Signs and wonders

Rural India

A tale of two villages

Oct 17th 2012, 14: 18 by J.P. | KAILASHPUR, CHHATTISGARH and MAHESHPUR, UTTAR PRADESH

YOUR blogger recently spent a couple of weeks pottering around central India in the company of Jean Drè ze of Allahabad University, Aashish Gupta, his research assistant, and Reetika Khera of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. The trip was exhausting, exhilarating and fascinating in equal measure. Much of the time was spent in two villages, each side of the border between the states of Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The map below shows where they are and the slide show gives a handful of snapshots. The moral of the trip: national governments are not everything and even bad policies can be made to work. In the past, The Economist (like many Indian politicians) has been scathing about the cheap-food scheme called the Public Distribution System (PDS). See here and here. But the PDS is making a partial comeback. The post below is a detailed account of how the PDS and other forms of government help actually work in the two villages.

Signs and wonders

A painted milestone marks the turn-off of the road to Kailashpur. The slab sports a poor likeness of the Mahatma in bright yellow and black and announces “The Mahatma K. Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Rural road constructed from the curve at Pansara to Kailashpur forest road. Sanctioned: 2007-08. Cost: 4.3m rupees [$80, 000].” The road winds a few miles through the jungle and ends at the village’s new primary school, also gaily painted with a rainbow, Tom and Jerry and Mickey Mouse. Villagers walk painstakingly along, balancing on their heads bundles of twigs each the size of a desk. The firewood is for sale at the nearest town, Wadrefnagar, 20 miles away. The schoolteacher, Solomon Ming (who is, unusually for this corner of Central India, a Christian) busily shepherds his charges back to their school room after a free lunch. For many children, it will have been the most nutritious meal of the day. The girls chatter excitedly about their new satchels, which arrived that morning—gifts of the Chhattisgarh state government (only the girls got them: they are intended to encourage female literacy). On the wall behind Mickey, is a list of all the children enrolled at the school, 85 of them, each name painted black on yellow. Next to that, are the details of the three teachers, their qualifications and when they started work. Another painted sign outside the school says “National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Cost of levelling ground for a school: 25, 000 rupees.”

The lists and painted signs are evidence of a quiet upheaval in Chhattisgarh, a state in central India created in 2000. Over the past few years, the government in the state capital, Raipur (200 miles away), has been trying to improve India’s notoriously corrupt and inefficient social safety nets. The system, which provides cheap food and make-work schemes for the poor, was so bad that Sanjay Gandhi, an influential politician, once said 90% of the money going in to it never reached the intended beneficiaries. Determined to improve that, the Chhattisgarh government insisted the schemes be transparent and that people should know what the projects were up to. Hence the signs.

Two hundred kilometres (125 miles) away in Maheshpur in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh, there are no such signs—and little to describe even if there were. The primary school is a patch of bare earth protected by a tarpaulin strung between trees. The children are at home because the teacher, who lives in a nearby town, has not appeared. A few ponds have been dredged and footpaths levelled under the make-work scheme, but nothing on the scale of the Kailashpur road. Urmila, a widow, complains that she has never been able to get any work under the scheme, though she has asked repeatedly.