It’s been a while since I’ve started my work as a Block Project Manager under the State Rural Livelihood Mission of Rajasthan. Six months to be exact. And these six months have been a sweet and sour ride through the rural riches of the Aravalli hills where i am posted.
Sayra, a not so quaint village located around 903 metres above sea level in Udaipur district is what I’ve been calling home for the past few months. Dominated by many tribes and an unending and often irritating labyrinth of Caste, dialects and sub-castes, these people are a far cry from what a city bred, northeastern guy like me is used to. More often than not, I am grappling with the linguistic divide, and the chasm that separates us from their value system and social beliefs.
My work involves me interacting with all the people in the community, especially women. I am bestowed with the task of empowering these women with financial linkages, knowledge and capacity building and community institution creation. As great as it sounds, the ground work is rather a tedious process of continuous instruction giving, even pertaining to the minutest details often considered the work of common sense. Common sense ain’t that common after all. Blind faith and patriarchy is.
This isn’t to say that I despise what I do. I like doing it. Talking to people I would have never otherwise had the chance or the sheer will to talk to. The rural space is an outlandish terrain. All our lives, we are trained to listen, to follow instructions and to use our heads. On the contrary, these values hold little water in the villages. Here, things have their own way of figuring themselves out. Or not. That’s an uncertainty I fret over.
We, at work, help the women of the community to assemble and integrate themselves into Self Help Groups. They pool in money and also gain enough credibility to get loans from the formal Banking system without any collateral. Many of them, get promoted to cadres, looking after various activities like training, bank linkages, MIS updation etc. Imagine, veiled women, working on laptops and doing ‘Bhaashan-baazi’ in front of a few hundreds. Seems strange. A sight to behold.
To veil or not to veil. That is NOT the question !
The rural life has its own course. Like the unplanned meandering lanes of any old Indian city. It’s time consuming, irritating, inefficient. And yet, we still manage to reach our destination. Don’t we ?
Me training them for Mission Antyodaya Survey
Different Strokes 