Disclaimer: Pardon any errors in spelling, grammar or vocab. I intend to blog more often from now on and so my posts will come battling dreary eyes and midnight slumbers after a long day at work and at the playground!
In the latter half of July, I moved from Delhi to Bagar, a small village in rural Rajasthan (about 200 kms away from Jaipur) for the second leg of my fellowship. This is an update on life here in the village.
Bagar, is a village of about 10,000 people and is the ancestral home of the Piramal family. It also houses their haveli, which has now converted into a Neemrana heritage hotel. I am based out of the Grassroots Development Laboratory, which was established by Indicorps and the Piramal Foundation in 2006 to seek creative ideas and solutions to some of India’s most pressing developmental challenges. The objective was to use Bagar as a rural laboratory to test scalable ideas in social development and scale them on a national level. Souce for Change, the rural BPO that I work with, grew out of one such idea.
Bagar is extremely conservative, particularly with respect to women’s development. Female infanticide is rampant, and as a result, Bagar has a shocking sex ratio of 921 girls per 1000 boys. Most women are forced to wear the purdah and are financially dependent on their husbands or fathers. In such an environment, Source for Change (which till recently was an all-women BPO), by working towards creating opportunities for these women to learn, grow, achieve financial and social freedom, is a welcome change. My role at SFC is to streamline its training and develop Human Resource management processes in order to ultimately improve the productivity and quality of our Associates.
To be frank, I was skeptical about moving to a village in the middle of nowhere, with only the most basic amenities. I wasn’t convinced even after visiting to get a firsthand glimpse into the place in the first week of July. However, I recognized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I had never lived in an Indian village before (except for the brief 1-month stays every 2-3 years at my grandparents place in Kerala) and this was my one-shot at gaining an insight into life of the ‘next billion’.
Much to my surprise, life in the village has been very pleasant and enjoyable. Work has been really satisfying and interactions with people in the community very gratifying. At the work end, we’ve already developed and implemented leave policies, attendance regulations, rewards and recognition programs, re-training assessment, and are now working towards a strategic plan on ramping up to 200 seats (currently 85).
Outside of work, every day around an hour prior to sunset, my colleague Shrot & I work with Shekhawatji, the physical education teacher of the Piramal Boys School, to teach basketball to the school kids and to help form the school’s basketball team. Basketball is a sport which requires a lot of quick thinking, discipline and teamwork. These also happen to be the skills that the village kids (and some of our entry level trainees) seem to lack the most. The kids have been training and practicing for over a month now and will be participating in the upcoming district championship. Bar one, none of the kids have ever played basket ball before let alone participate in a championship. Irrespective of the championship result, we hope that the kids will apply the leadership and team work skills picked up in the court in real life situations.
I have to confess that it is still early days and things may not always be as rosy. In fact, even now life isn’t that easy. There’s a huge change in the lifestyle that one may be used to such as TVs and internet, washing machines, your own bathroom and so on at home and malls, multiplexes, fast food etc outside home. It can get extremely hot and humid, there are no ACs and frequent power cuts (about 3-5 hours everyday) mean that even fans may not give any respite. The sheer dearth of connectivity with Delhi (only local buses that take 8-10hrs to cover 200 kms ply on this route) is another point of distress and the availability of only pure vegetarian food can be unnerving for a compulsive meat eater like me. No washing machine means that you have to start getting used to washing your clothes by hand. Almost every new person you meet will ask you your caste and won’t talk to you until they are convinced you do not belong to the lower castes. It’s almost impossible to convince them that you do not have a caste!
Yet, there are advantages to any situation. While I may have driven a car for over 6 years, the feeling of owning a cycle, adding a headlight and exploring the bylanes transported me back in time to my childhood. Meat may be unavailable, but that means one can experiment with various authentic Shekhawati cuisine that one cannot get anywhere else (not even in Jaipur!) in the country.
In a nutshell, there’s been an unexpected feeling of satisfaction despite the challenges.
