The Renascence of Rural India
By L. F. RUSHBROOK WILLIAMS pROMINENT among the governmental activities which are benefiting most directly from the stimulus which Mr. Nehru's return to New Delhi after an absence abroad always imparts is the extensive programme of rural reconstruction in the charge of Mr. S. K. Dey, Minister for Com- munity Development. Mr. Dey's passionate obses- sion with the backward condition of the country- side sometimes inspires even his Prime Minister with a kind of humorous awe, but it is Mr.
Nehru's unfaltering support which has made possible Mr. Dey's new scheme for training twelve million people for rural leadership in camps which are to be set up all over India.
The Indian villager numbers four out of every five people in the country, and the Govern- ment's programme for helping him to help him- self is quite as big as and possibly even more significant than India's astonishingly successful effort to apply Parliamentary democracy, based on adult suffrage, to an electorate of 200 mil- lion. During India's first Five Year Plan, the machinery for rural development in its twin forms of Community Projects and National Extension Service `blocks'—each 'block' covering an area which may include scores of villages— has begun to influence between one-third and one-half of the whole country; and it is the hope of those responsible for the execution of the Second Five Year Plan that on its completion the rural development programme will be at work in every Indian village. Since these number well over half a million the scale of operations almost staggers belief.
The campaign has caught the imagination of most people in India—even of the conservative villager, traditionally suspicious of government and of government officials, especially when they belong to his own section of the community.
'Governments come and governments go,' says the rustic. 'After the Moguls came the Marathas, after the Marathas the British, after the British the Congress Party. But they all give the villager the same privilege—the privilege of paying taxes!' Yet by slow degrees the villager has begun to realise that the new campaign for rural uplift is not merely the shinty (hobby) of some district officer who may be here today and will be gone tomorrow, but a continuously operating policy which will not be halted until its objects are achieved. Moreover it is a policy which produces tangible improvements which he can see with his own eyes—a road connecting his village to the highway, better houses, a new school building, a new well built in a way which preserves the water from pollution, cattle sheds in which his cattle will be safe without the need of taking them into his house, a new hall for village meetings and for the accommodation of visitors. It is true that these things are not given him, fairy-godmother fashion, by the Government; he has to work for . them. But the Government encourages him to want them, helps him to plan them, assists him with materials and with 'know-how' to build them, and sends trained people round to show him how to get the best out of them.
Further, he is supplied with better tools and better seed at concession rates; he is taught how to make the best possible use of local water and to construct storage dams and embankments to conserve rainfall. He is encouraged to plant trees to check denudation, to grow new and more valuable crops for the markets which the new road has brought within his reach. He has not changed overnight his attitude towards official- dom; he will still chuckle when something goes wrong with the demonstration-plots, so that their yield is poorer than that which his own centuries- old practice provides; he is inclined to take refuge in his massive rustic obstinacy from the efforts of the young, earnest and enthusiastic 'village level' workers—the backbone of the whole programme —to persuade him to depart from ancestral custom. But more and more, as trained observers like Dr. Adrian C. Mayer, who lived in one vil- lage for a year and then came back a year after- wards to see how things were going, have testified, the villager is coming to appreciate that there is 'something in it all.'
Progress is not, of course, uniform; too much depends upon the local leadership in each vil- lage for equal success to be attained everywhere. Many villages are split by faction; sometimes there is rivalry between the factions over which side will 'get things going' quicker; sometimes one faction will make a point of spoiling or obstruct- ing everything that the other is trying to do. The 'village level' workers, although they are all care- fully trained and mostly very enthusiastic, differ in their capacity to `manage',village leaders, and to 'gentle them along' without alienating their sympathy, losing their confidence, or depriving them of initiative. As Mr. Nehru remarked to the present writer not long ago, about half the vil- lages in which the plan is now operating are run- ning a good show, about a quarter are displaying really outstanding progress, and about another quarter are quite disappointing. And he should know. The rural development programme is very dear to his heart; he is inclined to think that it is the best thing that his Government is doing. He will take infinite trouble to help things on, flying hundreds of miles to open a new training centre, spending exhausting hours touring the country- side and personally distributing suitable rewards and commendation for outstanding work.
Such tours are indeed exhausting, as anyone who has made them can testify. But they are also extraordinarily stimulating, and it is easy to understand why Mr. Nehru and, indeed, his fellow-workers in the same field, derive from them a new faith in India's future. For in so many of the 'good' villages, the villagers have definitely taken over charge; they will point out what they have done—sometimes moving an entire village to a healthier spot, sometimes straightening and widening a narrow alley, some- times building a complete new dispensary, a vil- lage library, an open-air theatre. And they ate becoming critical, too, of the kind of co-operation that they are receiving. In one village where I was being taken round by the development officer —a very big man indeed, in final charge of the work throughout a State the size of Italy—I saw the- village headman draw him mysteriously aside and take him to see some new houses. When we left the village the development officer told me with a grin that he had been given a severe lecture by the headman on the bad quality of the last batch of cement; and that he only escaped bY giving his personal assurance that the next lot would be better. 'That's the spirit we want,' said the development officer, who is nicknamed laldi jaldi Sahib (Mr. Quick! Quick !-) throughout his enormous charge. 'Think what we could do if we got the millions of rural India really going!'
It is little wonder that India is enthusiastic over the rural development programme. But there is anxiety too. For it is India's answer to the pro- gress which Red China is making under her monolithic Communist government—India's living demonstration that democracy can do more for the masses than can dictatorship. Every year an independent body—the Programme Evalua- tion Board—sits in judgment upon what has been achieved, points out shortcomings, demands improvements. The current report, published last month, points out that where progress involving physical change is concerned, the record is good; but that changes in social attitude, the develop- ment of a sense of local responsibility, the spread of the co-operative movement, still leave much to be desired. Moreover, the transition between the intensive effort characteristic of the Community Project 'blocks' and the comparative stagnation of some 'post-intensive' blocks which have attained a certain level of improvement but are there halting, poses a real problem. The Board make the bold suggestion that rural development is so vital that it ought now to be made the main business of the district officer, instead of ranking, as it does at present, as only one of several respon- sibilities. Instead of being given an assistant for developing projects and concerning himself mainly with revenue, law and order, he ought to have assistants for these functions and take over the development work himself. It is a revolution' ary suggestion and there may be some practical difficulties in adopting it, because the district officer, perhaps even more markedly than in the days of the British raj, is the pillar on which the administration of the country rests. But the fact that it should have been put forward shows the way in which the mind of India is working. Rural development, like Vinoba Bhave's Land Gift movement, is in the Gandhian tradition; 110 sacrifice is too great to ensure its success.
Previous page
