The Headman Has A Degree

Rathore, who gave up a 20-year-old career as journalist (he was last with Rajasthan Patrika) to return to his village Arwar near Ajmer, successfully contested the panchayat elections in May last year. He has become part of a larger trend in rural India where people, after having moved to the cities on the lookout for better fortunes, are now making the journey back, giving up the comforts of the city for the toil and uncertainty of village-level panchayat politics. Women are joining this march too, whether it is MBA student Reshma Kadam in Lagadwadi in Maharashtra’s Satara district or Chhavi Rajawat, again an MBA, in Rajasthan’s Soda panchayat in Tonk district.

The trend reinforced itself in the recent Jammu and Kashmir panchayat polls too. Winners here include Raja Parvez Ali Mir, a Mumbai-based model who returned to Lachipora in Kupwara district to be elected as sarpanch; Gurmeet Singh Bajwa, an MBA sarpanch in Jammu district’s Kang village; and Ghulam Nabi Ambar, a history post-graduate from Kashmir University, a successful businessman and now the head of Asham-B panchayat in Bandipora district. Ambar’s move, as with the other two, was largely inspired by their desire to realise in the villages the basic living standards they took for granted in the cities. “You can’t send 60-year-olds to study in universities but you can tell them that things have moved ahead and that it’s time they changed their vision,” he says. Meanwhile, in Bihar, a 22-year-old sociology graduate, Kajal Kumari, has been elected the mukhiya of Khirhar panchayat in Madhubani and Sharad Kumari, a social worker with a PhD, narrowly missed a victory (by just 19 votes) in Darbhanga’s Jale panchayat. And in Uttarakhand, Archana Rawat, a history post-graduate and a bureaucrat’s wife, is changing the face of her remote Thana panchayat about 80 kilometres away from Dehradun.

This reverse migration has changed the manner in which local officials deal with sarpanches. “When I was reporting, I would often see how disparagingly sarpanches and villagers were treated by the officers,” says Rathore, who drives to his panchayat from his home in Ajmer. His urban, journalist background has transformed the way local babus now engage with villagers. This new breed of sarpanches has resulted in a more equilibrated relationship between the pradhan and the government representative, which is yielding benefits on the ground.

Take, for instance, Munna Das, a poor SC tailor in Archana Rawat’s panchayat, who should have been on the BPL list. Omitted, he missed out on government assistance like the Rs 38,000 grant for BPL families to help them construct a house. Rawat asked the local officials what could be done and was promptly told that Munna had to be on the BPL list to receive assistance. She then enquired if there was any other scheme that would cover his family. It turned out there was—a grant under Uttarakhand’s Atal Awas Yojana. Today, as his house nears completion, Munna is delighted at the prospect of finally having a roof over his head to call his own: “Had it been an illiterate pradhan, he or she would not have dared to ask the officer twice,” he says. Another villager, Sultan Singh Rawat, agrees, “Educated pradhans are familiar with how things work in the cities, they aren’t cowed down by government officers.” Kamlesh Parikh, a resident of Arwar, can think of other benefits too. “If the sarpanch is poor and illiterate, he is more worried about filling his coffers with the panchayat money. He first thinks of feeding his family...if anything’s left, then the panchayat benefits,” he says.

Education and an awareness of how governance works (painstaking paperwork included) is helping these sarpanches bring state assistance closer. Rawat, for instance, took the initiative to photograph people who deserved pension but weren’t getting any and filled out their forms and submitted them in Dehradun, where she lives. Earlier sarpanches didn’t bother, overwhelmed by the paperwork it entailed. “Since then, over 75 villagers have been added to the pension list,” she says. Similar reluctance to jump into the labyrinthine legalities prevented sarpanches in Shergarh from handing out property ownership certificates. But Rathore claims he has already issued over 300 of them.

An urban outlook is also helping bring newer ideas and technology to panchayats, like a website that solicits help from outsiders and planned solar energy for the Soda panchayat, or an aloe vera plantation programme in Shergarh to generate extra income for the panchayat. Similarly, Reshma Kadam of Lagadwadi, Satara district, who has worked with a private firm in Mumbai, wants to teach villagers how to use the internet so that communication with the world outside becomes easier. Farther away in Tamil Nadu’s Melathure panchayat in Pudukkottai district, K.S. Saravanan, who’s nearing the end of his second consecutive sarpanch term, has helped introduce low-cost construction alternatives with the expertise he gained working as a mechanical engineer in Tiruchirappalli.

And it’s not all positive either. For all the good they are doing in their villages, pradhans who live in cities have brought about one major concern. “Some of them have families and homes to look after in cities. Are they giving adequate time to the welfare of villagers?” asks Rekha Pundhir, who works with panchayat leaders for Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra, a Dehradun-based NGO. D.P. Mishra, a professor at the Institute of Rural Management in Anand, Gujarat, says the reach of even these urban mukhiyas will be limited when faced with lower-level officialdom. “They may be given a seat, offered a glass of water but beyond the perfunctory courtesy there’ll be little help.”

There are other cautionary tales too. Not everybody who heads back to the villages has a happily-ever-after story. O.P.K. Pillai, a retired army brigadier, was the sarpanch in Kulashekarapuram, Kanyakumari district, Tamil Nadu. He served out his five-year term, but left disappointed at how little he could achieve, circumscribed by higher authorities and overwhelmed by the corruption around him. “The bureaucrats aren’t keen to see panchayati raj succeed,” he says, stressing how unenthusiastic they are in devolving powers to the panchayat. Obstacles may abound but for now that isn’t stopping a growing number of city-dwellers from hoping they can take over local governance, turn the tide and blur the divide between cities and villages.