From Huts To Homes

t was in 1994 that Rangaswamy Elango decided to retrace the journey he made in the ’70s out of Kuthumbakkam village in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruvallur district. A graduate in chemical engineering, he gave up his scientist position in the Central Electrochemical Research Institute, Karaikudi, Tamil Nadu, and returned to the village. He served two terms as sarpanch of the Kuthumbakkam panchayat between 1996 and 2006. Elango says his scientific background helped him seek out technologies developed at the research institutes and put them to effective use in rural areas. During his second term, he introduced “mini-rice and cereal processing mills” from the Central Food Technological Research Institute in Mysore and soap-making technology from the Integrated Rural Technology Centre in Palakkad, Kerala. “One can can act as a bridge between these institutions and the villages,” he says.

What he couldn’t achieve as sarpanch, he does now as the managing trustee of the Trust for Village Self-Governance (TVSG), an organisation Elango created in 2001 that takes the Kuthumbakkam model to other panchayats. The trust helps launch self-help groups that do viable businesses for city-based firms, and is a repository for donations from villagers and outsiders. It was the TVSG, along with the central government and individual benefactors, that helped Kuthumbakkam earn for itself the coveted “hutless” distinction in 2004. “Every family lives in a dignified household,” says Elango proudly. The ambitious goal now is to reinforce localisation instead of globalisation by linking 20 panchayats in the region under a “network growth economy model” where the basic requirements of the villagers are met locally. “The idea is to produce most of our needs locally using local resources,” says Elango.