Hello Chhattisgarh!

Time ticks away. It's been one year since i first landed in Chhattisgarh as an IAS probationer and now i find myself going back to where i came from (#lbsnaa). 

Exactly one year back, i had funny notions about the state and its people, there were doubts whether i will fit in. Doubts whether i will survive, both professionally and existentially. Like any other newspaper reading member of the middle class citizenry, i also thought of "Chhattisgarh" as a term synonymous to "Naxalism". (Having read and reviewed a lot of Leftist literature obviously didn't help feel better). 

I remember being pleasantly surprised finding that there is flight connectivity to its capital, the fact that the airport was normal and there was no armed ambush till half an hour after the flight's landing also brought relief. 

The drive from the airport to my district took 6 odd hours and i spent the whole time looking out of the window, searching for People carrying weapons and red flags. What i found instead, were wide roads that led to the highway that cut through a beautiful, serene countryside, dotted with kuchcha houses and ponds..

Over the next few weeks, my preconceived notions about the state went for a complete toss! Instead they were replaced by even funnier notions... 

For one, I was astonished by people's capacity to consume paan... When there are more than 4 people clustered at a place, the place is bound to smell of beetle nut! ... When the "Honorable" High Court decided to confer on us, probationers, temporary powers of a judicial magistrate, i found myself sitting on a high chair listening to the pan chewing lawyers. The height of the chair was enough to make me seem imposing and give wings to my already inflated ego but not enough to prevent the pan filled saliva that splashed from the lawyers' mouths, from reaching me!

The scenes at the courts and govt offices were filled with obnoxious red teethed smiles of middlemen, spread across faces that were made rotund by intense oral activity (i.e. chewing :P)...  I soon learnt the subtle differences between people's choices - the gudaku, the paan, the gutkha and the hundred other products that they subject their teeth to. 

The second pattern that emerged clearly was that of pond bathing! Initially i saw it as an escape from the heat, but then, when my travels increased, i realized its omnipresence. Wherever there is a water body - a river, a pond, a tank, or even a temporary rainwater nallah... There are bound to be people of all age groups and genders bathing, be it early in the morning or late into the evening... ( somehow the nights were given to the poor water bodies to soak in all the human touch). One had had dreams in which the river flowing next to the circuit house would be flowing with soap water and there would be bubbles all around.

Away from the dusty towns, in the tribal villages, i sensed satisfaction in the air; A sort of a unhurried ease that comes with lack of expectations. Children greet me with broad noses and beautiful white smiles (for their teeth are still not subjected to the torture reserved for adults). Barefooted people could be seen carrying tendu patta on their lean, sun-burnt bodies.  The forest that surrounds is cut by roads that are plight-fully checkered with tar. Roads that are used by trucks and lorries carrying produce from the dug-up earth.

In the days that followed, chhattisgarh slowly began to reveal itself. Its a cadre wherein the IAS is still looked up to, a state where administration has shown promise, a state where political intervention is not vile or crippling. A state where problems are huge and complicated and the people are submissive and enduring.

Chhattisgarh has the land from which the richest business tycoons earned their money, made the middlemen rich and left the indigenous people wondering what just came and took away their home. It's a rich state with poor people that challenges the government to deliver and distribute the benefits of industrialization better. 

One can go on writing, but its now time to go back to LBSNAA and somehow describe my dirt and sweat filled field level experience using big English jargon words that no one back in the district would either understand or care to...

PS: All views expressed here are purely personal and have no connection with those of the Government. This post has been carefully modified to fit into the ambit of freedom of speech permitted to officers under the Rule 6 and Rule 7 of All India Service (Conduct) Rules, 1968.

Had you been here

This is the first poem I have ever penned down, even in private.

CASTE : A Formidable Exploitative Force in Tribal Regions

At the outset I must admit that I cannot claim to be an expert on a region's socio-economic dynamics through my few hours of its touring. Yet, the caste based divides and the exploitative character of this caste system in Shivpuri is so flagrant that any empathetic observer cannot help but notice it.

This district is infamous in the "global development circles" (meaning the UNICEF, UNDP and the other practitioners of top-down policy models) for its appalling malnutrition levels among children. Huge funds have been poured in from the very same agencies so as to uplift the "tribal masses". Yet the affect of such international intervention over the last decade is for all to see.

I would like to sum up a few observations that I came across in a few hours of my touring -

 

The region has been the "summer capital" of the Scindias who have used its jungles for hunting and building elaborate luxury castles. The same family holds all the representative seats in the parliament for this region; On the left side is a dalit landless agricultural worker who has never seen stable employment, and has never been "selected" for any MGNREGS based work (when it is their right to get 100 days of work per year) by the panchayat officials. I wonder how he can share the emphatic feeling of the seemingly omnipresent writing on the wall.  

 

 In the local political scene, the marginalised communities claim of political neglect by all the elected candidates of the last three decades. The First-Past-The-Post system has allowed some candidates to win even with less than 10% votes of the village. In such a case all the benefits are allegedly captured by those belonging to their political clan and the rest feel unrepresented.

 

In terms of administrative empowerment, the first major stumbling factor in policy administration process is that tribal communities are treated as passive beneficiaries, with no right to choose and no ability to decide. This kind of an approach favours development of nexuses that enrich a few while rendering all public intervention futile.

Almost all the tribals complained of the domination of the upper castes in the lower level bureaucracy. This "world class" medical facility opened at the heart of the remote tribal region of Charch using UNICEF funding seems to resonate the same trend. All the employees mentioned on the board are upper castes - the same as those of the anganwadi centres, panchayat secretaries and numerous other grass-root level public functionaries.

 

In terms of initial endowments, there seemed to be two groups within the SC population of the district - while some of the Jatavs (belonging to the SC community) were well-off (from rural Indian standards), most of the other Jatavs and other SC community were living in dilapidated conditions and held no land or stable employment.

 

 

For the adivasis (tribals), there was no land or labour opportunities to talk about. The businesses in the villages marked as "tribal" for the purpose of BRGF (Backward Region Grant Fund) always seemed to be owned by upper caste Hindus who employed the tribals as casual labourers. The tribal gentleman on the right laughed at the question when I asked him if he owned land or if any revenue land ("patta") was allocated to him. He explained how a tribal spends his entire life in a hand-to-mouth existence and the only jobs they aspire for are in the illegal mining quarries of the region.

I can't end the post without mentioning a grandeous statement made by the senior district official who was incharge of our visit.

 

"Arrey bhai (to his subordinate) inhein wahaan le jaana uss sansthan mein jahaan humne un adivasiyon ko nehla-dhula kar unka mundan karwaya tha. (to us) kuchch adivasiyon mein bimariyon ki badi samasya thi, maine dekha toh paaya ki inhe dawaiyon ki nahi hygiene ki jaroorat hai - unko badhiya nehle dhula kar shave banwa kar taiyar kiya aur ensure kiya ki voh nahaye - ab aap log jayenge toh dekhna - koi bimari nahi hai udhar ! (smiling to himself)"

[He asked his subordinate to take us to an organisation where he had made a set of tribals, complaining of health problems, to have a bath and shave daily - he claimed that itself cured the diseases in those tribals].

 

What struck me in this assertion was not the seemingly fuzzy connection between shaving one's stubble and falling ill (After all, hygiene is an important factor in health), but the way he said it. The air of superiority and wisdom he echoed could have been the same if he were to be talking of some non human species that are to be managed by him. Clearly, the idea of "participation of tribals in making of decisions that affect them", will be incomprehensibly bizarre for him in the near future.

 

 

 

LBSNAA – The colours of the Foundation Course

It’ s a beautiful place to reside in, the very ambiance of the academy with its hills and curves signifies  a sense of stability, that comes naturally to any place with a rocky terrain.

The interesting aspect of doing FC here is that the pace with which the course moves; There are 250+ people to meet and get to know about, trillions of gossips revolving around hundreds of tit-bit events that happen during the day, and to top it all, every week ends with some organised event that adds to the randomness and entropy (some call it excitement) of the course.

It is this brisk pace of the mind, deeply contextuated in the stillness of the spirit, that acts as the continuous underlying theme of the stay here. No matter how random my day goes – with seemingly irrelevant/ trivial classes, or incidents of incoherent (and often defying-ly irrational) behaviour of some batch mates, I can always find my inner peace just sitting out and staring at the majestic topography that this place offers.

Last few weeks that I have spent here have been an experiment in handling randomness – to do something, experience it and then return to the shell that is secured in the presence of few like-minded friends.

"Pratakal ka Atyachar"- Our Skit in the 1st cultural

A lot of my active participation in the FC has been questionable; The skit that I partly scripted and played a role in – was very well-received by the OTs and faculty alike, but only our team knows how many questions were put to us before we performed on stage. There were batchmates who had a blanket objection to their being imitated (Frankly, I thought it was their inflated egos who made them feel that they deserve imitation), while some took it in the right spirit. We were constantly wary of how the faculty will take their own imitations – being the first cultural night, we knew that we have to set the standards and we took the risk of doing things our way.

A Scene from the Bhojpuri Song in 2nd Culturals

A similar story is that of the Bhojpuri item song that we danced on in the second cultural – although the jury is still out on whether it was vulgar or not (or rather, whether the level of vulgarity was within acceptable limits or not :D). A lady faculty member complimented us on the “unapologetic manner” in which we did it while there were a number of differing viewpoints from some batchmates.

I guess the most difficult type of questions for me to answer would be those questioning the logic of my acts, and I won’t care about such questions unless my behavior gets really out-of-the line.

A major departure from the NPA attitude has been that of image consciousness – while in NPA my acts were directed so as to ensure that my low-profile image doesn’t get blurred, here I am just being myself irrespective of the consequences. This isn’t really the safest approach – I have already merited a personal meeting with the disciplinary in charge along with the image of being “culturally active” (some extended it to assume that i would be energetic about everything, irrespective of its stupidity). Given the latter image, my low participation in the childish fete organised yesterday, brought the ire of my batch mates who coordinated it.

One critically important learning from the stay in LBSNAA so far is that the lonely boring moments centred around somber futuristic existential questions can be humorously evaded by gossiping about the most nugatory things in academy life. This is the importance of friends whom you can talk to.