By Patricia Mukhim
Dr Mukul Sangma, recently launched what everyone calls “his brainchild” – the Integrated Basin Development and Livelihoods Programme (IBDLP) through a series of workshops ranging from financial inclusion to markets, infrastructure and governance and, the key component for tying up all of the above – climate change adaptation. I was unfortunate not to be able to attend all the deliberations. But from the first day’s pow-wow on ‘Financial Inclusion’ one learnt that Meghalaya has a very weak database in some of the core sectors. If female-headed household are to be targeted for financial inclusion, how many of such households do we have? No data yet! Also it was evident how disconnected our peripheries are from the core – the secretariat. However, there are some inferences that one can draw from the workshop on financial inclusion. It will take a complete overhauling of the present system to make the rural population bankable. Dr Mukul Sangma has to reinvent the government and also ensure that financial institutions based in this state are held accountable for the dismal credit-deposit ratio. The bureaucracy is not about the “IAS officers” only as some might like to imagine. It’s the dealing clerk down the hierarchy who can short-circuit the best policy.
Recently I read a book by Dr Wayne Dyer called, “Pulling Your Own Strings” and I recommend it to all who have time to read. Dyer talks of the victimisation syndrome and how victims finally victimise others. Dyer talks of families as the main institution that demands conformity. While values and attitudes are also learnt in a family, it is also the institution in which the greatest hostility, anxiety, stress and depression are learned and expressed. Our own renowned psychiatrist Dr Sandi Syiem has often said that most patients in mental institutions have difficulty in dealing with various members of their families. Dyer says it is not neighbours, employers, teachers or friends whom disturbed people have difficulty handling to the point they have to be hospitalised. It is family, always.
Many families give a false appearance to the outside world of hyper-normal stability and moralistic goodness. Dyer says what actually goes on is that they have developed an elaborate system of cues to warn any member should he/she be about to do something spontaneous, something that would topple the precarious family balance and expose the hypocrisy of their over-controlled pseudo stability. Families can be the most rewarding institutions but can also turn claustrophobic through control by elders. I am beginning to wonder if ‘controlling’ parents is the reason for alcoholism in our society which is often laid at the doorstep of matriliny.
Now our government and other public institutions are to be managed at every level by individuals drawn from one of such families. What happens if most or at least 50% of those who work at some level of governments come from dysfunctional families? Having been victimised at home they will look for opportunities to victimise others. Wayne Dyer speaks of bureaucracy as giant institutional machinery and that government and public utilities are the worst performers. We are familiar with the rigmarole of renewing our driving licenses, getting a ration card, or an EPIC or even paying electricity bills at counters with long queues. Nowadays even getting cash from a bank or getting your passbook updated or buying a bank draft entails a queue. So if you have no time to queue up you cannot get any work done. Those who talk of internet banking are addressing a miniscule population and certainly not the rural segment of society.
Dr Sangma has taken a giant leap by conceiving of and giving shape to the IBDLP but my honest and simple question is – how does he ensure effective implementation? The bureaucracy he has to work with is already used to doing things a certain way. It’s a bureaucracy that believes in a series of meetings but little action. Most of them don’t know what a village looks like. Those who make time to visit villages every Saturday are a few senior officers who believe they need to get real before they get going with the project. But at the end of the day there must be a properly geared chain of command with an accountability mechanism so that outcomes are effectively measured against outlays.
When a project is to be implemented in “Mission Mode,” you need missionaries. Where will they come from? This is where NGOs score over government. NGO workers are trained to spend time listening and learning from people about how they do things. Only then do they see if a little value addition would help improve their socio-economic status and livelihoods. NGOs are trained in conducting participatory rural appraisals (PRA). The lesson is to listen to villagers not to lecture at them. Coming out of the financial inclusion seminar I met a government official who with the entrenched cynicism said, “This will not work. Our farmers are happy keeping five chickens just for their own use. They don’t want to rear chicken by the hundreds.” I asked him why they wouldn’t. Before he could answer I already got what he was about to say. That they are ‘used’ to a certain kind of lifestyle! I told the man that it is the duty of field officers to show the farmers a better model than just rearing five chicken or two pigs.
But I realise the problem lies elsewhere. Our system of selecting aspirants for studying Agriculture Sciences is faulty. They do not go through an aptitude test. Those who are deputed by the State to study agriculture, horticulture and allied activities may not even be interested in their subject. Agriculture science is usually not the first preference. It’s the last choice after medicine, engineering, dentistry etc. But is it reasonable to expect stylish, urban, students from elite households who have made it to the top of the heap through intensive coaching, to connect with the farmers? They have never felt the soil and do not know what it smells like and we expect them to return after their training to dirty their feet in the fields? It’s unreasonable, and yet we have been doing this for decades. The only reason most people study what they do is to get a government job. Hence it is not uncommon to find agricultural officers spending more time in offices and pushing files. If more field officers/ extension officers spent time in the fields, Meghalaya’s economic graph would have soared.
Aspirants who know farming because they have done it with their bare hands, have no way of making it to the Agricultural or Veterinary colleges. And we do not have courses closer home to train them to be better farmers. The so-called Krishi Vigyan Kendras run largely by the Indian Council for Agricultural Research and Training (ICAR) have never been evaluated and I suspect that they are not functioning as well as they should, otherwise, Meghalaya would have capitalised on its indigenous variety of pest resilient hill rice, which is what we will require for climate adaptation. In fact we should now be looking at our indigenous seeds and subsidise farmers who resist the high yielding variety of hybridized crops, grown with an overdose of fertilisers and pesticides and which have indirectly led to change in the soil texture and therefore to climate change.
In Meghalaya we have pushed mono-culture beyond a sustainable point. Rubber, broom stick and so too other exotic fruits and vegetables will one day claim their price. Where are our indigenous vegetable species? Why is bitter gourd (Kerela) disappearing? Also what has happened to our native species of beans (Phresbin Manipur) and leafy vegetables many of which are known for their medicinal value? With forests disappearing and all of our homes neatly concretised many of the forest herbs like Jangew, Jatira, Jalynshir, Jamyrdoh are losing out. I know that Dr Carl Rangad of the Agriculture department is acutely aware about the need to promote and conserve traditional foods through the indigenous food festivals organised from time to time. But we have to make this a pro-active effort and ensure that all agricultural graduates spend more time in the fields than in sanitised office environmentd.
Dr Mukul Sangma might like to read the book, ‘Reinventing Government’ by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler to understand why governments need to be reinvented. This is the era of entrepreneurial government. The doctor means well and wants to revolutionise the rural economy. This should have been done by his predecessors decades ago. But now that he has taken on this onerous task, he does not have the leisure to walk. He has to sprint … and not alone but carrying the bureaucracy with him. Quite a task I must say! We can only wish him well… You can’t be cynical when someone is trying to do something, can you?
But a note of caution: There are too many consultants floating around in Meghalaya and making capital out of our misery. They too should be disbanded and shown the door. We have enough indigenous wisdom and young professionals who must be given a chance to work for their State.