Impressions

What sets rural India apart from urban India? Leaving aside all the usual cliches, what struck me most was the quiet hospitality that villagers show to any person from the city. We would never reciprocate such dignified courtesy that easily. While I've no romantic notion of an idyll Indian village a la Bollywood movies, our office trip to a couple of villages in Alwar reinforced this view.

The purpose of our visit was to get first hand knowledge of how various government schemes, routed through Anganwadis, health centres, schools and panchayats, work in reality. We, at PRS Legislative Research provide research assistance to MPs. Therefore, it is essential for us to have some first hand knowledge of the workings of government schemes and institutions.

We visited two schools, an Anganwadi centre, a panchayat and met, among other people, an Auxiliary Nurse Midwife, Primary Health Centre doctor and a number of Panchayat members and a couple of Sar Panches. While the government is pouring more money on the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) scheme than on other schemes (the Panchayat gets Rs 12 lakh for SSA and around Rs 10 lakh for all other projects), there was little evidence of improvement. The schools were in dilapidated condition with barely any facilities and the children were barely literate. The contrast with a private school in a city is so stark that one instinctively feels guilty. Guilty that we have so much opportunities while these children through an accident of birth is forced into a life of no opportunites and almost no hope of a better future. It is so frustrating to hear that while money is coming in, there is hardly any proper utilisation of such funds. Apparantly, some of the money was used to build a second room for the principal while the need was for classrooms. The almost painfully transparant hoax was the computers. They were displayed for our benefit still in their plastic covers and one of them not even connected to the CPU. The fact that they actually thought that we would be impressed by the computers spoke volumes about how the government ensured compliance from schools.

Amidst such depressing realities, certain funny incidents stand out. A kid crawling up and falling sound asleep on Madhukar's lap. Madhavan's expression when a 4-year-old started bawling while he was trying to put a tika on his forehead as part of the enrolment ceremony. Priya stating in her American accented Hindi that she's from U.P. Me struggling to avoid going inside a toilet that I had said I needed to use two minutes back (the problem was not that I actually needed to use it but I had said so only to check the availability and condition of the loo).

(To be continued)