The Bhil Adivasi Mobilisation for Climate Action

 Introduction

Tribal Development in India has been problematical from the time of independence. This has been due to a conflicting situation arising from the opposition between the traditional community based subsistence economy of the Adivasis and the modern market based growth oriented thrust of the mainstream economy. The challenge for the State has been to integrate the Adivasis into the modern economy in a manner that was beneficial to them. This has generally not been possible because the Adivasis have lacked the requisite skills for this and the government system for equipping them with these skills has malfunctioned. Moreover, in order to save on the costs associated with modern development the Adivasis have often not been recompensed and rehabilitated properly for the displacement that they have had to face as resources have been extracted from their traditional habitats.

Not surprisingly this has led to dissatisfaction on the part of the Adivasis. This in turn has given rise to outright political revolt, rights based New Social Movements of Adivasis and also an emergence of Non-Governmental Organisations for bringing about better tribal development. Decentralised and local community controlled development has been acknowledged as a major desideratum for tackling tribal deprivation by scholars. With the award of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Elinor Ostrom in 2009, even mainstream economics has come to acknowledge the importance of collective action for the management of common pool resources. This has also gained in importance currently because of the benefits in terms of mitigation of climate change that such communitarian natural resource management can achieve. The collective action undertaken by the Bhil and Bhilala Adivasis in West-Central India to secure their rights and entitlements and in the process mitigate climage change are detailed here.

2. Traditional Bhil Society

The Bhil Adivasis in West-Central India have traditionally had a communitarian culture based on a subsistence livelihood pattern that ensured sustainable use of their natural resource bases. The important characteristics of traditional Bhil society are as follows -

1.      Habitations of small communities linked together by strong kinship ties

2.      Customs of labour pooling in all social and economic activities

3.      System of interest free loans in cash and kind

4.      Minimal interaction with the external centralised trade based economy

5.      High dependence on forests for daily as well as agricultural needs

6.      Social customs that ensured the redistribution of the surplus of individual families among the community

There was thus a minimal role in this society for accumulation, trade and monetary profits and so it continued for ages at a low level resource use equilibrium. However, Bhil society is patriarchal like others and so women have to bear the double burden of poverty and patriarchal oppression.

3. Colonial Dispossession

The Maratha invasion of the region in the late eighteenth century and later the advent of the British colonialists in the early eighteenth century the situation changed drastically. The penetration of the modern market economy and the settling of non-tribal peasant farmers began in the Bhil areas. This put the Bhils in a precarious situation with the beginning of a process of alienation from their natural resource bases and their integration as ill paid debt ridden labourers in the centralised market economy.

The British enacted the Indian Forest Act in 1865 and took vast areas of community forests out of the control of forest dweller communities and handed over their management to the Forest Department created by it and this was the single most debilitating development for the Adivasis in India. Even though this act was implemented only in the provinces directly controlled by the British it nevertheless provided the new direction of commercial exploitation of forests to forest management in the Princely States that largely ruled over the Bhil areas and so they too were adversely affected.

4. Post Colonial Situation

Ironically, the coming of independence aggravated the livelihood situation of the Bhils instead of  improving it. Most of the Bhil areas that were under the governance of Princely States prior to independence were assimilated into the states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and the Indian Forest Act (1927) (IFA) was implemented. Vast areas of forests which were earlier still being managed by the Bhils with the Princely States only nominally in control, were converted into Reserved Forests.

The Bhils mostly were illiterate and so did not understand the legal procedures for conversion of their habitats into Reserved Forests and so lost most of their lands.  Under the IFA, the government “can constitute any forest land or waste land which is the property of Government or over which the Government has proprietary rights, a reserved forest, by issuing a notification of this effect”. Settlement of rights was not carried out and large areas remain unsurveyed even today. The history of forest management thereafter has been one of continuous deprivation of the Adivasis and is briefly described below followed by a description of the failure of economic and social development schemes in Tribal areas.

4.1 Disempowerment and Maldevelopment of Bhil Adivasis

The situation of the Bhils was made worse by the fact that government services like education, development extension and health have not functioned properly and so the Adivasis have been deprived of the welfare benefits that they were entitled to under various schemes. Finally the patriarchal nature of Bhil society led to the burden of increasing poverty due to wrong development policies falling disproportionately on the women. The necessity of bearing more children to get male progeny has also led to a population explosion, increasing pressure on the natural resource base.

4.1.1 Decline of Local Self Governance - The most debilitating phenomenon immediately after independence was the marginalisation of the customary community based local self governance systems of the Bhils. The third tier of Panchayati Raj was not set up and instead the power in rural areas was transferred to the bureaucracy and especially the Forest Department and Police. The Forest Department staff took undue advantage of the restrictive provisions of the Indian Forest Act to demand bribes from the Bhils to allow them access to the forests without which they could not survive but which had become legally proscribed. The Police interfered with the traditional communitarian dispute resolution mechanisms of the Bhils and instead forced them to report their problems to the Police leading to unnecessary arrests and litigation.  Even though the Bhils elected their own representatives to the state and national legislatures due to the policy of reservation this did not translate into power for the Bhils at large as the elected representatives went along with the overall policy of marginalisation of the Adivasis.

As a result, the general Bhil population was completely disempowered and left at the mercy of the bureaucracy. This disempowerment is the root cause of the mal-development of the Bhil areas. The specific micro level needs and aspirations of the Bhils have not been articulated and so macro level development policies that have been pursued have been inimical to them.

Thus, the actual state policy that evolved for Bhil tribal areas was as follows - “ top priority has been given to a programme of rapid industrialisation and extension of means of communication to the most interior regions. Our firm view is that the development of land and agriculture alone will not be adequate for the rehabilitation of the tribal communities. Agricultural land is insufficient and cannot serve the needs of even half the tribal population. The tribal areas are rich in industrial and power potential. There is no reason why in the wider interest of the nation and in the long-term interest of the Adivasis themselves, industries should not be developed and localised in tribal areas”. 

4.1.2 Industrial Development versus Tribal Development - The assumption that industrial development in tribal areas is in the long-term beneficial to them has been proved to be totally fallacious. Invariably Adivasis are not rehabilitated and compensated properly for the loss of their traditional livelihoods and neither they are trained to gain employment in the new industries that are set up. The industrial areas set up on tribal lands in West-Central India are an example of this. The government provided cheap land and other subsidised infrastructure to the industrialists along with tax-holidays but the displaced Adivasis were given only pittances as compensation. Not being educated or skilled they did not get any of the permanent jobs that were created and are even today working as casual labourers. Pithampur, Indore, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Surat and Kota, which are the main industrial centres in West-Central India in fact draw in Bhils from the whole region as casual labourers.

The other fallacious assumption is that agricultural land was insufficient to provide suitable livelihoods to the Adivasis. Inadequate attention was paid to developing the productivity of dryland agriculture on sub-optimal soils in upper watersheds on which the Bhils are dependent. Instead stress was put on developing green revolution agriculture on the plain lands with irrigation and chemical inputs. This was totally unsuitable to the hilly dry land farms of the Bhils. Today the green revolution technologies are proving to be unsuitable for the areas where they were started off with in the 1960s in Punjab and Haryana primarily due to soil quality degradation and lesser and costlier avialability of water and chemical inputs.

A resource conservation policy for land, water and forests, a research and development policy for the traditional organic agriculture of the Adivasis and appropriate technology for processing agricultural and forest produce combined with a vibrant local government system with a clear gender focus to counter the internal patriarchy of Bhil society would have worked wonders if it had been implemented. Appropriate education and health systems incorporating tribal knowledge would have been a bonus that would have produced a new generation of Adivasis able and ready to take on the development challenges faced by their community. This was not done and so the human development indices in the Bhil tribal areas have remained the poorest in the country.

5. Mobilisation of Bhil Adivasis

The Bhil Adivasis of West-Central India began mobilising from 1970s onwards primarily for their basic constitutional rights. Later this movement spread to include the integration of the Bhils into the modern market system without exploitation by moneylenders, traders and corrupt government officials. Currently the umbrella organisation of Bhil Adivasis in West-Central India is the Adivasi Ekta Parishad.

The introduction of the special Panchayat Raj for Scheduled Tribal areas under the provisions of the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act 1996 (PESA) gave a boost to the work of mobilisation. The provision in PESA Act that the tribal Gram Sabha is to be the final arbiter on all issues of local development and that this Gram Sabha could be as small as a hamlet of a village made it easier to implement development programmes. Often it is not possible to carry the whole village together on some development programme because the tribal hamlets of a village are situated at a distance from each other. Another law that promises to have far reaching consequences is the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forestdwellers (Recognition of Rights) Act 2006 (FRA) which gives rights to the land that the Adivasis have been cultivating and also community rights to the forests in which they have been residing. Finally there is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme which if properly implemented can in addition to providing employment to the Adivasis also improve the natural resource base of their habitats.

The specific mobilisational strategies adopted that have got the people to act collectively for getting their entitlements and the conservation of natural resources for climate change mitigation are –

1. Problem analysis workshops in which the people have participated in open discussions to pinpoint the problems they were facing.
2. Legal and rights training workshops in which the people were taught the basics of the liberal democratic framework.
3. Collective Action for assertive rights through public demonstrations and sitins.
4. Revival of traditional labour and resource pooling customs.
5. Special women's meetings to get them involved in resource conservation work and also public demonstrations and also counter the internal patriarchy of Bhil society.
6. Legal and policy advocacy to change the laws and rules in favour of the Adivasis.

6. Gaining Access to Forests and then Conserving them

The mass mobilisation began with the problem of ensuring access to the encroached farms of the Adivasis in the reserved forest. As a solution to this problem it was decided to protect the remaining forest area and prevent it from degradation. This was done to counter the claim of the forest department that the Adivasis were destroying the forest. Consequently, social protection of the forests to ensure their regeneration was undertaken. Small groups patrolled the forests by turns through a labour pooling system. The fodder generated from such protection is cut and bought by the members at the end of the monsoon season and the money thus generated is kept in a fund for carrying out plantation work. This forest protection has considerably increased the availability of fodder, fireweood and non-timber forest produce in the study watershed and this has especially benefited the women and children who are the main collectors of forest products. It may be mentioned here that tribal children treat the collection of forest produce as a playful activity and it is not labour for them. This is how they come to know their natural environment. Greater fodder availability has facilitated goat and buffalo rearing and so increased the supplementary incomes from animal husbandry which provides an insurance against livelihood shocks to the tribal households. It is not possible to quantify the increase in forest product availability because of a lack of records but people say that they now enjoy much greater forest product availability and have bigger herds of goats and cattle than earlier.

7. Soil and Water Conservation

The villagers organised themselves into small groups of ten to twelve farmers each who then pooled their labour and cooperated with each other to perform their agricultural operations together and also undertake soil and water conservation activities. This was a revival of the traditional labour pooling custom of the Bhils called Dhas. In this system people used to work together to do agricultural operations on each others' fields, build each others' houses, and improve the quality of the farm fields through soil conservation work. However, this traditional labour pooling custom is dying out because of their integration into the mainstream money economy and the exploitation by the forest department staff.

A major feature of this cooperative soil and water conservation work is the participation of women in it. As is well known the ravages of natural devastation caused by bad development are mostly borne by women. Consequently it is not surprising, that when offered an opportunity to cooperate to reduce their drudgery, women come forward enthusiastically. This has not only ensured that women have participated in the community actions and improved their status in society but they have also as a result, changed the gender relations at home.

The intensive soil and water conservation work and the forest conservation have together ensured that both natural and artificial recharge in the watersheds have increased considerably and as a result the streams are flowing throughout the year. The farmers have used this enhanced water availability to cultivate dryland varieties of wheat which require less water. The greater availability of animal manure has resulted in the farmers using treated organic manure in larger quantities and improving the quality of the soil. The soil and water conservation work has also ensured the greater availability of soil moisture and so double cropping has become possible even without irrigation in some of the upper fields where a crop of gram is taken. In some cases the kharif jowar crop after being harvested, regenerates to give a small rabi yield from the soil moisture.

8. Implementation of the FRA

The FRA has been plagued with problems right from the beginning. Even though the Act was passed in 2006 it took another year for the Rules to be framed and passed by parliament. Even after that Governments have been very tardy in setting in motion the process for application and verification of the rights of the Adivasis. The people have had to organise many demonstrations to first get the process started and then for it to continue. The people have also pro-actively used the MGNREGS to carry out soil and water conservation works on the lands for which they have gained lease rights under the FRA.

An associated achievement of the people is their success in getting the proposal by the Government to set up a Wild Life Sanctuary in the Katthivada Forest Range of Alirajpur district in Madhya Pradesh cancelled. Under the provisions of the PESA Act and also the Wild Life Protection Act any displacement of people in a scheduled tribal area has to be sanctioned by the Gram Sabha. Hard mobilisation by the people forced the Government to implement this provision and the Gram Sabhas unanimously rejected the proposal because of its many infirmities and it had to be shelved. This is the first time that a proposal for a Wild Life Sanctuary in this country has had to be shelved due to strong legal and mass action by the Adivasis.

9. Conclusions

The most important achievement is that the Adivasi Ekta Parishad has been able to inspire the Adivasis to assert their identity and clearly demarcate their sovereignty over their habitats. The laws and rules for utilisation of the forests were that laid down by the government and administered by the Forest Department and were not matched to the local needs and conditions. The Adivasi Ekta Parishad succeeded in mobilising the people through regular meetings and trainings to stand up for their rights against the forest department staff and design their own rules for governing the use of the collective natural resources. A section of the people initially braved the opposition of the traditional Patels who were agents of the Forest Department and even went to jail fighting for their rights and established the organisation. Once the organisation was established and natural resource conservation work began, the benefits began to flow and this acted as a reinforcing factor in the continuation of the process and so later even the Patels, who were initially opposed to the process, later became a part of it.

The mobilisation process resulted in a fairly strong people's organisation spread over the whole of the Bhil Adivasi homeland and the people were able to ensure that the Forest Department was forced to allow them to manage their common resources according to their own rules. The monitoring of the forests as well as the soil and water conservation work is done by the people themselves and that is why the system has worked very well for over three decades. The people have developed a system of sanctions beginning with fines for small infringements of the rules and going upto ostracism for more serious violations and this is administered by the people themselves. The traditional community conflict resolution mechanisms of the Bhil Adivasis have also been revived and these are also working very well.

However, unless the government ensures a participatory framework of rule making and monitoring at several levels it is difficult for a people's organisation to build up a larger movement of conservation. Since the government through the forest department and police has actively opposed the people's mobilisation it has taken place only in isolated patches in the Bhil homeland. The laws and policies that favour Adivasis are not implemented primarily because most people are not aware of these provisions and the Government is not serious about them. The Adivasi Ekta Parishad by raising the awareness of the Adivasis in this regard has brought about a positive transformation in West-Central India. Thus, despite its limitations, the mobilisation process described above has ensured justice for the Bhil Adivasis and provided them with a better livelihood situation while simultaneously making a significant contribution towards climate change mitigation.

 

WHITHER ADIVASI GIRLS' EDUCATION

I set out four decades ago to try and improve the situation of Adivasis but unfortunately have mostly met with failure. However, nothing hurts more than the most recent in this series of failures because it is related to Girls' Education.
My wife Subhadra is a Dalit whose family had less than two hectares of unirrigated land from which they could hardly make ends meet. She had to study in a government school and also work at home on meagre food and almost no money. She somehow passed her higher secondary school examinations and then to escape her poverty joined an NGO as an Anganwadi (creche) worker and later by dint of persistence became a land rights and gender activist. Later she decided to pursue higher education and is currently enrolled for a Phd.
This personal experience made her think about the education of girl children from poor families. She felt that if girls from poor families are to study then they must be provided hostel facilities because if they stay at home then their parents tend to make them work and so they are not able to study. Moreover, the government school system in Madhya Pradesh has now become moribund with close to zero teaching and learning. Therefore, without extra tuition it is not possible to educate girls just by sending them to a government school.
However, running hostels and schools for girls is not an easy matter. The Right to Education Act has now made it mandatory for all schools to be registered and a considerable amount of paper work has to be done continuously regardless of the quality of the actual education being imparted. Secondly due to the grievous malpractices by NGOs running girls' hostels there is also a considerable amount of monitoring of such hostels. Moreover, running a full fledged school and hostel requires good quality staff which is almost impossible to get in rural areas these days. Those few from rural areas who have somehow learnt something from the dysfunctional government school system and have attained some quality have invariably migrated to cities for better livelihoods. Therefore, those that remain in rural areas know next to nothing despite having become graduates.

So Subhadra decided two years back to informally run a hostel with about five or six girls of class six at the Pandutalab centre of Mahila Jagat Lihaaz Samiti. The girls would be enrolled in the Government Middle School in the village and would reside at the centre and get coaching from Subhadra and I in addition to whatever they were taught at school. Once the hostel stabilised other people also could come and spend a few days and teach them whatever they were good at. The idea was that the girls would get a holistic education as they would also work on sustainable farming at the centre and understand the forest, soil, water and energy conservation work being done there.
Initially, it was difficult to get these girls as both the girls and their parents were not ready. So in the first year we started a weekend coaching class at the centre for girls of all classes from Pandutalab and a few nearby villages so that they and their parents would get an idea of the huge difference in education quality that we were planning to provide. There were quite a few girls who came to these coaching classes in the beginning where we taught them English and Mathematics the two main bug bears of school children in rural areas. However, after some time the interest of the students flagged despite their learning immensely in the classes. Investigations revealed that the problem was that they were being taught next to nothing in the schools and they were also not being given any time to study at home by their parents. Thus, while they would learn a lot in the coaching class on one weekend, they would forget everything by the next weekend and be back to square one. Also the girls did not see why they should work hard to understand a subject in the coaching class when nothing was being taught in the school.
This reinforced the logic that the girls would have to be kept in the hostel and taught intensively. But that is easier said than done given the fact that girls are made to do a lot of work at home even when they are studying in school and so keeping them in hostels is not generally favoured by parents. Anyway, this year Subhadra began canvassing for girls to join the hostel from the month of April itself when the last year's session came to an end. She went around nearby villages convincing parents and talking to the girls who could be enrolled for the hostel. Once the girls were identified, she went and met the teachers of their schools to facilitate their transfer to the Government Middle School in Pandutalab.
The interaction with the teachers brought to light the sorry state of public primary education in Mahdya Pradesh in tribal areas. The primary schools are mostly single or double teacher schools teaching five grades all seated together. All the children of school going age are enrolled in these schools regardless of whether they are attending regularly or not. This is because there is a strict order from the higher ups that there should not be any child out of school. Since there is a no detention policy so not only are these children marked present they are also declared passed in the examinations. Moreover, since the funds and materials for the midday meal to be given to the children are according to the attendance in the school so also all are marked present regardless of whether they are taking the meals or not. The Unified District Information System for Education, which is the online data base for the primary education system thus paints a very rosy picture of the status of primary education. There is of course an unofficial tally of the actual attendance and the number of dropout children with the teachers but try as she might Subhadra could not get this from them.
After much effort parents of about eight girls agreed to put their girls in the hostel at Pandutalab. They were told to get the transfer certificates from the old school so that they could be admitted to the school in Pandutalab. Two girls were even put in the hostel by their parents pending the formal transfer and we began teaching them. These girls despite being in the sixth class did not know the Hindi alphabet or the numbers let alone write in Hindi and do sums.
When the girls' parents went to try and get the transfer certificates they came up against a barrage of questions from the teachers as to why they wanted to shift their girls to a private hostel and the government school in Pandutalab and that such hostels are wholly unreliable and that they would be jeopardising the future of their girls. One parent did manage to get the transfer certificate but the Head Master of the Pandutalab Middle School refused to admit the girl giving him the same kind of warning that putting the girl in the private hostel would jeopardise her future. Basically no teacher wants to lose a student even if he himself is not teaching anything because it reduces the number of students for the midday meal. Also instead of trying to improve pedagogy and learning achievements in his school he is wary of private schools and hostels which reflect on his incomepetence and the shoddy state of the Government School System.
This then created a difficult situation for us. The only two girls who had come to the hostel began crying given the lack of company. The increased pressure of proper studying also made them feel more home sick. The fact that the girls would not be enrolled in the school in Pandutalab also resulted in a situation wherein Subhadra and I would have to take on the full responsibility of teaching them. Since these girls would in any case remain enrolled in their village schools formally this was not much of a problem in formal terms. As they could go and give the examinations there. There was also the possibility of getting these girls to give the tenth class examinations from the National Institute of Open Schooling a few years down the line as this is the first formal educational certification these days after the RTE Act's no detention provision. However, convincing the parents to follow this kind of informal arrangement became difficult as they felt that their girls might get penalised in future. Also there is a general reluctance to send girls to study away from home because there are now a spate of cases where the girls elope with other boys often of a different sub tribe of the Bhils from the one to which they belong even while studying in school. So there is a malevolent and dysfunctional public education system on the one hand and patriarchy on the other which are seriously putting girls education in jeopardy.
Consequently, we have had to send the two girls who had joined the hostel back and put this project in abeyance for the time being. We will try again next year with greater preparation as we now know what we are up against.

Anti Duffer Unlimited

When I first came to Alirajpur in 1985 to work among the Bhil Adivasis, I started off by teaching young children in a government primary school in the morning and conducting an adult education class in the evening. Both activities did not last long as I got involved in mass organisational work to build up a trade union of the Bhil farmers and labourers. However, ever since then, I have been involved with education of Adivasi children off and on. The striking thing that I first noted all those years ago was the abysmal standard of teaching in government schools in the Adivasi areas and their huge difference with the standard of the books that were prescribed. The main reason was that there were not enough teachers who were capable of teaching the prescribed books. In most cases there are single teacher schools with the teachers themselves being products of these schools and so unable to understand the books they were supposed to teach.
When we did get down to running some schools of our own we came up against this major constraint of lack of capable teachers. Whether it is the residential Rani Kajal Jeevan Shala in Kakrana or the single teacher schools in Vakner, Bada Amba and Chilakda, the basic education that the teachers had received when they were in school was so poor that despite being trained periodically they were not able to teach properly. Often I have gone and taught in these schools for a day or two to find that the children in a particular class were at a level of a few classes further down. There is no solution to this problem because it is next to impossible to get teachers in Adivasi areas capable of teaching the prescribed texts.
One of the programmes of the newly set up centre of the Mahila Jagat Lihaaz Samiti at Pandutalav village is to improve girls' education standards. What we have planned is that we will provide coaching classes to the girls studying in nearby schools at the secondary level from classes eight to twelve on weekends. For the past few weeks considerable publicity has been done in the nearby villages that Subhadra and I for starters, till others from Indore and elsewhere too decide to chip in, will provide coaching to girls in all subjects on saturdays and sundays and so they should come for this. The first class that was held under this programme had only four attendees as shown below!!

Why, despite the publicity done for the programme and the credibility Subhadra and I have in the area, did so few girls turn up? Thereby hangs a tale. We asked the girls which subjects they found most difficult and they said in one voice English and Maths. So we started with English only to find that even the girl in the twelfth class did not know a word of English. We started off with some basic sentences and as we worked through them we talked to the girls about how they were taught in class. It appears that after learning the alphabet in English they had never read or written anything in class. The teachers come and tell them to read as they themselves are unable to read the texts and just sit like dodos. The students then go home and do other things and don't touch their books at all. That is why most of the girls had not turned up because they didn't have any conception that there could be a teacher who would teach!! What is the point in going to a coaching class and sitting there all day without being taught after having done that through the week in school. This was a shocking revelation to us that students in adivasi areas can't believe that there can be teachers who can teach and make studying both a fun and a learning experience. The same was the situation with maths. Apart from tables up to ten or so and some rudimentary addition and subtraction the girls didn't know much. We had to spend a laborious few hours trying to make them understand how to multiply and divide. For the first time they had filled up their exercise books with so much writing and were enthused enough to say that they would go back home and practice what they had written and read.
One is left wondering about the farce that is being enacted in the name of education in Adivasi areas. The prescribed texts are of a high standard and unless they are taught well from the lower classes, the backlog of knowledge that builds up is near impossible to address in the higher classes. Since there is a no detention policy upto class ten when the first public examination is held, students are promoted through to class ten without being taught much. They come to accept that teachers do not teach and they need not learn. In the end what we have is a huge lot of young people who have been turned into duffers by an inappropriate education system. They are all very intelligent children who do a lot of thoughtful work on their fields and in their homes but when it comes to learning at school its just a waste of time and effort. So while the children of the rich go to schools where teachers do teach and they go on to become important cogs of the capitalist system, poor adivasi children are deliberately turned into duffers as they are NOT TAUGHT, due to lack of teachers, the same prescribed texts as the rich children.
In recent years there have been many projects to groom a few underprivileged children who have somehow learnt something in poor schools and help them to enter elite institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology, with one of them being very famous by the name of Super Thirty. They do a laudable job by helping these few children put a foot into the edge of the closed door of opportunities in the capitalist world. But eventually these few children become part of the oppressive building and the door remains firmly shut for the vast majority.
Without some rudimentary education it is not possible for the Adivasis to forge a mass movement to break down the capitalist door and create a more just world. There is no need to become super intelligent in the paradigm of education designed by the rich in order to challenge their hegemony but at least the adivasi children must not become duffers. That is why instead of the super thirty we have launched a programme to ensure that we counter the invidious conspiracy of the capitalist state of converting adivasi children into duffers and have named it - Anti Duffer Unlimited.

Doing Maths instead of Pouring Milk on Shiva

MahaShivratri is a public holiday and so Rani Kajal School in Kakrana had officially no classes. But the students of class eight there decided to use this free day not to pour milk on Shiva like millions of others did but to do Mathematics. The Madhya Pradesh Government has reintroduced board examinations at the class 5 and class 8 levels this year after a long hiatus and so with less than a month left for those to begin the students are naturally on tenterhooks. Mathematics as always is the most difficult subject. So there was a five hour maths class facilitated by Ishaan, who is Subhadra and my son. He is in class eleven currently but ever since he was in class nine his mother has sent him to the school in Kakrana or the one in Sakar run by Amit and Jayashree to spend a week after his own final exams teaching the Adivasi children there and also enjoying himself with them.

This year before going to Kakrana he asked me what he should teach. I told him to teach the students of class eight maths and clear their doubts so that they could do well in the impending examinations. Earlier, Sandeep, Swapanda's nephew, Arjun and I have done some maths teaching off and on whenever we have spent a few days there. The big problem is that Kakrana is so remote that there are no good teachers there to teach maths properly. Despite many appeals having been sent out, so far no young student has agreed to intern there and provide maths and science education to the students for a few weeks or months. So now with the board examinations just a few weeks away, the students decided to make the most of Ishaan's expertise. They put in two hours each day in the evening after dinner and they took advantage of the Shiva holiday to put in a marathon math session.
The texts prepared by the Madhya Pradesh Board adapted from the books prepared by the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) are well designed with good problems to test the understanding of the students. However, in the absence of good teachers these texts are not taught properly and so most children aren't able to comprehend them well. The whole government school system and most private schools too promote learning by rote even for maths in the absence of good teachers. No wonder then that millions of people in this country pour milk on Shiva which they find to be a more meaningful activity than learn maths from incompetent teachers.

Philanthropy at its Best

My college days in Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT KGP) were very nice not so much because of the studies or the sports but more so because of the great time spent with co-students doing many other things. After graduating we all went our separate ways despite being so close together for five years. I, especially, having gone off into the wilds of Alirajpur completely lost touch with my college friends. Then after three decades with the advent of the internet and Facebook we began connecting and catching up again and remembering the great times we had spent together in college. Many of these friends are now American citizens but nevertheless they still have a deep connection with the land of their birth and their friends who have stayed back. Nagendra Subbakrishna or Noggy as he is more popularly known is one such individual. We got in touch again after many years about two years ago. We have a practice of having a get together of old IIT KGP alumni when one of us comes in from the USA. So about four of us got together in Bengaluru and had a great time. Noggy then expressed the wish to come and see the wilds of Alirajpur. What with one thing and another he could not make it till about three months back when he along with his wife Kathy came on a visit to Alirajpur. The upshot of it was that both of them fell in love with the school in Kakrana.
Noggy has to visit India frequently every three months or so on work and now he has made it a point to visit Kakrana every time he comes down to India from the USA. On his first visit itself he was disturbed with the fact that the children in the school in Kakrana mostly have to eat pulses and rotis. He said that growing children should get more vitamins and protein. The parents of the children being poor can pay only so much and so the school in Kakrana has to be heavily subsidised through grant funding and as this is inadequate the food quality is nutritionally deficient. Even so attempts are made to provide vegetables. Noggy would have none of this and insisted that more protein and vegetables should be served to the children and donated money for this.
Kakrana being on the banks of the River Narmada has an abundant supply of fish which is first class protein. However, since a majority of the children in the school are vegetarian they will not eat fish. Then another IIT KGP alumnus, Sanjeev Sabharwal, suggested that the children could be given soyabean nuggets which have high protein content and also are tasty to eat. Since they are vegetarian there would be no problem of feeding all the children with it. So I began scouting round Indore to see what the price of soyabean nuggets were. The branded nuggets from top food retail outlets cost as much as Rs 150 a kilo. However, since Madhya Pradesh is the biggest producer of soyabean in this country, soyabean nuggets are available wholesale from top soyabean processors for as little as Rs 55 per kg. So we bought a quintal of soyabean nuggets and transported them to Kakrana. Now twice every week the children are getting fried soyabean nuggets and they are eating them with relish as shown below.

India is ranked 97 out of 118 countries in the global hunger index and Adivasis have much more than their share in the population among the hungry in this country mainly due to income poverty. Hunger affects Adivasi children right from the womb as their mothers are hungry when they conceive. This affects not only their physical prowess but also their intellectual abilities. As mentioned earlier, the parents of the children in the school in Kakrana being poor, they find it difficult to pay large fees and so both the education and the food in the school has to be subsidised through external grant funding which is not adequate. Under the circumstances, Noggy's concern for the nourishment of the students of the Rani Kajal School and his contribution to alleviating the situation by ensuring more consumption of vegetables and protein by the children is philanthropy at its best.

Internet and Creativity

The internet has fired the imagination of the teachers and students of Rani Kajal Jeevan Shaala in Kakrana. Initially they tried their hand by uploading photos and sending them to others in the outer world as there was some glitch with typing. These photos are just fabulous and give us a sense of the richness of the environment in Kakrana. The first photo is of a king sized lobster shown below.

Before the Sardar Sarovar dam was built there never were any lobsters in the river Narmada in Kakrana. However over the past decade or so these lobsters have made their way almost a hundred kilometers up the Narmada from the Arabian sea, climibing up the spillway of the dam and have made their home in the river in Kakrana. They are frequently caught by the Adivasis like Ragliya above who have now become expert fishermen.
The next photo is of vegetables being grown in Rani Kajal Jeevan Shaala. Over the past year or so the school has gained tremendously in dynamism and one of the new projects was to grow vegetables in the one acre kitchen garden of the school. This has been immensely successful as the teachers and the students have immersed themselves in the kitchen garden as is evident from the picture below.

The children and teachers have also beautified the campus with flower plants of various varieties which have now begun flowering. There is a tank in which lotus flowers had been planted after they were brought from Toran Mal in Maharashtra which is the highest point in the Satpuras to the south of Kakrana across the Narmada River. One gorgeous flower is shown below.

Later when the typing facility became functional there have been a spate of posts from the children to the Facebook Page of the school https://www.facebook.com/cowmeshranikajal. While Jyoti Solanki who passed out from class eight last year, which is the highest class of the school, has posted a mythical story in Hindi about how the village of Kakrana got its name, Pratap Padiyar a student of class eight has posted a translation of a play in Hindi into his mother tongue, the Palva dialect of the Bhili language, which is possibly the first ever Bhili literature on Facebook. More such creative work is afoot and will soon be available to the world at large due to the internet being operational in the school.
This is what had made us so desperately try to get internet to Kakrana and it is indeed very satisfying to see it produce such a great surge of creativity in so short a time. Digital justice and the cause of child rights have been eminently served by this endeavour.
  

The Law is an Ass

The generally accepted meaning of the phrase "The Law is an Ass" refers to the routine application of the law by an administrator or judge without  applying the mind  and taking into consideration the context. The phrase compares the administrator or judge with an ass or donkey, which latter is assumed rather uncharitably to be an idiot!! However, there is another meaning to this phrase also which refers to the obstinacy of donkeys and compares the refusal of centralised institutions, which are supposed to administer the law, to accede to the just demands of the ordinary citizen thus violating the basic principles of natural justice. Institutions in India routinely act in this obstinate manner and greatly inconvenience ordinary citizens. We will discuss a few such instances here to show how difficult it is to secure justice in this country.
A boy, a farmer's son, who was studying in the Keshav Vidyapeeth in Indore run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) decided not to pursue his studies there any more after passing the Class Ten examination of the Central Board of Secondary Education in May 2015 and applied for a transfer certificate (TC). The school management refused to give the TC saying that he had been automatically admitted to the higher secondary school to pursue the plus two education and so he would have to pay the fees for the first session amounting to Rs 37000 to get the TC. The father of the child, who is an active member of the RSS and the Bharatiya Janata Party, then approached higher level politicians in the party, including elected representatives to the legislative assembly and the parliament but to no avail. The school management remained adamant that the child would have to pay at least Rs 17000 to get the TC. Eight other boys who had also applied for their TCs succumbed to this unjust demand and paid the charge. However, the father of this boy refused to buckle under this pressure despite being a long time member of the RSS.
The man then filed a complaint with the District Collector in this regard. The Collector, after perusing all the documents, issued a notice to the school authorities asking them to show cause as to why they were not issuing the TC. However, at the next hearing the Collector, obviously having been pressurised by the RSS, passed an order that the student would have to pay the first session fees of Rs 37000 because he had already taken admission to the school without giving the man a chance to refute the arguments and evidence given by the school management. The school management then sent the man a legal notice demanding a huge sum of Rs 70,000 for having harassed them so as to brow beat him into submission.
This then prompted the man to approach advocate Anil Trivedi. Before we proceed further with the story it will be necessary to know a little bit about Anil Trivedi or Anilbhai as he is popularly known whose photo is given below.

 The law being an ass it requires equally obstinate lawyers to get it to work for the poor and oppressed. Anilbhai is the only lawyer in Madhya Pradesh who has consistently used the law to intervene in the interests of people deprived of justice by the rich and the powerful in the state. Anilbhai became a practising lawyer by chance. He is the son of the veteran Gandhian Kashinath Trivedi and so was involved in social and political activism right from his childhood. He, however, chose to follow in the footsteps of Ram Manohar Lohia and became an activist of the Socialist Party. When emergency was declared in 1975 he was arrested and sent to jail. At that time he had been pursuing post graduate studies in psychology and law simultaneously and taking part actively in the mobilisation in support of the Sampoorna Kranti movement launched by Jayaprakash Narayan in Bihar. Once in jail the hot topic of discussion among all the senior politicians, some of whom were lawyers, was the ease with which Indira Gandhi had subverted the Constitution because there was not enough legal awareness among the masses about their rights. The consensus was that there had not been enough legal activism on the part of lawyers who were members of the progressive parties so as to challenge the arbitrariness of the executive in its actions to repress human and civil rights. Anilbhai had earlier been studying law without any firm commitment to pursuing it as a career.  But the discussions regarding the inadequacy of legal activism made Anilbhai decide on choosing the legal profession to try and fill up this lacuna. He studied and appeared for his final examinations from inside the jail. 
Immediately after coming out of jail he became involved in electoral politics as he was chosen as the candidate of the combined opposition from one of the seats in Indore in the assembly elections that followed. However, due to the filing of nomination papers by a rebel from the erstwhile Jana Sangh the votes got divided and the Congress candidate won. This loss to the Janata party has turned out to be a gain for the mass movements in Madhya Pradesh. If he had won he would most certainly have become a full time politician and not been able to pursue a career in law. However, this loss in the elections made him concentrate seriously on becoming a lawyer and since then he has devoted most of his energies in brilliantly using the law in favour of the poor. He has stood for elections a few more times as a member of the Janata Dal, a group of former Socialist party politicians and also as a candidate of the Aam Aadmi Party recently and lost but that has been more from a conviction that the legislature and the parliament are the bodies, which should bring about social and economic justice and so more and more people with a commitment to socialist and humanist ideals must try and get themselves elected. He may not have succeeded in this, given the corrupt nature of electoral politics but he has definitely made an impact with his legal activism.
When the aggrieved man came to Anilbhai after having learnt that he was possibly the only one who could help him in his battle against the RSS against which he had revolted, the first thing he was asked was that he should not give up the battle, which was going to be a long and one of attrition, mid way after being intimidated by the RSS and leave Anilbhai in the lurch!!! Anilbhai asked him why he had taken it into his head to fight the might of the RSS after being such a dedicated member of the organisation. Most of the students in the Keshav Vidyapeeth in fact are the children of dedicated RSS members from Western and Central India as this is a school specially developed to build dedicated cadres for the organisation. The man said that the pedagogic and hostel environment in the school is not very conducive and so many students who have been studying there since their early childhood want to leave once they pass the tenth board examination to pursue careers of their choice rather than become foot soldiers of the RSS. The school management faced with an exodus had decided to clamp down by not giving TCs or charging a session's fees to do so. The local MLA of his area had even told the man that he would give him the Rs 17000 being demanded by the school but that there was no way in which he could get the TC without paying the sum. Anyway now with the latest legal notice the man was well and truly up against the wrath of the RSS for his revolt.
Anilbhai filed a petition in the High Court in Indore and in the first hearing itself secured a stay on the order of the Collector and an order directing the school to give the boy the TC within seven days. Thus, began a saga that is yet to end!! When the man went with the certified copy of the High Court order to the school, the principal refused to take it saying it was a Sunday and also gave the man a tongue lashing for proceeding legally in the High Court against the school. In the next hearing the lawyer for the school argued that the boy had been "deemed admitted" even if he did not apply for admission as per the rules of the Central Board of Secondary Admission and so he would have to pay the fees for the first session amounting to Rs 37000 even if he wished to discontinue studying in the school. The lawyer also contended that since the school was a private entity a petition could not be entertained against it in the High Court. However, the judge said that there could be nothing called deemed admission as there was no rule in this regard and it would anyway impinge on the freedom of choice of the student and since the school was imparting education regulated by the rules of the Central Board of Secondary Education, it was a public authority against which a petition could be entertained to protect the fundamental rights of the child. Once again the judge ordered that the TC should be given to the student and he should be paid Rs 25000 by the school within three days to compensate him for all the unnecessary harassment meted out to him. The school instead of complying with the order has filed an appeal in the Division Bench of the High Court. The boy is currently studying in another school but if the TC is not given by his old school soon before the end of the academic year in March, he will lose a year and it appears that the intention of the RSS is to so penalise him for daring to take it to the courts. The various departments of the Government, including the Collector, who have also been made a party in the petition have consistently said nothing instead of acting to resolve the issue in the boy's favour in accordance with the rules and regulations
Institutions in India which have clout whether in the corporate, political or government sectors know that it is difficult to get justice from the courts and so they trample on the rights of citizens with impunity. Not only does it take time but also resources to fight lengthy court battles and most citizens are not able to do so. Anilbhai has rendered yeoman service to many citizens who have picked up the courage to take on institutional Goliaths to get justice. Whether it is the case of an Adivasi activist who has been illegally externed by the administration because he was fighting for the rights of his people, or the case of an Adivasi woman who has been denied the mandated compensation when her husband was illegally killed by forest department officials, or the case of a blind person who was denied a job illegally by the administration, a case which resulted in guidelines being formulated in Madhya Pradesh for the implementation of reservation for the disabled in government jobs leading to the employment of more than 1500 blind people or the case of a Dalit woman who was denied government employment as a crafts teacher despite being qualified and having passed the selection process, a case that has dragged on for two decades and even now despite a definitive order from the High Court, has not been complied to by the government necessitating a petition for contempt of court, Anilbhai has unfailingly stood by ordinary aggrieved citizens. Today he is sixty five years of age and even after four decades of legal activism in which he as taken up more than fifty such landmark cases of human and civil rights, he is as sprightly as ever in the fight for justice.
This then brings out the difficulty of ensuring justice for citizens, especially those who are poor, in the present centralised system in which institutions are far more powerful and the courts work at a snail's pace and it requires huge resources to move them. 

What it takes to Clean India

Ever since Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, in his maiden independence day speech on August 15th last year announced that he would like to see India squeaky clean by 2019, which happens to be the sesquicentenary of the birth of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who was possibly the first votary of a clean and sanitised India, there has been a great hullabaloo throughout the country on actualising this wish of the Prime Minister. But like Gandhi and many others before him, Modi too hasn't really addressed with sincerity the herculean problems in the path of making India clean, especially in rural areas. In fact even the international agencies like the World Bank and the United Nations not to speak of the moribund Public Health Engineering departments at the Centre and the States and various national and international NGOs active in the Water Supply and Sanitation (WSS) sector in this country have skirted the difficulty of this problem to save on costs and have gone around designing and implementing practically unworkable and environmentally unsustainable WSS Services.
Even though I have designed and implemented a workable and environmentally sustainable water supply and sanitation system in our office in the city of Indore and also studied this problem in detail as part of my Phd, I had never grappled with the problem at a larger scale and so was not aware of the various practical intricacies involved in its solution especially in rural areas. An opportunity arose this year when it was decided to construct toilets and bathrooms in the Rani Kajal Jeevan Shala residential school for Adivasi boys and girls that our organisation runs in the village of Kakrana on the banks of the River Narmada in Alirajpur district of Madhya Pradesh. There were only three toilets for the girls and women on the campus earlier but given the huge adverse health effects of open defecation in close proximity to the school by more than a hundred boys and men it was decided to construct fifteen bathrooms and fifteen toilets. Detailed below is the saga of the successful implementation of this WSS project and how it has been an immense learning exercise for all those involved, including a so called expert like I!!!
The biggest problem with toilets in rural areas that is generally brushed under the carpet and overlooked is water supply. Toilets across the country are being built in the hundreds of thousands since the clarion call given by Modi but in most of these, there is either no or inadequate provision for water supply. Consequently, toilets across the country and especially public toilets, stink to high heaven and most private toilets built in rural homes remain unused. In rural areas where households have to bring water from a distance from tanks, streams, public wells or hand pumps for their drinking and cooking use, it requires great motivation on their part to get say fifteen more buckets or so for a five member household for bathing, flushing and keeping the toilets and bathrooms clean instead of bathing and defecating in the open. Even if they were to get these fifteen buckets of water, it would give rise to the problem of disposal of the waste water of almost equal proportions. Dry pit latrines without proper treatment of the sewage, which are promoted by policy makers across the world, as a consequence, to get round the high cost implications of providing adequate water supply to the toilets and treating the waste water properly, give rise to both a foul stench and contamination of the ground and surface water. Thus, Modi's Clean India campaign has mostly led to the construction of stinking toilets which are either not being used or if used are then contributing to greater pollution of the ground water than in the case of open defecation.
The enormity of this problem was brought home to us in the construction of fifteen pairs of toilets and bathrooms in the Rani Kajal Jeevan Shala in Kakrana in two blocks of ten and five units for boys and girls respectively as shown below.

The quality of construction of the toilets and bathrooms was fairly good with brick and cement mortar, vitrified tiles, UPVC pipes and brass and ceramic fittings as shown in the picture below.

The campus has a hand pump in which there is inserted a two phase submersible pump of one horsepower (HP). Initially after the toilets and bathrooms were constructed they were fitted with two numbers of one thousand litre tanks in addition to the one thousand litre tank that was already there for the three toilets built earlier. These tanks were connected to the submersible pump. However, this total of three thousand litres of water supply proved totally inadequate for servicing fifteen bathrooms and eighteen toilets. The tanks would empty out within a few minutes during the morning hours of heavy use and then filling them up again and again was a big problem. Later during the day the tanks would remain empty and so the children would have to cart water in buckets from the handpump to the toilets over a distance of over a hundred metres which is a labourious exercise. Given this water shortage the toilets began to stink badly and became a potential health hazard. Moreover, the three septic tanks for treating the sewage were also improperly designed and the outflow from them was collecting near the tanks and creating a stinking pool of dirty water that was contaminating both surface and ground water. One of the septic tanks had even cracked due to improper design and construction that left one of the brick walls of the tank exposed without a retaining support, as a result of an inadequate understanding of the topography and soil quality of the area on the part of the mason who constructed it, adding to the problems.
To rectify the situation it was decided to build a ten thousand litre concrete tank on top of the highest hillock in the campus so as to provide enough water storage for the present and future needs of the school at all points as shown in the picture below.

This then brought us up against a new problem of filling this tank with water. The one HP submersible pump could deliver water at a very slow rate to this tank which is at a height of about 20 metres above the hand pump. Matters were compounded by the fact that the voltage of the electricity supply was low and often fell to 160 Volts or so instead of the standard 240. Ideally the Madhya Pradesh State Electricity Board should be providing 240 Volt three phase AC supply to rural areas so that farmers can run pumps of 3 HP and upwards for irrigation purposes. However, the reality in most remote areas of the state is, that the supply is in two phases of low voltage of about 160 Volts with the third phase remaining even less at 20 to 30 volts and effectively non-functional for running pumps. That is why throughout rural areas in the state, two phase capacitor driven 1 or 2 HP pumps have become popular. However, given the low voltage there is a limit to the head up to which these pumps can raise water. The submersible pump of 1 HP took eight hours to fill up the hill top tank and often when the voltage became very low it would stop pumping altogether.
Given the uncertainty of electric supply we installed a 5 HP diesel generator and this improved the delivery of water by the pump but this was an expensive option that could be adopted only in emergencies when there was no electricity supply at all due to load shedding and not regularly. To solve this problem it was decided to lift water from an open well shown below that was there in the campus which was being used only for irrigating the two vegetable farms in the campus. The submersible pump in the hand pump was to be used henceforth only for drinking water purposes.

The problem was that this open well too had a 1 HP pump on it and unlike submersible pumps these pumps have less power and so it could not push water up to the hill top tank located at a distance of 250 metres and height of 25 metres from the well. First we replaced this pump with a 2 HP pump from Kirloskar Brothers but that too did not work. We then chose a 2 HP pump from another company and that also failed to work. Finally, a third pump from yet another company was able to lift water up to the hilltop tank, thus solving the problem temporarily. There was a small hiccup as the weight of all the water in the pipeline proved too much for the plastic foot valve that we had put at the end of the suction pipe and it went kaput!! We then replaced it with a more robust foot valve. Currently the water level in the well is very high and just 2 metres below ground level. But as summer approaches and the water level goes down it is likely that the pump will not be able to lift water to the hill top tank. Therefore, in future we will have to make a further investment in replacing the 1 HP submersible pump in the hand pump with a 2 HP one.
The bigger problem was regarding the disposal and reuse of waste water. Huge amounts of waste water were being generated from the bathrooms and toilets and these were being released untreated into the surface and ground near the septic tanks and were polluting the water sources of the school and also other farmers nearby in the village. First the cracked septic tank was repaired with reinforcement and supported by a retaining wall to ensure that it did not crack again as shown below.

Then a water treatment system was put in place to clean the water flowing out of the septic tanks. This consisted of plastic 200 litre drums laid horizontally filled successively with brick crush, sand and charcoal as shown below. Though the use of these three purifiers is well established, it is the first time in India that they have been put into a horizontal drum assembly to reduce the costs involved in water treatment. Since space is not a constraint, this is a very cheap and effective system.

The water from the septic tanks enters this system of tanks and gets purified while passing through them to reach a Biological Oxygen Demand level less than the 30 mg/litre value for release into the soil prescribed by the Central Public Health and Environmental Health Organisation. However, instead of releasing this water into the soil it is being collected in a tank and recycled to flush the toilets thus saving considerably on the use of potable water for this purpose as shown below. The waste water consequently flows in a closed loop repeatedly after being treated. The excess treated waste water is used for gardening and plantation purposes. There is a vigrorous soil and water conservation and plantation exercise going on in the school to improve both water and biomass availability so as to eventually make the campus energy sufficient also.

So now the toilets in the school are being used regularly, they are not stinking and the waste water is not polluting the environment resulting in a sanitised atmosphere conducive to good health. A very happy resolution of the exasperating and persistent problem of cleaning India in a remote corner of its vast expanse. However, this has not been achieved without considerable difficulty. Kakrana is situated in hilly terrain 45 kms distant from the nearest town of Kukshi where all the hardware, cement, steel, sanitary fittings and pumps are available on sale. There are no competent, masons, plumbers and electricians available in Kakrana and so they have had to be brought from Indore and Ahmedabad all of three hundred kilometres away to implement the project. Consequently the average cost per a unit consisting of a bathroom and toilet has worked out to be a whopping Rs 70,000. The Government, international agencies and NGOs on the other hand want to build these units for Rs 20,000 by skimping on the costs of water supply and waste water treatment and that is why they end up making a royal mess of the whole exercise and India remains as unclean as ever. We had initially budgeted for Rs 40,000 per each bathroom and toilet unit but due to the complexities of the problem, eventually the cost escalated. Even now there is a need for a further investment of about Rs 5000 per unit to replace the submersible pump in summer. Even if we economise on the use of vitrified tiles, ceramic and brass fittings and quality of construction there is no way in which the cost can be less than Rs 50,000 per bathroom and toilet unit at current prices. This is something that no poor rural household will be able to afford and so it must be borne by the Government if it wants to see a clean India. Like in the case of education, so also in the case of sanitation and water supply, the investment is easily recovered through greater productivity of individuals.
 Incidentally this is a decentralised system and so the cost is comparatively low. If the same system were to be designed for the whole village of Kakrana then the cost would go up considerably because centralisation in the case of WSS leads to higher per unit costs.  This is in fact the main reason why in metropolitan cities like Mumbai and Delhi water supply is inadequate and waste water is mostly being released untreated into the soil and water bodies resulting in these cities having stinking rivers that are biologically dead flowing through them. So the only way to a clean India is to implement decentralised WSS systems combined with water harvesting like the one in Kakrana not only in rural areas but also in the cities and towns.

Serendipity of the Internet

Professor Swapan Bhattacharya is in his seventies having retired more than a decade ago from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai where he did cutting edge research in micro-biology. He settled down after that in Indore where a few of his friends in the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology, which houses India's biggest particle accelerator, had got together and created a residential colony near the centre to lead their retired lives in. Swapanji wanted to do something to improve the level of science education in schools for under privileged children and also if possible do something to improve the sustainability of agriculture. However, he had not been able to make any headway because he could not find an organisation of his liking. Then we met on the Internet. He is interested in urban water and waste management as this is a problem that his residential layout in Indore also faces. He is a member of the India Water Portal and there he read about the decentralised water and energy management systems that we have implemented in our house in Indore and he got in touch with me. And he got solutions from us not just for water and energy management but also for his long term desire to do something in science education and sustainable agriculture.
Swapanji came to know about our work in Alirajpur and especially about the residential school for Bhili children that we run in Kakrana where some incipient work is also being done to conserve and promote traditional Bhili dryland agriculture. He expressed a desire to see the school. So we went down to Kakrana from Indore for a preliminary reconnaissance. He liked what he saw and after coming back roped in his brother in law from Mumbai who gave him his car as he wanted to buy a new one. Then on 8th December we went down in this car and Swapanji carried enough material with him to settle down in the guest room that we have in the school. As is evident from the write up that he has written, he has hit if off with the environment and the people there, especially the children who are his guides for various things, in the same way as he is their guide for education.

In this picture he has climbed up with two of the children to the top of the hill overlooking the school and Kakrana village with the River Narmada in the background. At this height mobile and internet connectivity is available whereas it is not there in the school itself below. So Swapanji intends to set up an internet hub here for his own researches and for the school children and teachers. The problem with development work in Alirajpur is not so much lack of funds as lack of skilled persons. There was a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when there were as many as ten middle class youth both men and women who were working full time on a near voluntary basis on very limited financial resources and those were the golden years of the KMCS. We are still reaping the benefits of the intensive work we all put in for a decade or so then. Since then unfortunately there have not been any professional youths from the cities going and working there. Despite many requests sent out, no one has come to work except for one or two youths for very short periods of time. But here we have a seventy plus retired professor deciding to stay full time in this remote village and enthusiastically devising solutions for many problems that the Bhils face. Initially he intends to set up a laboratory to teach the children the rudiments of science and relate them to their own environment. Such are the advantages of the serendipity of the Internet. Swapanji writes -
This village Kakrana in M.P., is about 225 Km from Indore. I went there the second time (8th to 20th Dec 2014) to see if I could survive there without falling sick - it is a very dusty area but totally free of industrial pollutants. I did stay well and even climbed hills without any after effect.Hills are not vey high, of course, but quite challenging for me.

The long stay gave me an opoprtunity to watch the activities of nearly 200 students and 10 staff families including all the teachers of the school except two who come from a nearby village.

An interesting development within the first three days was very amusing and touching at the same time. The car in which I went was parked on the open ground, there being no garage, so that it was in my view. For some protection, a green plastic usually used for shade was laid over it. It so happened that some one was trying to catch a ball, missed and the windscreen was hit hard enough for it to develop a minor crack. It was reported by a student to me first after a couple of days. They pointed out that  the boy was not a resident student but came from a nearby hut, and that out of fear, he did not turn up for the classes after the event. My assurance that I don't blame him because it was a play ground where I parked the car, and that I will be angry if he misses the classes any more did not work. Even then he stayed home two more days, and only when a teacher assured him, he resumed but did not face me.I did not embarass him by trying to see him either.

This episode had a wonderful effect. Many students and two teachers started constructing a garage having failed to get a mason. 

For fuel they go about every 15 days  to the jungles about 20-25 Km away on the banks of the Narmada along the river on a motor boat.  The fallen dead trees or dried up wood on the ground that they find, they load up to the roof and return to the river bank of the village where a pick-up  hired van is loaded and driven to the school about two kilometers away.On the trip we spent a total of 10 hours with ten of us, comprising of myself, 3 students, 2 teachers, one cook and three labourers. So we had to cook our lunch in the forest. 

I also climbed a nearby hill accompanied by two vey young students, Rahul and Pratap. It was a wonderful experience.

Another important discovery was that these tribal children speak a language called Bareli, which has no scripts, and so no written matter in any form. The only book is a fable collection written in Devnagari by two NGO authors. They have written the stories as orally transmitted fables, in the book titled "Kahaneen Petaro" meaning box of stories.

Since the students know Hindi script, they were charmed by the stories as they read them, for the first time, in their own mother tongue. They borrowed the book from me whenever they were free from regular school classes.