I write this letter from Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh. Are you aware of the demography and the geography of a village in a remote tribal district? I decided to visit the villages of Jhabua to learn and tell you about the education issues of the villages in the district. This will be the first of a series of letters reaching you, in the hope that you will also contribute to bring change to this forgotten district.
Pipalia, just five kilometers away from the Jhabua main city is very close to the main road that is busy with trucks and buses. Villages in Madhya Pradesh, are a cluster of hamlets called falias. Each falia belongs to a particular caste. In Pipalia, the main caste was the Bhils tribe and each sub-caste inhabited a single falia. When I say clusters, I do not mean that these hamlets are located very close to each other. In Jhabua, these hamlets are very scattered and may have a distance ranging from five to even eight kilometers between them. They almost appeared to be separate villages existing on their own. Each falia had its own hand-pump as the main source of water. The village boasted of an impressive primary and even a middle school which was located in the main falia of the village. Next to the school were the ration shop and also the aganwadi (Government preschool). The aganwadi was closed and the primary school teacher said that it runs in the morning. The ration shop was compensating for the lack of activity in the aganwadi by a huge line of people waiting for their food rations. Lack of any other market in the village, the ration shop was by far the busiest spot in the village. These scattered hamlets had one thing in common-no electricity. The electricity came for only a couple of hours a day and the nights are pitch dark as even the main road had no electricity posts. No electricity also meant no television and I found out that only 4 households from the total population of 1800 possessed a TV set. There is also no common place for the community to watch TV or read a newspaper together. The Panchayat ghar or the community room was newly built next to the main road.
Thatched roofs, mud-baked and individually owned houses belonging to joint families disrupted the greens. Thin alleys connected the houses splitting the greens on either side. Pradhan Mantri Sadak Yojana (Prime Minister’s Road Scheme) reached out from the main busy road to the main falia of the village. As I walked from one falia to the other, I was amidst lush green fields with crops of maize. It will take two more months for the crops to get ripe and will culminate with a festival. I also noticed that only women worked in the fields. Men either have migrated to Gujarat to work as a daily wage earner or are in the Jhabua city working in the market. I asked the women if they read newspapers to get information about government schemes. All the answers negative, not because there is another source of information, but because almost all women I spoke to are illiterate. Women in the fields were also accompanied by small children playing along side. I was curious to know why they weren’t in school and I didn’t get any answer to that. They did not seem to be working with their mothers, nor did they seem over or under-age for primary school. Later, I discovered that there was one reason for the children to be out of school, which was based on their caste. The school principal told me that a couple of houses from the other side of the main road did not like sending their children to the government primary school because of caste differences and also because they did not get along with the Sarpanch (elected Panchayat head) very well.
The previous Sarpanch, proudly showed me his vast expanse of rose bushes, bamboo plants which he was able to cultivate with the help of subsidized seeds from the Government’s agricultural outlet in Jhabua city. He explained the government’s organizational structure in the village. We know that a Panchayat is the local government body which comprises of a group of villages. The number of villages under each Panchayat depends on the distance between them and the population of the villages. The Sarpanch is the head of the Panchayat (local village government) and has five members called the panch (literally meaning five) under him/her. I was very impressed to find that Pipalia had a woman Sarpanch, only to be disheartened to find that this liberation translates into the husband running the show and the wife (Sarpanch) only complying to his actions. Group of Panchayats form a Janpadh (literally means people’s post), which is a team of ten elected members from multiple villages at the Block level. Jhabua district has six Blocks. All the panchayat proceedings and petitions are handed over to the Janpadh. An interesting post which is also government recognized is the village Tadvi, who resolves small disputes in the village. The village Tadvi has a hereditary right to the post, i.e. the post is not an elected one but is passed on as a family lineage from one generation to the other. Apart from the government officials at the village level, there is also a Parent Teacher Association in the village which does not seem to be very active and the reason given is that the parents themselves are illiterate and cannot make any decisions. Every school by law has a Village Education Committee (VEC). I found that this VEC seems rather mysterious. Everyone I spoke to had a different interpretation of a VEC and I am still unclear about who these people actually are. The government primary school principal informed me that the VEC is a single member who is a part of the Panchayat and is the education representative in the Panchayat. This person puts forward the problems faced by the village school and discusses other education issues in the panchayat meetings. Some say that VEC is the same as the Parent Teacher Association. I am yet to unravel the mystery of the missing VEC. Along with the missing VEC, which is supposed to monitor the mid-day meal, the mid-day meal itself was missing. The reason as narrated was that the prices of lentils have gone up causing an increase in the per-child cost of preparing the meal. This is accompanied by the fact that the government budget was not revised yearly thus not taking not account the increase in the prices, resulting in the meals to be unsustainable at the village level.
One observation which is hard to miss is the busy NGO volunteers in the village. Multiple NGO’s partnering with each other to provide wooden benches in the government primary school, running preschools, working on forming self help groups and if nothing else showing interest to learn about the problems in the village. My transect walk in the village helped me to understand the demography and the geography of a tribal village. Stay with me to understand the village dynamics up-close and personal.
Radhika Iyengar
Doctoral Student, Teachers College, Columbia University
Consultant, Jan Shikshan Sansthan, Jhabua (www.jssjhabua.net)
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