January 4, 1999

DEVELOPMENT
Independent Action

Self-help is a sureshot recipe for success, as these award winners prove.

Nestling in the Satpuras, picturesque Chilwaha had a problem. The village school's teachers often played truant. "Our children," remembers Manohar Singh, a local farmer, "couldn't read even after three years." Fed up with teachers who treated their vocations as a state government-funded sinecure, the villagers decided on direct action.

That was a year ago. Before Madhya Pradesh's Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS) won the gold prize under the 1998 International Innovations Awards Programme of the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management.

The residents of Chilwaha decided to open their own, parallel school. The village panchayat drafted an application to the district panchayat. Next it hired a teacher. A local resident offered his verandah -- and the school was born. Today Singh's four daughters study there. They have learnt to read and write as well. Says Onkar Singh, the farmer who heads the school's committee: "We control the teacher. He knows he'll be sacked if he does not teach."

The EGS is the very embodiment of responsive government. Villages which don't have a primary school within a kilometre can simply demand one. It is obligatory upon the state to set up the school within 90 days. The teacher is appointed and monitored by the local community but the salary, Rs 500 a month, comes from the state capital.

Amita Sharma, director, EGS, is convinced of its utility: "The formal system could provide only 80,000 primary schools in 50 years. This left 20,000 habitations unserved. The EGS bridged this gap in 18 months."

Adds R. Gopalakrishnan, the civil servant who fathered the EGS: "Universalising primary education is less a matter of finding money and more a matter of forging alliances of the right kind." As they say in Madhya Pradesh these days, where there's a will there's EGS.

Gopalakrishnan and Sharma would find a kindred spirit in Kalva, a village in Andhra Pradesh's arid Kurnool district. There Fatima Bi, 33, is still learning to read and write. She can barely sign her name. But that didn't prevent her from getting the 1998 United Nations Race Against Poverty Award. The first Asian recipient of the award, Fatima is a tribute to India's emerging womanhood -- of that intangible but arresting idea called empowerment.

It began under the aegis of the United Nations Development Programme, initially covering 670 families divided into 22 self-help groups. The idea was simple: make the woman of the house the general in the war against poverty. She was encouraged to save at least one rupee a day. Since April 1997, Rs 18 lakh has been mobilised -- and serves as the corpus of Proddu (literally: dawn) a village development organisation. Fatima, as Kalva's sarpanch -- the post is reserved for women -- feels Proddu is an apt name: "For us it is the first ray of light."

Proddu conducts classes for illiterate girls, runs a creche, imparts vocational education, has built a road, a school, a water tank, small dams, given loans. In sum, it is a mini-government that Kalva's women call their own. The little big woman is India's route to a new dawn.

© Living Media India Ltd