few days typing everything and uploading the acquired data. As I head off back to US, my hope is that more data would be acquired and uploaded online, making the conditions of the villages known and hopefully the data can be taken to the authorities resulting in positive action towards the betterment of the ‘heart of India’. For myself, the experience has been like no other, an eye-opener of sorts which has not only given me enormous exposure but also changed my perspective towards things that matter most. Even though I skipped a proper lunch on our trips from Lucknow to the villages, I didn’t even think of complainig about it because when you meet and see the plight of the villagers, you forget about your own petty troubles. My one suggestion to others from this experience is that such an activity should be made compulsory for urban-school students where they spend few days understanding how the majority of the India lives.

- Pravir Gupta
23rd August 08

¹ Lala Mau Mawau is a village in Bharavan block in Sandila tehsil in Hardoi district in UP.

² Pradhan is the elected head of the Gram Panchayat under the Panchayat System

³ ‘Asha’ health worker is different from Asha organization. It stands for Accredited Social Health Activist.

⁴ Patta is land leased by the government and there are 4 kinds of pattas.

⁵ Lekhpal – Land record inspector