Impressions of Alwar (cont.)

Cities in India are a study of contrasts - high rise buildings beside dilapidated slums; latest cars beside bullock carts; six-lane flyovers go hand in hand with pot-holed lanes; children begging at streetlights while flabby children of rich parents munch on a packet of Lays and a coke. All this and more exist side by side in the cities. Villages, it seemed to me, more a study in lack of contrasts. The mud houses and the concrete buildings of the schools and the panchayat had the same look of hopelessness. Although the mud houses were the more flimsy of the two (since it looked like they could get washed away with a one good downpour), at least they were well-kept and spotlessly clean. The concrete buildings, on the other hand, were dark, dingy and dusty. The children could barely read, if at all. The dry ration kept at the Anganwadi Centre as part of the Mid Day Meal Scheme tasted like saw dust (as Raghav, being 6 years old and not inhibited by any kind of political correctness, very aptly put it, "no taste"). There was one female teacher present at the first school with whom Priya and I spoke to after inspecting the loo (that kind of broke the ice)! She drew a pretty sad but I think accurate picture of the state of education there. According to her, the school had a high drop out rate, especially for girls. Social vices were rampant such as drinking. Children were pulled out of school for months during harvest season or if parents had to leave in search of employment. When or if they were re-enrolled they had to start from scratch. Boys were sometimes pulled out and sent to better schools or for higher education (the school was only till Class 8). No such luck for girls. College was a distant dream for them since even among the boys only a handful went to college. Therefore, the stranglehold of poverty and social attitudes seem to be the biggest hindrance to progress of any kind. I also think that for these people education (or the mechanical way it is imparted in our schools) does not hold value because it does not translate into jobs or a better way of living.

I came away with a feeling that things would not change for these people until something drastic was done. The place is a few hours (3 hours) from Delhi but seems like a completely different world and era. Except for the teacher, an Anganwadi worker, and an ANM we did not speak to any village woman. As we walked through their clusters of houses, they just stared at us with expressionless faces. Some of them would return a smile shyly if we smiled at them. It reminded me of our annual visit to the zoo as kids. The difference here was the animals did not show half as much curiosity as we did for each other even though we were all the same species!

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)