By Patricia Mukhim
At a recent training of rural development workers, I asked the group to write down three sentences to answer the question, “What is Meghalaya?” The answers were varied and interesting. One of them wrote three words – Meghalaya is shattered. It sounded so radical and outright pessimistic that I asked the young man to amplify his answer. He said, “Look at the MLAs we have produced after 41 years! Businessmen are turning politicians and politicians are becoming businessmen.” So whose fault is this? Us the voters, right? Why did we succumb to money power? It’s because the 85% people living in the rural heartlands of Meghalaya are so poor that they don’t mind trading votes for money. But they are not the problem. We the educated, middle class elite with our loud and strident voices that end up within the confines of Greater Shillong are to blame!
How many of us dirty our feet to get a better understanding of the rural situation? I was appalled to learn that the meaning and intent of the NREGA which was implemented since 2008-09 is yet to be translated into the local languages. So how do we expect the rural folks to become stakeholders in the implementation of the scheme? Another problem is that the format of the scheme changes from time to time and it is left to the rural development workers (Gram Sevaks and Sevikas) to go to the people and keep changing their communication strategies to accommodate the changes that have come from the Govt of India. This to my mind is not how we do rural development. We cannot be bringing in models from the rest of India and force them on our people. It’s not going to work.
There is no short cut to participatory planning. This is why despite all the bitter critiques by naysayers I still believe the projects initiated by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is relevant and carries the stamp of community participation in planning and implementation. When IFAD conceived of the first poverty alleviation project in 2001 which was implemented by the North East Region Community Resource Management Project (NERCORMP), the Organisation sent its project planners to undertake several years of field research to understand the ground situation. They developed 3-D models of their villages and identified the resources available. They learned how the rural villagers subsisted and understood the reason for their poverty. They also analysed how these resources had hitherto been used and why poverty persisted. At that time the villagers were also facing the brunt of the Supreme Court ban on timber since most worked the forests for their livelihoods without realising that they also had the responsibility to reforest what they had left barren.
The IFAD project was multi-faceted in that it had a wing for intensive capacity building of the villagers but more particularly of women. Several trainers came and went. There was Al Fernandez of MYRADA, Hyderabad and others who spent considerable time with the villagers in a teaching-learning exercise. Fernandez’s views were that there is much to learn from our villagers about resilience in the face of great onslaughts of natural disasters which exacerbate poverty. He realised that what expert trainers could possibly help them with are better coping mechanisms. The trainers lived and worked in the villages among the communities. They had learnt over years of experience that they cannot implement a project using the pyramid style, top-down model. Government has done enough of that and failed miserably. The only difference between Government projects and those implemented by international organisations are the strict monitoring and evaluation systems in the latter which are absent in the former. Regular monitoring achieves three things. First, it sees if the project is on track or if there is need to tweak the implementation models to suit the needs of the stakeholders (not beneficiaries as Govt would like to see them). Second, it ensures that field staff is adequately capacitated before they launch into the implementation mode and are asked to capacitate others. Third, it ensures that funds are judiciously spent and accounted for and that the deliverables from the project are met within the time line.
The IFAD project did suffer from time overrun and needed extensions but that is because community mobilisation does not work to precision. It is a time and energy consuming grunt work. It takes time to make a community that is used to oral transactions to write down things and keep records. Creating women’s self help groups and making them speak up before the village headman and his Dorbar is a new thing. Empowering women to draw up a set of aspirations they could work together on such as purchase of a common farm land and setting up a rice mill in some of the project areas are far reaching interventions. It is a different matter that the same project is now under the North Eastern Council and I suspect that it suffers the maladies of a government scheme which spends more on establishment costs than on reaching funds to the people.
In contrast Government paid rural development practitioners complain that working with villagers is difficult because (a) they are illiterate (b) they are not open to learning (c) they resist change and all that crap that square pegs in round holes tend to trot out as excuses for their own failure to understand themselves and what they are expected to deliver. If our villagers are so ignorant how have they survived for so many years until the advent of the so-called government schemes? Is it not a fact that the introduction of multiple schemes in rural areas has actually made villagers highly dependent on patronage and subsidies, so much so they have lost the vitality to grow ‘according to their indigenous knowledge and genius?’ The problem with Government workers is that they think they know everything and must spout out that knowledge on the empty-headed ‘beneficiaries.’
Perhaps the problem with rural development practitioners is that their own roles have not been well defined. The field workers who are the connecting link between the villagers and the government are not given the wherewithal to meet the challenges. They don’t get mobility allowance and I was told that even trainers do not receive their remunerations on time, courtesy the red tape. If red- tapism which kills Government enterprise has filtered down to the Blocks then there is not much hope for Meghalaya. The bureaucracy is like a heart that beats. If the heart is clogged at different points the person will suffer a heart attack and die. The bureaucracy in this State and country is going through the same dilemma. There are clogs everywhere. Files are not cleared within a reasonable time line and everything that has to reach the field workers is delayed. How then can rural development workers be motivated to do their work with enthusiasm?
Meghalaya is nearly 85% rural so if the cut and thrust of Government intervention is not focussed on rural development then the State will encounter several impediments to its growth. But appointing half-baked, untrained, unprofessional employees to implement rural development work with villagers (not for villagers) in Meghalaya will not deliver results. This is the age of professionalism. We need Gram Sevaks, Sevikas and other project staff who not only understand their work inside out and but who also have the mental equilibrium to deal with obstinacy, apathy and non-cooperation from villagers. Meghalaya needs motivational trainers, not half-hearted workers who are there for the salary and who don’t hold themselves accountable. A system of self-evaluation needs to be created. The Government too should come up with the Social Audit Bill sooner than later so that communities can evaluate the Government field staff implementing various schemes. This might be a wake-up call for those who take their work as a part time activity.